This is the update of a post I wrote back in January. Since that time Kobo has updated store interface in major countries: Canada, US, UK, France, Germany, among them. If you live in one of those countries, please read this post for details how to find free ebooks.
Users living in remaining countries, still see the old interface, and it’s still possible to find free books using tips described below. Please note, that it may change any time, as Kobo will be launching the new interface in more and more countries.
Kobo has a special page dedicated to free ebooks. If you were looking for free Kobo books on Google, you’ve surely seen it. It’s on top of search results list. The page is available under the link www.kobobooks.com/free_ebooks.
There are six categories listed here, to let you start browsing for books. Don’t expect much – each one has no more than 50 titles (compare it with 1 million claimed in the image above). Already now, some of the categories link to error pages – a proof Kobo is busy working on updating the site.
If you don’t want to remember the link, you can find it on Kobo with a pretty simple trick. Perform any search using the search box in top right. When a page with search results loads, under the main navigation bar, four new tabs will appear. One of them is Free Ebooks (see screenshot below).
Using the search box will also show free ebooks matching the term you are looking for. Simply, from a drop-down menu select Free Only. You can also sort titles by ratings, title, or by publication date.
To give you a glimpse of how many free ebooks you can expect on Kobo in popular categories, here is the example with a search term “mystery”. Out of 60,889 results found, there are 3,392 that are currently free.
Being free on Kobo doesn’t mean the book is DRM-free. You can easily find it. There is a relevant information already on search result pages. Look for the phrase: Download options: EPUB (DRM-Free). If you won’t see it that means the book has DRM from Adobe.
The best way to search for free ebooks on Kobo is to search for a topic, author, or category, and then select Free Ebooks from a drop-down menu of search results.
Using search box repeatedly should narrow down the number of displayed results, and you should be able to identify whether Kobo is a good destination for free ebooks at all.
Otherwise, you can browse other sites with free books. They are offered in epub format, which is compatible with Kobo. What you have to remember, though, is that you won’t be able to sync side-loaded books between Kobo devices and apps.
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