Places to get ebooks and audio books. Short stories, novels, non-fiction. For free and for pay. I'll update this as I find/remember more. Recommendations welcome. Last update: November 2010.
- Free audio:
- Radio 4 Book of the Week - RealAudio, 15 minutes a day, content available for 7 days after broadcast.
- Pay-for audio:
- audible.com - Various formats. They claim to do mp3 but they really mean DRMed AAC (Apple format, iTunes can play it).
- Free text:
- Bartleby.com classic fiction
- Project Gutenberg - you all know what this is and how to find it. Included for completeness.
- PageByPage Books - Project Gutenberg texts, reformatted as HTML and split up into individual pages - handy if you want to leave a bookmark partway through a text, or cite a certain passage.
- Infinity Plus - SF short stories and novel excerpts, I think mostly reprints
- SciFi Channel fiction archive (Internet Archive version) - SF short stories, both originals and reprints. The original of this disappeared when SciFi rebranded to SyFy, but the Internet Archive version seems to be complete.
- Strange Horizons fiction archive - SF short stories
- Fantastic Metropolis fiction archive - SF short stories and novel excerpts, originals and reprints
- Transcriptase - SF short stories and poems.
- Tor.com - short SF
- Lightspeed — short SF
- Pay-for text:
- Fictionwise - novels, short stories, fiction, nonfiction, download in various formats including PalmDoc and PDF. Pay per book. Reasonable prices, friendly and efficient customer service. Often has a few freebies too - search for prices between $0 and $0 to find them - which could be out-of-copyright fiction, nominees for recent SF awards, etc.
- Meta:
- Best SF Gateway - a list by author of online short SF, both free and pay-for
- Free SF Online - like the Best SF Gateway, but free only (thanks
ceb)