We’ve had lots of questions about e-books lately, as many people received e-readers for Christmas! I wanted to let you know that we’re paying attention!

The State Library of Kansas has offered a downloadable e-book service for all Kansas residents for several years. In December, the State Library switched providers. The transition to the new provider is taking longer than expected, but a new downloadable e-book library should be up and running within a few weeks. The new e-book service, along with the downloadable audio service (which is up & running) will be located at www.kslib.info/digitalbooks, and you’ll need a free Kansas Library Card to access the services (which you can get here at the library). We’ll let you know when the e-book service becomes available. At this point, it appears that titles for Kindle users may not be available initially.

We are looking into options for providing our own e-book library. However, it may be several months before we are able to do so, because of timelines set forth by the vendor. However, we are hoping  to have such a service up by early summer.

There are several websites that have free e-books available, mostly public domain works. A few sites include:

Sources for Free Content
  • Project Gutenberg – Free e-books for PC’s, Kindle, Android, iOS or other portable devices.
  • Feedbooks – Provides some free e-books for Android & iPhone/iPad.
  • Open Library – Initiative of the Internet Archive providing free world classic literature e-books.
  • Inkmesh – an e-book search engine to find free content and compare prices for e-readers.
  • Google Books – Public domain titles available for PC’s and other portable devices.
  • Free Technology for Teachers – Places to find free e-books for yourself and your students.
  • ManyBooks – over 29,000 titles available in many formats and languages. search by author, title, genre or language.
  • Munseys – collection of fiction titles available in several digital formats.
  • Baen – science fiction and fantasy titles available from Baen Publishing.
  • Free-eBooks.net – a variety of fiction and non-fiction titles.
  • GetFreeEBooks.com – site includes a variety of genres.
We appreciate your patience, and feel free to ask questions and make suggestions for how we can better serve you in 2012! Email comments to hesstonpubliclibrary@gmail.com or call Cari at the library at 620.327.4666.