You may like reading novels very much, or have to deal with tons of documents but don’t want to compile a document from scratch. Here, we rounded up 8 of the best websites to download free PDF books and documents, helping you find the most valuable resources you can use in your life or work.
Cisdem PDFMaster
Free Download macOS 11 or later 
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
Recommendation Rate: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
For: e-books
Brief Overview: No sign up; all books are free; support 7 output formats (no PDF, but can print as PDF); allow reading online.
There are 70,000 free eBooks offered on Project Gutenberg, you can download most of them in PDF format without sign up. It allows searching and browsing books by spotlight search, bookshelves, frequently downloaded and offline catalogs. Besides PDF format, these books are saved in a wide variety of formats, like HTML, ePub, Kindle, Plain Text, etc., you can export the eBooks and read on different devices. Moreover, users can send these books to Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive directly.
Recommendation Rate: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
For: e-books, PDF documents
Brief Overview: No sign up; all PDFs are free; PDF is the only output format; allow reading online; share on social media.
PDF Drive is a professional online PDF website through which we can search, read and download all kinds of PDF documents for free. This platform hosts more than 75 million e-books in a wide variety of categories, like Astrology, Biography, Academic & Education, Bussiness & Career, Stock Market and Financial. Not only can you free download PDF documents online but also share them on your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Telegram.
Recommendation Rate: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
For: e-books, PDF documents
Brief Overview: As the world's largest ebook library, it has over ten million books and article resources. Here, you can find various types of PDF e-books, including books, journals, and literature. Searching ebooks on ZLibrary is also convenient. You can directly enter the name for a search, or search ebooks by keywords, author, publisher, subject, etc. Compared to other PDF download resources, its main advantage is the availability of newly uploaded books. You can directly click to download the found e-books, which all provided in PDF format.
Recommendation Rate: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
For: e-books
Brief Overview: Sign up for download; most books are free; support 9 output formats (PDF included); allow reading online.
There are more than 50,000 free books for download on ManyBooks, a large part of which are saved in PDF and can be easily downloaded to your device. All these books fall into multiple genres: Romance, Mystery & Thriller, Science Fiction, Biographies, Action & Adventure, etc. You can find your preferred books more accurately and quickly by selecting categories such as language, author, popularity and rating. From classics to modern eBooks, you will find your favorites on ManyBooks. However, you have to sign up for free download and some of the books cost money.
Recommendation Rate: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
For: e-books
Brief Overview: No sign up; all books are free; support 13 free output formats (PDF included); allow reading online.
It’s an American non-profit digital library founded in 1996, providing free access to digital materials. As of 2024, over 40 million e-books and texts are offered by this digital library, ranging from novels, academic documents to public documents. They are freely downloadable in 13 file formats, including but not limited to ABBYY GZ, CHOCR, PDF, EPUB, TEXT and DAISY (for users with print-disabilities).
Recommendation Rate: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
For: e-books, PDF documents
Brief Overview: Anna's Archive is a ebook library search engine where you can easily find and download various books, papers, comics, magazines, and textbooks. It includes resources from the three globally renowned digital libraries: Z-Library, Library Genesis, and Sci-Hub, you can always keep this site as a backup site for these libraries.
Recommendation Rate: ⭐⭐⭐
For: e-books
Brief Overview: Sign up for download; all books are free; support 2 free output formats (PDF and TXT); 5 free books/mo; allow reading online.
It’s a website full of free ebooks and documents, over 100,000 e-Books and over 1100 audio-books. Besides reading the books online, you can also free download PDF books by uploading your eBook collections as exchanges. There are 9 main categories, each of which is divided into different groups. You can even find a lot of academic books and documents here to help you succeed in your study or career. However, you can download 5 eBooks per month for free only.
Recommendation Rate: ⭐⭐⭐
For: PDF documents and magazines
Brief Overview: Sign up for publishing PDFs; allow reading online; share PDF documents to multiple social medium directly.
It’s a well-known digital publishing platform where you can publish and share digital magazines, interactive publications and online documents for free. The topics are greatly varied in fashion, sports, travel, cooking, cars, literature and so on. You can read these publications directly online or share them to social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest. For French, there’s no doubt that it’s the best website to download free PDF books and documents.
Recommendation Rate: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
For: PDF document templates
Brief Overview: Sign up for download; most templates are free; edit templates online free; support various file formats.
When working, if we want to compile a document highly efficiently, we’d better use some ready-made templates. Template.net is a website to offer a lot of free PDF document templates of various types: designs, business documents, education, marketing, social media, holidays, etc. It allows users to edit and download the PDF document free, but you will have to sign up.
Recommendation Rate: ⭐⭐⭐
For: PDF document templates (mainly forms)
Brief Overview: Sign up for download; some templates are free; edit templates online free; limits on form, submissions, views and storage.
To create a professional business document in PDF format, like Contract, Lease Agreement, Invoice, Proposal, Business Plan, Receipt or others, Jotform would be the best place where to get the free PDF document templates and add new contents to your PDF. Still, you have to sign up to edit and download the file, even, there is a watermark added to your file.
After downloading PDF files, we can use PDF software to read, edit, and convert the ebooks. One software I frequently use is Cisdem PDFMaster. It integrates functions such as reading, creating, editing, annotations, converting, compressing, encrypting, signing, etc. It has a clean interface and well-organized, placing frequently used features on the home page for easy access.
In terms of PDF editing, it can edit the text and images of the PDF itself, When editing it will ensure that modifications do not alter the original structure and framework. Colors and font sizes can be modified in the right toolbar.
Besides editing, you can also use it as a PDF reader. It provides several default reading modes, you can switch to an eye-protection mode by one click. It also supports color changes to match the computer system, with dark mode available for night use.
When reading a PDF file, It supports split-screen viewing, allowing you to compare and read the same or different files simultaneously, which is useful when you need to reference content from different parts of the document without flipping back and forth.
If you like to take notes while reading, this software supports it too. You can use it to make annotations, comments, and highlights, after making all the annotations you can export the notes directly from the PDF file as separate notes. You can also search for notes by keywords.
Its conversion function is also outstanding, allowing you to quickly convert PDFs to Word, PPT, Excel, CSV, etc. Especially when converting tables, it ensures the consistency of tables and data, which is really convenient. If you have large batches of PDF to be converted, you can use the batch conversion function, it has no limits on the number or frequency of conversions, and the converted files will keep the layout and fonts.
Free Download macOS 11 or later Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
Earlier than macOS 11, click here
Websites giving free PDF documents and e-books are of great value to everyone, where we can read the books online or offline and use the documents for our work. Most of the work on these websites is done by volunteers, if you appreciate their help, you can spread the word for them or make a donation to encourage their generous contributions online.
Carolyn has always been passionate about reading and writing, so she joined Cisdem as an editor as soon as she graduated from university. She focuses on writing how-to articles about PDF editing and conversion.
Steven
Thank you so much!!! How kind you are!!! You can't believe how much I love to read, all the sites you recommended will help me a lot!