Quarantined? Read interesting digital books on these platforms

With the pandemic outside of our homes, it is best to listen and stay in. And among so many things that you will have to do to while quarantined reading would be very convenient for you.

María Belén Marinone, content editor at Leamos, a website for subscribing to books and digital publications, assures that the need to read "changed dramatically after the mandatory isolation decree."

Reading books without having to download them to a device is for you the best option in preventive isolation, and the advantage is that you will not have to fill the memory of your devices.

Without further ado, here is a list of websites where you can read books online, and best of all, they are free!

1) Many Books

For those who want to read in other languages, Many Books has more than 50,000 ebooks in English on hand to read online for free. Its website is friendly, it groups the works classified by theme (literary genres, popular classics, author selection …), in such a way that they can be found easily.

2) 24symbols

This is a website for reading digital books, where you will find a series of free and paid options to access the material. The platform already has more than 200 publishers, 20,000 titles and more than half a million registered users.

To enjoy the 'free' option, you will simply need to create an account. But if you want to enjoy the service in a Premium way, you will have to pay a small monthly fee so that it allows you to access its complete catalog, without advertising and with the number of downloads you want.

3) Miguel de Cervantes virtual library

When it comes to speaking about linguistic heritage, this website brings together Hispanic works from the internet in order to make them known throughout the world.

The web contains an immense digital bibliographic sea where it gathers, not only works in Spanish but also in other languages spoken in Spain, such as Catalan or Galician. On the site you will have free online books available from other institutions such as the Joan Lluís Vives Library, the Galician Letters Library, the American Library, the Children's and Youth Literature Library, and others. 

4) Public domain

This website is great, as it pursues the purpose of collecting and disseminating all those copyright works that have already expired, and therefore become "public domain".

So much so, that any user can make use of the text they choose and that are available in their catalog in order to make commercial editions on paper or eBook. With the condition that authorship is attributed to the original authors and no Copyright is created on it.

When entering the page, you will notice that on the left side you have a bar with the alphabet, through which you can quickly access the author's last names.

5) Libroteca.net

Although it doesn't have a modern web design, this site contains a presentation of more than 55,000 books to download.

While browsing the platform, we can search by authors, by titles, language, etc. The texts may be appreciated in formats such as: .doc, .pdf, .txt, .exe, among others. In addition, more copies will be included even in other languages.

Also Read: Netflix releases for April you can't miss

6) Wikisource

If the name of this site sounds to you like 'Wikipedia', you are not very far from reality. It turns out that Wikisource is an extension of Wikipedia, and its goal is to create a huge virtual library full of original texts and, above all, free to download. The only thing that its creators require is that any of these documents are published with a GFDL, Creative Commons license or that they are in the public domain.

It has more than 110,000 books available to read online or download on any device.

7) World Digital Library

Another option, if we are looking for greater variety. Despite its impressive name, this place houses 20,000 documents and articles from all over the world. In the same way that the previous sites can be read online for free or listened to in audiobook format.

8) Ebiblio

At this point we will talk about eBiblio, a platform for the management and lending of digital content (ebooks, audio and video). A network of public ebook libraries under the Ministry of Culture and Sports that expands throughout the Spanish territory.

They have more than 200,000 licenses and have about 1,500 commercial ebooks. As in the municipal libraries, we can borrow up to 3 books at once, and have them with us for a maximum of 21 days. Also, obviously, we will need a public library card to access the catalog.

9) National Library of Spain

In the same way as Miguel de Cervantes, we see a bibliographic collection that is concerned with spreading and preserving Hispanic literature. To date they present us with more than 300 reference works of our language that are already in the public domain.

All works are accessible from the website itself and can be read online in PDF format, without the need to download anything. 

10) Gutenberg Project

This website is a pioneer in displaying an extensive range of digital books. Currently, it has a varied catalog of up to 59,000 titles, totally free.

Most of the texts available are in the public domain, although there are also some texts under copyright. Of course, the page is in English, but do not worry, because you can find books in more than 50 languages.