You can listen to new music through free streaming apps, watch TV shows for free on Hulu and torrent any movie a couple of weeks after it's out. So why not discover new books for free too? When you're too busy or lazy to go to the library, instantly downloading e-books to your phone or tablet is a great option and a nice alternative to re-watching Twin Peaks on Netflix again. So here are the eight best places to download e-books.

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to create and distribute e-books. The site has over 46,000 free e-books and new books are added weekly. Books are available in ePub, Kindle and simple text formats and you don't need to register to download books.

Kindle Lending Library
If you're a Kindle user and a member of Amazon Prime, you should definitely check out the free lending library service. The library contains over 800,000 e-books, including New York Times best-sellers. A lot of the books offered are quick page-tuners (think Harry Potter and The Hunger Games) so it's perfect for spur of the moment purchases and vacation reads.

Open Library

Open Library is a non-profit online project devoted to creating "one web page for every book ever published." There are over 1 million free e-book titles available, with a huge selection of classical works.

Free e-books.net
This site is very easy to navigate and has a comprehensive selection of genres, from biography to mystery to humor.

BookBoon
BookBoon is a great resource for free academic textbooks and educational how-tos. So if you ever feel like brushing up on your econometrics or engineering thermodynamics, this is the site for you.

Lit2Go

In case you want to listen to your books instead of reading them, Lit2Go offers a great selection of classic audiobooks on a beautifully designed site.

Google eBookstore 
Browse the free section of the Google bookstore to get high-quality e-books. You'll find a ton of classics here if you feel like reading all of Jane Austen or Tolstoy works.

DailyLit

So DailyLit isn't technically a free e-book service. It's more of an interesting take on the free e-book phenomena. It's a literary email service that sends you a daily book excerpt from the novel of your choice. Each excerpt takes less than 20 minutes to read and you receive an email every day until you're done with the book. This is an easy way to get back into reading if you need help fitting it into a busy schedule.

Oyster or Scribd
Both Oyster and Scribd function on the "Netflix for books" platform. Though they both have a monthly subscription fee, (Oyster is $9.95 and Scribd is $8.99) you can try out both services for free. It's worth checking out if you find yourself going through a ton of e-books a month.

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