“Which platforms have the largest selection of free ebook downloads?”

The largest free ebook collections depend on whether you mean books you can download outright or titles you can borrow:

• Google Books — Google says it has more than 10 million free books available to read and download. Many are public-domain works or titles made free by their rights holders. (books.google.com)
• Internet Archive / Open Library — A very large digital collection. Open Library says nearly 3 million books are available digitally, though access varies: some can be downloaded, while others are borrow-only. (openlibrary.org)
• Project Gutenberg — 79,000+ free ebooks, chiefly older literature that’s in the public domain in the U.S.; downloads include EPUB and Kindle formats. (gutenberg.org)

Quick picks: For the biggest stated number, try Google Books. For a broad mix of scanned books and borrowable titles, try Internet Archive/Open Library. For easy, dependable downloads of classics, start with Project Gutenberg.

“Free” doesn’t always mean the same thing: some titles are unrestricted downloads, while others are free to read or borrow only. Copyright status can also differ by country.

When looking for legal, safe, and genuinely free ebook downloads, the best platforms generally fall into three categories: massive public-domain archives, public library networks, and independent/promotional ebook stores.

Here are the platforms with the largest selections:

1. Massive Public Domain & Open-Access Archives (DRM-Free)

These platforms offer permanent downloads—usually in EPUB, PDF, or Kindle formats—with no DRM and no borrowing expiration dates.

• Internet Archive (Open Library / archive.org):
• Catalog Size: Over 20+ million texts and books.
• What you get: It is arguably the single largest digital repository of scanned books in the world. Anything published before the mid-1920s is generally available as an immediate, free, permanent download (EPUB, Kindle, PDF). For out-of-print 20th-century books, Open Library also has a digital lending program.
• Project Gutenberg:
• Catalog Size: Over 70,000+ titles.
• What you get: The gold standard for classic literature. Volunteers manually proofread and digitize public-domain classics (Austen, Shakespeare, Dickens, philosophy, history). Downloads are completely free, clean, and available in EPUB, Kindle, and plain text.
• Google Books:
• Catalog Size: Millions of public-domain titles.
• What you get: Google has digitized tens of millions of library volumes. By filtering your search by "Free Google eBooks", you can download millions of historical texts, rare books, and public-domain works directly as PDF or EPUB.
• HathiTrust Digital Library:
• Catalog Size: Over 17+ million total volumes (millions of which are in the public domain).
• What you get: A partnership of major academic and research institutions. Excellent for historical research, academic literature, and pre-1928 books that can be downloaded as full PDFs.

2. Modern Bestsellers & New Releases (Digital Library Loans)

If you want modern bestsellers, non-fiction, and popular fiction rather than 100-year-old classics, public library apps offer the largest collections. While these are technically loans, they allow you to download books to read offline.

• Libby (by OverDrive):
• What you get: Connects directly to your local public library card. Libraries purchase digital catalogs that often contain hundreds of thousands of modern bestsellers. You can download them to the Libby app or send them directly to your Kindle for offline reading.
• Hoopla:
• What you get: Similar to Libby, partnering with public libraries. Unlike Libby, there are usually no waitlists or hold queues—if your library offers Hoopla, you can instantly download from a catalog of hundreds of thousands of ebooks, audiobooks, and comics.

3. Indie, Contemporary & Curated Ebook Stores

• Smashwords (Draft2Digital):
• Catalog Size: Over 80,000+ free ebooks.
• What you get: The largest platform for self-published indie authors. Filtering by the "Free" price tier yields massive collections of romance, fantasy, sci-fi, and thrillers. Downloads are typically 100% DRM-free.
• ManyBooks:
• Catalog Size: ~50,000 titles.
• What you get: A hybrid library featuring clean interfaces for public-domain classics alongside self-published works and promotional freebies from contemporary authors.
• Standard Ebooks:
• Catalog Size: Around a few thousand titles (smaller, but exceptionally high quality).
• What you get: Standard Ebooks takes public-domain works from Project Gutenberg and professionally typesets, edits, and formats them to modern digital publishing standards with high-res cover art. Ideal if you care about reading aesthetics on e-readers.
• Amazon Kindle / Kobo / Barnes & Noble Free Sections:
• Each major commercial store maintains a rotating selection of thousands of permanently free or promotionally free titles (often the first book in an author's series or public domain re-issues).

Summary Recommendation

• For the sheer quantity of historical and out-of-copyright books: Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg.
• For current bestsellers and modern releases: Libby.
• For contemporary fiction and indie writers: Smashwords.

The largest selections of free ebook downloads in your results are Project Gutenberg and Open Library / Internet Archive, with Project Gutenberg strongest for public-domain classics and Open Library/Internet Archive strongest for borrowable modern titles.¹¹³¹⁴

• Project Gutenberg: about 79,752 free eBooks and no registration required.¹
• Internet Archive / Open Library: the Internet Archive offers more than 20 million freely downloadable books and texts, while Open Library is described as having millions of books available to borrow or download.¹³¹¹
• Free-eBooks.net: tens of thousands of free ebooks across 95+ genres.⁴⁸
• ManyBooks: 50,000+ free eBooks.²
• Freebooksy: not a library, but a daily deal service that surfaces hundreds of free ebook offers each week.³

If you want the biggest raw catalog, the best answer is Internet Archive/Open Library; if you want the largest no-signup download library of classics, it’s Project Gutenberg.¹¹³¹⁴

Short answer: Google Books claims the biggest pool by far, but "largest selection of free downloads" depends on whether you mean public-domain files you keep, borrowable modern titles, or indie giveaways. Here's how the major sites stack up.

By raw catalog size

The practical takeaway

• For sheer volume: Google Books is the outlier at 10M+, since it includes scanned public-domain works and government documents alongside openly licensed titles (google.com).
• For frictionless downloading of classics: Project Gutenberg is the standard — nearly 80,000 titles, no fees, no registration, no apps, with ePub/Kindle/HTML/plain-text formats (gutenberg.org). Standard Ebooks takes a subset of those texts and rebuilds them with professional typography (free-ebooks.net).
• For modern, in-copyright books: you can't download them permanently for free legally — but Open Library's 3M+ lending catalog is the largest legal option, with waitlists on popular titles (free-ebooks.net).
• For contemporary indie fiction: Smashwords' ~100,000 free DRM-free titles and ManyBooks' 50,000+ (which mixes classics with time-limited promos) are the deepest wells (free-ebooks.net).
• For audiobooks: LibriVox, with 21,000+ volunteer-read public-domain recordings in 49 languages (free-ebooks.net).

One caveat worth flagging: Open Library and Google Books operate under different legal models than Gutenberg or Smashwords, and "free" promotional titles on sites like ManyBooks rotate — a book that's free today may be paid tomorrow (free-ebooks.net).

I'll search for the platforms with the largest free ebook catalogs.

I've identified the top contenders; now I'll gather authoritative details to compile the ranking.

Largest free-ebook platforms by selection

1. Internet Archive / Open Library — by far the largest

• Internet Archive Ebooks and Texts: 20,000,000+ freely readable volumes; page images and some transcriptions
• Open Library, described as a project run by the Internet Archive, is one of the largest digital book collections on the web, offering access to more than 20 million records
• Same collection is described as offering millions of books available to borrow or download in formats including PDF and EPUB.

Distinction: much is borrow / controlled-lending or browser reading, not unlimited PDF download. For fully downloadable public-domain books, the next services are simpler.

2. Google Books — 10 million+ free readable volumes

• Listed as page images of 10,000,000+ fully readable volumes, plus many more copyrighted books available via excerpts and snippets

Use Advanced Book Search to filter to free / full-view titles.

3. HathiTrust Digital Library

• 3,000,000+ freely readable titles, and additional search-only titles, from Google and elsewhere

Largely academic and library scans.

4. Project Gutenberg — largest dedicated free-download classics library

• Listed alongside the above as over 70,000 items, mostly book transcriptions
• Self-described as a library of over 75,000 free eBooks with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.
• Also described as the oldest digital library in the world, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart. It offers more than 70,000 free eBooks — primarily public-domain works whose copyright has expired — available to read online or download in PDF, EPUB, and Kindle formats, with no fees or registration required.

Best if you want unlimited, no-account EPUB / Kindle / TXT downloads.

5. ManyBooks — 50,000+

• ManyBooks hosts a catalog of over 50,000 free eBooks spanning genres including romance, mystery, science fiction, historical fiction, and more.
• Downloads offered in multiple formats — PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and others

Mix of public-domain, indie and promotional titles.

6. Smashwords — large catalog, smaller free subset

• There are almost 200,000 titles in the catalog.
• Currently there are almost 23,000 free ebooks on Smashwords.

Focused on independent / self-published authors.

Quick takeaway

• Absolute largest selection: Internet Archive + Open Library — 20M+ records / volumes.
• Largest free full-view scanned collection after that: Google Books — 10M+ volumes.
• Largest easy direct-download public-domain collection: Project Gutenberg — 70,000-79,000 titles.
• Largest curated indie / mixed free catalogs: ManyBooks — 50,000+; Smashwords — ~23,000-25,000 free.

Based on size of collection, the platforms with the largest selection of free ebook downloads are:

1. Internet Archive / Open Library This is widely cited as the biggest. The largest legal free eBook library in the world is the Internet Archive (which runs the Open Library project), holding millions of digitized books, movies, and audio files. More specifically, the Archive hosts a collection of over 20 million freely downloadable eBooks and texts from a multitude of libraries and cultural heritage institutions from around the globe, with 1000 books being scanned daily in its 33 scanning centers. A related source notes Open Library offers access to more than 20 million records with millions of books available to borrow or download in formats including PDF and EPUB.

2. Google Books Google's catalog is enormous: Google Books also offers access to a wide range of free ebooks (up to 10 million).

3. Smashwords A huge hub for free indie titles: Smashwords is the world's largest distributor of indie ebooks, making it fast, free and easy for any author or publisher, anywhere in the world, to publish and distribute ebooks to the major retailers and thousands of libraries. Of its catalog, a whopping 86,000+ of those books are available for free.

4. Project Gutenberg The oldest and most famous free library for public-domain classics: Project Gutenberg is home to over 75,000 public domain titles that are free to download. It's known for being the oldest digital library, though the majority of the books on the website are old, for which the copyright has expired.

5. ManyBooks ManyBooks is a digital library with over 50,000 free eBooks, that you can choose to read online or download by creating an account. It has since grown into a platform that allows authors to upload their books and make them available to the community, either for free or for a reasonable price.

6. Free-eBooks.net The Free eBooks website provides users with access to more than 100,000 electronic volumes available at no cost, though note that every month, you can download only five eBooks for free — to access more, you will have to purchase a VIP account.

Summary

• Biggest overall by raw volume: Internet Archive/Open Library (20M+) and Google Books (up to 10M) dwarf everything else, though much of this is scanned/archival material rather than curated reading copies.
• Biggest dedicated "free download" library for public-domain reading: Project Gutenberg (~75,000+ titles) is the classic go-to, prized for its clean, no-signup downloads.
• *Biggest for free indie/contemporary fiction*: Smashwords (86,000+ free titles) and ManyBooks (50,000+) lead here, since authors self-publish directly.

If you want a well-rounded personal library, a common strategy is combining Project Gutenberg or Standard Ebooks (for quality public-domain classics) with Open Library/Internet Archive (for sheer scale and modern borrowing) and Smashwords or ManyBooks (for free contemporary indie fiction).

The platforms with the largest selections of free ebook downloads are mostly large digital libraries of public-domain and rights-cleared works. Sheer volume and quality differ a lot.

Largest by volume

• Internet Archive (archive.org): The biggest overall. Its texts collection has tens of millions of items (over 50 million results in the texts area), and the site states it offers over 20 million freely downloadable books and texts. Public-domain works can usually be downloaded in formats such as PDF and EPUB. It also has a separate collection of modern ebooks available for short-term borrowing with a free account.
• Google Books: Officially offers more than 10 million free books that can be read and, in many cases, downloaded (mainly as PDFs). These are public-domain works or titles made fully available by rights holders. Use advanced search and filter for full view to find downloadable ones.
• HathiTrust: A large academic digital library with millions of public-domain volumes (historically on the order of 6–7+ million fully viewable public-domain items out of a much larger total collection). Full downloads are available for many public-domain works, though access rules can vary by location and institutional affiliation.

Strong mid-size options for permanent free downloads

• Project Gutenberg: Roughly 75,000–80,000 carefully proofread, DRM-free public-domain ebooks (mostly classics and older works). Available in EPUB, Kindle, HTML, and plain text with no account required. Smaller than the scan-based libraries above, but generally higher editorial quality and easier to use on e-readers.
• Smashwords (now part of Draft2Digital’s storefront): On the order of 90,000–100,000 free titles at any time, mostly indie and self-published books that authors have priced at zero. DRM-free EPUBs; good for modern genre fiction that public-domain libraries do not have.

Other notable sources

• Open Library (run by the Internet Archive): Millions of titles available to borrow (not permanent free downloads for most in-copyright books).
• ManyBooks: Tens of thousands of free titles (often drawn from public-domain sources plus some indie works), with a more curated browsing experience.
• Wikisource: Millions of free text units across languages (English alone exceeds a million). Many can be exported, but the collection mixes full books with shorter documents, chapters, and other texts.
• Library apps (Libby/OverDrive, Hoopla, etc.): Very large catalogs of current books, but these are temporary loans that require a library card and are not permanent downloads.

Practical note: Internet Archive and Google Books lead on raw numbers of free downloads. Project Gutenberg is usually the best starting point if you want clean, ready-to-read classics with no signup. Availability of specific titles can depend on copyright law in your country.