Summary
- Access free ebooks through Amazon Prime and Google Books for a budget-friendly reading experience.
- Explore public domain books on Google Books and the Internet Archive for a wide variety of titles.
- Starting this January, enjoy free titles like
A Farewell to Arms
and
All Quiet on the Western Front,
first published in 1929.
It’s a great time to pick up the habit of reading, since you can get started with a great e-reader on a budget, and pay a single subscription fee for your Amazon account, which will give you access to the massive Kindle Library. If you’d rather go the free route, there are several websites like the Internet Archive offering free ebooks you can download in your preferred format. Google is also doing this with Google Books, and the free titles for January 2025 were just announced.
Related
Amazon Prime member? Get two free Kindle books to help you through January
But you’ll have to claim them on the website
Books become free to share in the public domain every year, once their copyright expires or is voluntarily forfeited by the current owner. Once this happens, you can download them without payment, and read at your leisure. However, buying a book outright is often easier than tracking its copyright status and validity. Amazon offers two Kindle ebooks for free to Prime members every month through the First Reads program.
Google goes a step further, tracking the copyright status and listing new entrants in the public domain on Google Books, all for free. Not to be conflated with the Google Play Books app that serves as an all-encompassing solution for purchasing and reading content, Google Books is merely a free search engine for digitized books where you can preview and download titles, or curate reading lists. It also lists retailers and libraries offering the title, published editions, and additional details about the publisher, author, etc.
You can look up the title using the links below and read it online in the US. This month, four titles penned in 1929 joined the repertoire, all by eminent authors.
Engrossing reads for free
Probably geo-restricted on Google Books
In our testing, the web version of Google Books didn’t display a preview of these new free titles in Canada or India since the free preview seems geo-restricted. However, we have included Internet Archive links for some of the titles to satiate your curiosity, even if Google Books doesn’t list a free version available in your locale.
The first two free titles this month are World War 1 tales, where Hemingway’s is a romance novel and the other highlights the effects of war on the human psyche as seen through the eyes of a German soldier. All Quiet on the Western Front was also converted into a German-language movie of the same name in 2022, available on Netflix. Meanwhile, God’s Man is a graphic novel that narrates the tale of an artist and his pact with a stranger who gives him a magic brush, and Toad of Toad Hall is a four-act play set in the English countryside.
Since it is the first month of the year, it’s another good reason to get started with one of these books, so you can read a few evergreen titles that come into the public domain every month.