Many classic books have entered the public domain since their copyright expired. If you’re not wedded to the idea of owning a hard copy or want to see if you like a book before purchasing it, there are many options to find them for free as ebooks.

Amazon offers a whole host of classics if you have an account with them. You can read these if you’re signed in to your account online, download them to a Kindle device, or read them with the Kindle app on an iPad, tablet, or smart phone.

The Apple App Store has several independent collections of free public-domain books – I use one called, simply, “Free Books”.

I found these resources to be invaluable in locating, for the low cost of free, numerous works that have clearly stood the tests of time and critique across all genres.

For those concerned with the quality of books offered for free, consider that I have found Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Alexandre Dumas, Oscar Wilde, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, John Milton, Henry David Thoreau, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Immanuel Kant, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, Arthur Conan Doyle, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jonathan Swift, Walt Whitman, Dante Alighieri, Jack London, Mark Twain, Daniel Defoe, Bram Stoker, Philip K. Dick, and H. P. Lovecraft, most of these authors with numerous works, through the two resources I mentioned.

These also offer works for those more inclined toward political history and philosophy, with “The Federalist Papers”, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, Thomas Hobbes’s ‘The Leviathan”, the Gettysburg Address, and more.

For frugal people who love classic books like me, this is a great deal I’d hate for anybody to miss.

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