Free Sci-fi Books

I’m forever running out of books to read and never quite make it to the library so my interest was piqued when my friend Tim told me about a website you could download free sci-fi from.

I was thrilled when I visited the site and found that the books were from authors I knew because to be honest, many free books are not really that good.

The Baen Free Library is fantastic, it contains a large number of free books from the Baen catalog. The site is a little hard to navigate so this link will take you straight to the download pages (hosted on another site).

I would highly recommend:

The Honor Harrington series by David Weber
The Legacy of the Alldenata series by John Ringo (very hardcore sci-fi military, so be warned)
Elizabeth Moon
Andre Norton
Mercedes Lackey

The books come in a variety of formats, HTML, RTF etc. I have found that downloading the RTF format and then using OpenOffice to generate a PDF works really well.

If you are not using OpenOffice then download PDFCreator and you will be able to generate a PDF from Word by printing to the PDFCreator “printer” that the software installs…

Apart from the free books, you can also purchase other books in the Baen catalog from the site and get them in electronic form, quite a bit cheaper then buying the paperbacks.

The following is the currently list of authors with free books:

Aaron Allston
Andre Norton
Christopher Anvil
Catherine Asaro
Lois McMaster Bujold
John F. Carr
Paul Chafe
Rick Cook
John Dalmas
David Drake
Rosemary Edghill
Linda Evans
Eric Flint
Michael Flynn
Dave Freer
Mark A. Garland
Scott Gier
Roland Green
Ellen Guon
James P. Hogan
Sarah Hoyt
Karen Koehler
Mercedes Lackey
Keith Laumer
Murray Leinster
Holly Lisle
Duncan Long
Elizabeth Moon
Howard L. Myers
Charles G. McGraw
Larry Niven
Jerry Pournelle
John Ringo
Richard Roach
Fred Saberhagen
James H. Schmitz
Ryk Spoor
D. W. St. John
Harry Turtledove
Lars Walker
David Weber
K. D. Wentworth
Michael Z. Williamson

Happy reading…