Now for the last couple of great ebook sites for kid’s ebooks.  Here I shall be looking at a couple of truly amazing sites for kid’s ebooks

Megamouse, a wonderful name for a site.

This site, which consists of the writings of its owner,  Emma Laybourn, has a range of enchanting ebooks for kids aged between 3 and about 12, which as I said, are all written by Emma, a lady who obviously has a real talent for story telling.  The illustrations which are also wonderful, lively and very clear, make these ebooks a real pleasure to see – Though I am not sure who actually does these illustrations, but whoever it is does a great job in helping bring these stories to life.

She appears to have written dozens of these stories, all of which you can read online on her site, or download from one or other ebook website.

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Yesterday I looked at a couple of sites for ebooks for the very young, today I shall point you at a couple for older kids.   There are a vast number of online ebook stores that sell ebooks for kids of all ages of course, but I shall be looking at sites that offer free or very cheap ebooks that are legally available for you to download.

Bookrix, Superb collection of cheap and free kid’s ebooks:

Bootrix, a site I have already written about here (Link to that post), offers both free and  ebooks for sale in a wide range of genres, so of course they have a category of ebooks for kids.  Their collections are divided into “Books for Sale” and “Free Books”, and to my surprise, in the category “Juvenile Fiction” whist they only have a couple of pages of titles for sale, they have hundreds that are free.. So this is a site that you should definitely use to get ebooks for your kids, or if they are old enough to go ebook hunting for themselves, make sure you point them at this site.

As I mentioned in my earlier look at this site, all the free ebooks are hosted on their site, and the ones that are for sale are in fact only links to Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble or whoever it is that is actually selling that particular ebook.    But this of course is not a problem in any way.

Image courtesy of NY Times

You do  not need to register with Bootrix to download their free ebooks, simply select the category you are interested in – in this case either Free Books, Juvenile Fiction or Free Books, Juvenile Non-fiction, and then work your way through the lists you are then presented with until you find what you are looking for.

As with most such online ebook stores, you are given a screen full of thumbnails of the covers and a brief synopsis of all the ebooks, so choosing is simple enough.

Free ebooks seem all to be ePub.

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Well, as one gives up the ghost (Books on Board) another comes along to try and make an honest penny from selling ebooks to us.  The latest to join the fray is the well known (in Australia) chain of JB Hi-Fi, who are better known for their bricks and mortar shops in just about every shopping mall in Oz, where they sell all manner of digital and electronic gadgets – At Australian prices, which sadly are rather higher than in other parts of the world.

Operating under the cheerful (ummmm)  name of JB Hi-Fi NOW Books, they are offering us the normal selection of ebooks, both free (old classics) and not free (a wide range of more or less contemporary reading material).  They seem to have a pretty large range of ebooks to offer us, in all the normal genres, and at prices ranging from about AUD 3 upwards.  Thought the majority appear to be in the AUD 8 to AUD 10 range, which puts them firmly in the price range of the more successful online ebook sellers.

As with all ebook sellers apart from Amazon, JB Hi-Fi are selling ebooks in e-Pub format, which is reasonable as this is the format that all ereaders with the exception of the Kindle range uses.   further, on their website they take the trouble to provide an extremely long list of ereaders which can be used to read any ebooks you buy from them.   Though actually this is not really necessary, all they had to do was to specify that their ebooks would not work on any Kindles or ereaders that can not work with Adobe’s Digital Editions, and that would have been enough to ensure no mis-buys..

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Here is yet another site that will keep you informed about free or very cheap ebooks from Amazon and Smashwords.  DailyFreeBooks is a site that lists all the ebooks that are being offered on both of those ebook sellers sites.

This one has a really easy to use system to organise what sort of ebooks you are offered, you can specify if it should show you only ebooks from Amazon, or Smashwords, or from both, show you all ebooks on offer with erotic ones or without erotic ones (Nice touch that), show you ebooks within one or more particular genres and so on.

In the cheap ebook section you can define the price range you are prepared to pay as well, so you can set it for ebooks at $2 or less for example.

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Continuing my current wanderings around cheap or free ebook sites, here is my latest offering, the well named The Cheap.   Whilst this site offers various deal for Kobo, Nook and iPads, it is chiefly yet another Amazon outlet.  I am beginning to think that Amazon has started lots of websites that point to ebook bargains at Amazon whilst pretending to be nothing to do with Amazon.   However, whilst about 90% of the ebooks you will find in this site are Kindle ebooks, and if you want to buy (or in the case of the free ones) download them, you will be taken directly to Amazon, there are a fair number of ebooks here too that will work in Nooks, iPads and Kobo ereaders, and thus also in Sony and Hanvon ereaders too.

Why the Pig?

I am not sure why they have chosen a pig for their logo….   But that is what they have chosen……

So, what does The Cheap offer us?

Well when you go there, you are presented with a home page that lists all the genres of ebooks they have to offer, with sample cover images for each category.. So, Romance, History, thriller and so on.   Also they are listed by ereader, so some are listed as Kobo ebooks, others as Kindle Freebies for example.

Also there are a number of editorial boxes, which point you to articles that might be of interest to you, “How to change formats on non-DRM ebooks” or “News and Views”.  All stuff that is useful and of interest to us I would say.   In fact this site presents itself as a friendly user orientated site, and of course, stuffed to the gills with loads of free or cheap ebooks for us to read.

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Here we have another site where authors can place their work for sale, and distribution to other sites (such as Amazon).  Bookrix as this one is called has literally thousands of ebooks that you can download perfectly legally and for free.

It is particularly rich in ebooks for kids, which makes a pleasant change, with a very wide range of free or cheap ebooks for all reading ages from about zero to young adult.   So whilst you can find a large number of ebooks for adults in all genres here, for ebooks aimed at kids this is a really interesting site to visit.

Unlike many websites that have ebooks for kids, this one actually has real ebooks that you can download.  So many of the sites that claim to have ebooks for children actually only have them as PDF files (horrid on ereaders) or “books” that you can not download, but need to read on your computer.. Not exactly handy for bedtime reading I feel.   Bookrix has ebooks in ePub format, so they will work on iPads and any normal ereader (except the Kindle of course).   But as I mentioned, quite a few of the ebooks they offer, can also be bought at Amazon, and in that case will be in the correct format for Kindle ereaders.

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