Free book, or bait?
Search for a free book and real libraries and card-harvesting sites come back together. Six checks that tell them apart.
We went looking for free books to put on the FamilyAI shelf. One popular site put an account wall in front of every single download. Another refused to load at all unless we looked like a browser. And a genuinely good library turned up copyrighted picture books that somebody had uploaded without permission. None of that is unusual. It is the ordinary shape of the free-book web, and nobody warns a family about it.
Free means three different things
All three are legal and safe. A site that cannot tell you which one applies to the book it is offering you is the problem.
Out of copyright
Old enough that nobody owns it any more. In India that is usually sixty years after the author died. Anyone may copy, print or sell it.
Tagore, Premchand, Dickens, the Panchatantra.
Given away on purpose
Still in copyright, but the people who own it attached a licence saying you may read, copy and share it. Creative Commons is the usual one.
StoryWeaver's Indian picture books, most government textbooks.
Lent to you
A real library owns copies and lends them out one at a time, exactly like a paper library. You give it back, or it expires.
Open Library's borrow queue, your city library's app.
Check the site in front of you
Tick anything the site does. This is worked out on your own device and nothing is sent anywhere, including to us.
Where the real free books are
These are the sources FamilyAI's own library is built from. Every one says who runs it and why its books are free.
| Site | Who runs it | What is on it |
|---|---|---|
| National Digital Library of India Many Indian languages | Ministry of Education, run from IIT Kharagpur | Textbooks, exam preparation and scholarship for every level of Indian education. |
| StoryWeaver Hindi and dozens of Indian languages | Pratham Books, a nonprofit publisher | Thousands of children's picture books, openly licensed, free to read and to print. |
| Project Gutenberg English and European languages | Volunteers, since 1971 | Seventy thousand books that are out of copyright. Nothing newer, on purpose. |
| Internet Archive and Open Library Many | A registered nonprofit library in the United States | Scanned books, some free to read outright and some lent one copy at a time. |
| Standard Ebooks English | Volunteers who re-typeset public domain books | The same free classics, laid out properly so they are readable on a phone. |
If a card number has already gone
In this order, starting now. The first hour is the one that matters.
- 1
Block the card, do not just watch it
Call the number on the back of the card or use the bank's app. Blocking is free and a new card takes a few days. Waiting to see if anything happens is how a small loss becomes a large one.
- 2
Report it within the golden hour
Call 1930, the national cyber fraud helpline, or file at cybercrime.gov.in. Money reported in the first hour is far more often recovered, because it can be frozen before it moves on.
- 3
Change the password, and anywhere you reused it
The account you made on that site is worth little to them. The same password on your email is worth everything.
- 4
Delete whatever it installed
Uninstall the app or extension, then run a scan. On a shared family phone, check what else was added the same day.
- 5
Tell the family, without making it a trial
Whoever clicked it will hide the next one if this one goes badly for them. That silence is the thing that actually costs money.
Print the six checks and stick them by the computer the family shares. That is where this actually gets used, not on a page somebody has to remember to come back to.
Print the rules