Reader's Stuff

Here are some sites from which you can download or read eBooks for free. Most of them are initiatives by Universities, open source communities etc. 

1. Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in its collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.  It also has a cool web service which takes you to the archived versions of the websites. You can select your date in this time machine 

2. Project Gutenberg has over 33,000 free downloadable eBooks in various formats. This is one of the oldest text digitization projects. 

3. Nalanda Digital library also have some free eBooks, journals etc cataloged on it's site. This project is in infant stage. 

4. The World Digital Library makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world on one site, in a variety of ways. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.

5. Digital Himalaya is a project from University Of Cambridge to develop digital collection, storage and distribution strategies for multimedia anthropological information from the Himalayan region.

6. The Digital Library of India is a portal by IISc - Bangalore which offers free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, predominantly in Indian languages, available to everyone over the Internet.

7.  ArXiv by Cornell University offers open access to 626,006 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. 

8. The Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation with a mission of one web page for every book ever published.

9. Read Print is another website which offers free online books library in an organized way.

10. Sacred Texts  has largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet. This site is dedicated to religious tolerance and scholarship, and has the largest readership of any similar site on the web.

11. The European Library is a free service that offers access to the resources of the 48 national libraries of Europe in 35 languages. Resources can be both digital (books, posters, maps, sound recordings, videos, etc.) and bibliographical. Quality and reliability are guaranteed by the 48 collaborating national libraries of Europe. But this is not eBook download service. 

12. Online Mathematical Textbooks  has a small collection of mathematics text books.

13.  Ibiblio is an online collection of various media including text on various topics where you can browse them categorically.

14. Shelfari (now acquired by Amazon) helps you to make a virtual online book shelf where you can also see the brief information on books. Similar service is offered by Goodreads.   There are other but these two are most popular. Also there is a web service named What should I read next  which suggests you pretty accurately the name and description of books of similar genre or on similar topic which you had just read.

15. In India Infibeam and Flipkart are very good sites for purchasing book online, offering very reasonable prices.