There are a lot of things to think about when you travel, but finding entertainment on the go shouldn't be stressful. Here's our guide on how to find great free reading before you get on a plane, train or car.
Know where to look
The easiest place to find a book for your iPad or iPhone is the iBooks Store itself. On a Mac, open iBooks (if you don't have it, you can download it here for free) and click iBooks Store. On the right you will see a list of Quick Links. click on Free Books.
On an iOS device, press iBooks > Store and then Featured at the bottom of the screen. Scroll down to Quick Links at the bottom of the page and click Free Books.
Find books you want
Apple's free book collection is divided into a number of subcategories, spearheaded by Apple's own recommendations. Among them are scintillating titles like Williams-Sonoma Thanksgiving and Apple's own iPhone and iPad tutorials. Below that, you can browse free books, labeled by category.
If you dive into a subcategory (Fiction & Literature, for example) you'll be presented with a list of free eBooks labeled within that category, such as A Christmas Carol by Dickens and The Time Machine by H.G. wells. You can view individual titles by tapping or clicking on them, or scrolling to the right if you don't see anything you like. There are tons of copyright-free books available, including Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, Bram Stoker's Dracula, the works of Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe's poems, and more.
If you know the name of a public domain work you'd like to read (for example, Sherlock Holmes ), you can read the section Free Books skip it and just use the iBooks search bar. But be careful: Some copyright-free books are available in multiple versions from different publishers, and while they all have the same content, some may cost money while others are free. To make sure you don't spend money unnecessarily, browse with the Mac version of iBooks and click the box next to Only Show Free Titles after you search.
A look outside the iBook Store
Apple's iBook Store isn't the only place to find great free books: My personal favorite is Project Gutenberg, which compiles (and sometimes creates) eBooks from copyright-free and out-of-print novels. There's quite a bit of overlap with the iBook Store, but Project Gutenberg has a larger selection, as well as offering multiple download formats.
Some good places to start looking on Project Gutenberg are the top 100 ebooks, popular ebooks, and recently added ebooks.
ready to read
When you have found a nice book in the iBook Store, press the button Free and on the Get Book button that appears. After that, the book will be downloaded to your library and should automatically appear on all your devices that have iBooks installed.
If you want to get a book from an external site like Project Gutenberg, it's easier to download the book to the device you want to read it on. If that's an iPad, go to the book's page and hit the ePub download link. The ePub file should be loaded as an icon with the option Open in 'iBooks' above. Press the link to send the file to your iBooks library. On your Mac, the ePub file comes in your Downloads folder; to add it, open iBooks and go to File > Add to Library.
This is a freely translated article from our American sister site Macworld.com. Described terms, operations and settings may be region specific.
