How to Download Free E-Books Off the Internet

I read a lot. Some of it online - news stories and such - and a lot offline, as in "real" books. Like most people, I read most books once and then never again (there are exceptions, of course), so for me used bookstores, libraries (whether a public library or my Dad's massive collection of books), make a good supplement to my own bookshelves.

Still, I found myself wondering the other day if there were good, legal ways of downloading books off the Internet. I think I've found a few.

Before we go too far, however, I should clarify something. When I talk about free books on the Internet, I'm not talking about someone on Craig's List offering to give someone else his book collection if only the recipient will come and get them. I'm talking about e-books, as in Electronic Books. These are typically formatted in either PDF (portable document format), or else one of the common e-book formats, such as PDF, LIT or sometimes even basic HTML.

I'm not talking about audiobooks (although there are places where you can get those), and although I'll touch on it at the end, I'm not really talking about something like Project Gutenberg either. What I'm really looking for is a free, legal way to download current (or fairly current) books onto my computer for reading at my leisure.

Okay, now that we've covered that, I've really found three websites that make the downloading of free books easy, and there's actually a lot of titles, a wide variety of genres, and the quality is quite good. So, without further ado... here we go, in no particular order.