Our daughter received a Kobo eReader for Christmas from her grandparents and since then she has been glued to it. Sure, we’ve bought some books, but mostly we have downloaded free Classics and borrowed books from the local library.
Yes, you should check out your local library. Many now have sites dedicated to lending eBooks and all you need is your library card.
We also found that the bookstore affiliated with Kobo has a listing of free eBooks, some of which we have also downloaded. The same goes for some of the other device providers.
If you own a Kindle, Amazon has a list of 100 free eBooks for kids:
And there are lists of free “iBooks” for iPhone/iPads/iPod Touch:
And the same goes for the Nook (although I couldn’t find a way to filter the free Nook books, so this is a list of all their free books, kinds included):
Free eBooks from Barnes and Noble
Free for All eReaders and Tablets
However, I’m going to feature sites that provide free eBooks to most, if not all, eReaders and Tablets.
Here are my top picks for ease of use and variety of free eBooks.
The Baldwin Online Children’s Project
This is an easy list of 548 books that you can skim through by author, title of book and genre. From what I can tell, it’s only available on your web browser, but most eReaders now have access to the web, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
Wikisource has a really well presented page called ‘Portal: Children’. Different windows provide deeper access to poetry, children’s fiction, fairy tales, and education and non-fiction. Yet again, I did not see any links to downloading the eBooks, so you’d have to read these books through a web browser.
Now we’re going to the source for all Classic books. They have a category for hundreds of kids books ranging from history, instructional books and periodicals to fiction, fairy tales and picture books. Well worth a browse. You can download the books to most eReaders as Project Gutenberg supports all popular eReader software.
Last but not least, Children’s storybooks online is constantly adding new books to its shelves. They have three categories: young children, older children and young adults. Again, you’ll need to read these books on a web browser as they are uploaded directly onto their pages.
One more thing I wanted to tell you about. Calibre is a neat piece of software for managing your electronic library, convert eBooks from one format to another and it also provides online access to free ebooks.
