10 Hot Sci-Fi Book Sites
The pen is sharper than the sword….
Sci-Fi movies and TV series are great. The special effects and eye candy almost create a genre onto themselves. However, for fully immersing yourself into the science fiction experience, reading the written word wins every time. This blog post is about where to find the best sites for free content and guides to the best books in this class.
_____________________________________________________
This is not the book sale site, tor-forge.com.
Rather it is a site that publishes short stories, art and news and reviews of science fiction works. Yes, they do have a sales page, too. However the free stories and art are well worth checking out. You may end up reading the first works of a great author, who appears as a best seller next year on Amazon.com.
_____________________________________________________
Baen has a cheezy looking site, no argument. However, they have an intriguing philosophy, so continue looking. They let you read entire books online for free, and really good ones by first class writers, on the notion that you will like them well enough to buy more from the same author. Eric Flint explains all this in the Baen Free Library page. The business model works and even Amazon does this now with the Kindle. This is my #1 best site to get free sci-fi books to read.
_____________________________________________________
This is the on-line portal to the paper copy monthly magazine of science fiction short stories. The full editorials of each issue are online for free and about half of selected short stories from each issue. If you like the issue you can go over to e-reader.com and buy the current issue for $4 (or subscribe at $20/6 issues).
__________________________________________________
This site is well organized for locating the best in a given science fiction category. There are lots of lists, reviews and some excerpts of books plus interviews with authors. There are 14 years of material on here.
__________________________________________________
Online stories, poems, artwork, comics, reviews, forums and even video game reviews can be found here. Nothing seems to be for sale here, only lots of content.
___________________________________________________
This isn’t actually a book site, rather it is a forum about links to online independent sci-fi videos. It’s just too cool not to include here. I checked some of them out and they are pretty good.
___________________________________________________
I really like this site. Tasteful looking and they jump right into the free short stories by emerging writers. They have been around since 1994 and they have years of archives to sort through.
___________________________________________________
We can’t leave out Planet Gutenberg! Thousands of volunteers have put tens of thousands of books online that have expired copyrights. Yes, there are a lot of boring books over 100 years old. There are also top classics in both science fiction and regular fiction. Explore Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and many more. They have many in multiple formats, too.
____________________________________________________
Technically, there is nothing to read here, but the list organization is great. This site helped me a lot in picking out 50 new books to read over the last two years.
____________________________________________________
The presentation and choices are great for the top 15 sci-fi books. You will probably get side tracked looking around this site at all the other lists. I did.
____________________________________________________
It was hard to find free (legal) content to read. Only a few sites have full books online, a few more have short stories.
Another site to consider is: wattpad.com. I’ve read books and short stories here, but the uploading authors are at risk of submitting copyrighted material illegally. I think the legal logic is that people upload for their own use when mobile but anyone can view their uploads, so both the reader and publisher are legal, in their own actions. The combined action would violate the spirit of copyright laws. Also, the site is dilluted with a lot of personal blog like diary posts. You will find some real gems here.
Written July 29, 2010 by Vic Richardson
