All The eBooks in the Universe in One Place

July 18, 2010 1:45 PM

Looking for a site like clicker, only for eBooks. Specifically, I am trying to find somewhere where I can (free or pay) download "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" by LeCarre.

I am looking for an online ebook aggregator or catalog of all ebooks (both free and paid), from all providers. Clicker comes to mind as the type of site I am looking for. I am aware of Project Gutenberg and do not want to include illegal sites like megaupload etc. Is there a one stop ebook site? It seems that many sites have only newer titles or others have only out of copyright. Is there something in between?

posted by Xurando to writing & language (6 answers total)

I've been reading ebooks since the early 90's and I don't know of any aggregator site, mainly because you can easily use a search engine to find ebooks.

Your book is not legally available in ebook format. (There are some illegal copies online, but I don't know if they're actually the book you want or not; I didn't look.)

You can contact the publisher directly and let them know you want the book in ebook format. You can also find the book on Amazon.com and click the "let the publisher know" link.

Some authors don't publish in ebook format because they're convinced all their work will be pirated; others have publishers who think the same.
posted by goblinbox at 1:54 PM on July 18, 2010

Oh: a great free ebook site is manybooks.net.

And: if you can't find an ebook at Amazon, Fictionwise, Gutenberg, and/or ManyBooks, it doesn't exist.
posted by goblinbox at 1:56 PM on July 18, 2010

For paid, ebookprice.info is decent. It searches a range of stores, so it's getting near to what you want.

Open Library is another place to look. I think it matches what you want in theory, but it may not have complete information. It lets you search specifically for ebook editions of books. It does show your book available as an ebook, but only (legally) for people with a key from the Library of Congress for the blind and handicapped. I'm not sure that Open Library has information on ebooks from Amazon, B&N, etc., but ebookprice.info should cover that angle.
posted by whatnotever at 2:44 PM on July 18, 2010

nthing Manybooks,
Feedbooks,
and demonoid for those impossible ones when you (feel) like the world has you down and you really would rather read a soft copy of something than go to the library (which is an awesome place).. and feel morally upright in doing so.

There are no awesome cross-copyright (public + private) aggregators that I have found.

Also: memailed
posted by bradly at 3:30 PM on July 18, 2010

I've been using Inkmesh recently and it's pretty good. There's even legal hits for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold there :-)
posted by LukeyBoy at 4:37 PM on July 18, 2010

AddALL also has a decent ebook price comparison thingy. Unfortunately none of the comparison sites pick up most of the smaller ebookstores (or stuff sold direct from publisher). Same for a couple of the new larger sites like Kobo.

As for free stuff, if it's old enough to be public domain and I am ever likely to have any interest in reading it, I've probably already heard of it, so I don't bother with aggregators much for those and just grab a copy over at MobileRead. (The interface there is a pain, but the books are probably the best-formatted versions available.)
posted by asperity at 5:31 PM on July 18, 2010