Find Free Books, Movies and Music Online

“Whatever your tastes, we guide you to the best websites for bagging yourself a digital media freebie – and all perfectly legally!”

With Kindles,iPods and set-top boxes currently ruling the home media roost, the days of physical media like CDs and DVDs may well be behind us. If you know where to look, you don’t even need to pay for digital films, music and books.

Your first stop should be the internet archive at www.archive.org. This site is host to millions of copyright free movies, live music and texts. With so much available it can be difficult to know where to start, but type is ‘Charles Dickens’ and you’ll find the author’s complete works available to download as a PDF, which can be opened is Adobe Acrobat or read on a Kindle.

Archive.org also hosts films, but most are over 50 years old due to copyright laws. For something newer, YouTube’s film service at www.youtube.com/movies features many films for free, including recent treats like ludicrously twisty thriller Wild Things, Guy Ritchie’s unfairly maligned Revolver and sci-fi musical Repo: The Genetic Opera.

We have covered TV services like BBC iPlayer and 40D before, but sometimes they host films on top of the multitude of catch-up TV series. At the time of writing both Starsky & Hutch and Southern Comfort are available online. In iPlayer,(www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer) click ‘Films’ under ‘Categories’ to see which movies have been show over the past few days.

Music files are smaller than films, which means there’s an abundance of websites offering free tunes. www.we7.com creates an online radio station based on an artist of your choosing and it’s a great way to listen to free tracks. www.grooveshark.com is also free and hosts even more songs. Just enter an artist, genre or title and it will search its immense catalogue for relevant songs and albums.

If you are lucky enough to have an ebook reader like an Amazon Kindle, Project Gutenberg(www.gutenberg.org) is an excellent source for out-of-copyright works. Unlike archive.org, it automatically provides file formats suitable for the majority of ebook readers.

Add all these sites to your bookmarks and browse away- you are sure to find a free book, movie or song to suit your tastes.