December 12, 2007 by sharky
Here’s a list of some common methods for finding eBooks and audiobooks on various P2P networks and protocols.
An eBook, or Electronic book (sometimes spelled “E-Book”), is simply a book, magazine, manual etc. that has been released to digital format. They take many forms, such as *.PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files, *.CHM (similar to a Windows ‘help’ file), *.LIT files (Microsoft Reader) or just plain text files (ASCII). Usually when a book or magazine is converted to these formats (except ASCII), it is professionally done in deliberate support of the program that is opening it, making the reading experience far more enjoyable that reading it in a text editor like Notepad.
An audiobook is a book that has been professionally narrated and saved to digital format. Retail audiobooks are normally found in the form of CD media to be enjoyed in any compact disk player. However, a ripped audiobook will most likely be found as *.MP3 files in order to save space, and can be ‘burned’ to CD media if desired (be advised that many audiobooks will require many CD disks to complete just one book - sometimes as many as 30 - as in the case of unabridged versions). But if you choose this route, use CD-RW (re-writeable) disks so you can use them again afterwards. Many tech-savvy people opt to play these MP3s on portable media players like iPODs, MP3 players and even cell phones.
Searching for free eBooks & Audiobooks
One resource for finding free (but copyrighted) ebooks and audiobooks is in the newsgroups (Usenet). If you have access to them, check out these newsgroups:
- Alt.binaries.e-book
- Alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.audiobooks
eBooks and audiobooks on BitTorrent:
Certainly the best resource for finding ebooks and audiobooks would be on the BitTorrent websites. Below is a comparison of BitTorrent sites that offer both of them, and how many:
| BitTorrent Website | *Number of ebooks (torrents) | *Number of audiobooks (torrents) |
|---|---|---|
| www.mininova.org | 15,500 | 4,000 |
| thepiratebay.org | 14,500 | 559 |
| btjunkie.org | 8,000 | 1,480 |
| www.torrentreactor.net | 3,400 | 926 |
| www.torrentportal.com | 6,200 | 1,100 |
| www.fulldls.com | 27,900 | 264 |
| www.isohunt.com | 4,700 | 990 |
*Results include all torrents (0 seed and up). - Dec. 2007
NOTE: When searching for eBooks and audiobooks on BitTorrent sites, users can sometimes ‘browse’ these exact categories (like on Mininova, FullDLS and ThePirateBay). Others don’t have a category specifically for them, so when searching these sites, ues the keywords “ebook” and “e-book” and also “audiobook” and “audio book” to generate the most thorough search hits.
Other web-based resources for free eBooks:
- Ebookshare.net — This is a BitTorrent site that offers lots of ebooks torrents to download. It’s a great site for content with many categories to browse, however, the popup ads are a real downer.
- www.gutenberg.org — They are absolutely loaded with ebooks. Search results by author and by book name, or choose ‘advanced search’ for more options. You can read the book online in HTML or text formats. Don’t want to read them now? Download and save them as *.ZIP in any of the formats. You can even download them in ‘plucker’ format to read them on your Palm organizer or smartphone! And there’s no catch! OK, there is one small catch: the ebooks listed here are not copyrighted in the U.S.
- www.scribd.com — Looking to download eBooks and magazines in PDF format? Look here. Anyone can read, search or download these titles in PDF or Microsoft Word format for free.
- www.bookmooch.com — This site is dedicated to people who actually want to trade REAL books. The cost is free, but you have to pay for shipping & handling to send your books. And you have to send books once in a while to keep your account in good standing.
Finding free audiobooks on P2P (Limewire):
Aside from BitTorrent - Limewire offers a smaller selection of audiobooks, as well. At last check, we only garnered a mediocre 430 ‘audiobook’ results on Limewire, and this number includes users who are sharing the same file. Shareaza, with its ’search more’ feature, generated a whopping 1,000+ files (however, many were considered junk results that included *.WMA and zip files). Serious audiobook pundits are better served by BitTorrent.
Audiobooks for iPod:
One of iPod’s many great features is the ability to play audiobooks, and pause them at a specific location for later playback. Aside from iPod’s ability to play *.mp3 audiobooks, genuine iPod audiobook files are almost always in the *.m4b file format - on the iTunes website and pirated - (and sometimes *.m4a). These are extremely scarce at the pirated level, but some can be found on popular public BitTorrent websites. Just do a search for “ipod audiobook” or “.m4b”. Here’s some Bit sites that carry them:
| BitTorrent Website | Number of listed torrents for iPod audiobooks: (.m4b) |
|---|---|
| www.mininova.org | 97 |
| thepiratebay.org | 14 |
| btjunkie.org | 34 |
| www.torrentreactor.net | 1 |
| www.torrentportal.com | 21 |
| www.fulldls.com | 12 |
| www.isohunt.com | 100 |
Genuine iPod audiobook files (*.m4b) are almost non-existent on P2P programs such as Shareaza or Limewire. They returned a grand total of 6 and 15 *.m4b files, respectively (and most search results were suspect.)
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