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Tuebl – The Ultimate EBook Library [Freeware]

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It would be unfair to classify Tuebl.ca as just another ebook library, despite the name (TUEBL…The Ultimate EBook Library – geddit?). Think of it more as a website on a mission, a mission to connect authors and readers together directly, with no complicated commercial middlemen involved.

The library contains nearly 24000 ebooks of all genres, and there’s some good stuff on there too. The idea is to help authors build their fan base by offering one or more of their titles for free on the site.

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The site features a bunch of different ways to accessing the books on offer, ranging from a straight forward search to more nuanced functions such as tags, trends, and most popular. The books are all user uploaded, which of course implies that there’s copyright material on there, but there’s not a user focused online service in existence that doesn’t suffer from that kind of problem, and there are alert buttons everywhere to provide copyright holders with takedown protections.

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All of the books are available in the ePub format, which can be read by most readers, but is not Kindle compatible. For that you’ll need to use a converter like Calibre.com. The one downside to the site is the sheer volume of advertising which intrudes everywhere into the interface.

While it’s clearly an expensive venture to host thousands of eBooks, we just wish there was a more elegant and user friendly way to generate revenue from user visits. That said, the site has supplied over 7 million downloads, which suggests that users are not too bothered by all the sales pitches. If you’re into ebooks, Tuebl.ca is definitely a worthwhile place to start.

3 Comments

  • Hello! First of all thank you for the great review of TUEBL, it is probably one of the best ones I have seen this year.

    The only thing that I really have left to respond to is the advertisements:
    While we certainly don't like having a website with so many advertisements, it is an unfortunate side effect of hosting such a popular website. We are always striving to make the experience better. We have made it so when you log onto the site with a mobile phone many of the ads dont' even show up making it faster for your phone to load the page and use less bandwidth.

    Also, and I don't mean to be rude or sound snide but here is what I first saw when coming to the site to read this article: http://cl.ly/NJ0Q So I guess we are all a little guilty of the advertising.

    • Thanks for the response Travis and point taken about advertising. ;) Although I will say that my objection to ads are only when they are so embedded into the content that they actually create a confusing user interface.

      As you can see with ours, once you get into the content, the ads are not as intrusive. But I agree it costs money to serve users with free content. Good luck with the site.

  • It actually IS kindle compatible, it’s just that you need to download Blufire Reader to be able to do anything.

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