How about ebooks?

Prices of good children's books are getting a bit too expensive, sometimes as high as RM40+ for one hardcover book with less than 30 pages.

If you're exploring your options on what to do, don't even consider giving up books.

How about going online to search for free ebooks?

You will be pleasantly surprised, as we were, to see some really beautifully-illustrated and interesting children's ebooks available for free. You can read them online or even download as a PDF.

There are also ebooks available for download to iPhone and iPad.

If you're willing to pay a bit, there are sites that offer a package deal of 200+ ebooks for US$80 or so. That works out to about 40 cents per book. That's RM1.20. Not a bad deal, actually. It's still cheaper than buying real books.

If you're trying to cut costs and tighten your belt as a family (and who isn't these days), give it a try but do shop around first for a good ebooks site.

For the sake of reaching out to a wider audience, we're recommending five sites that offer ebooks for free – for browser viewing or PDF download. We're not going into the iPad and iPhone scene … yet.

Children's Books Online: The Rosetta Project
http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/

There are not many ebooks on this website and the books are pretty old – you can actually see the creases in some of the pages which were scanned in. However, if you're looking for good old-fashioned English books, then you won't be disappointed. The site also tells you when the book was published and who the author was. Some of the books are from the early 1900s. Really cool!

I liked the selection of books. I think if you can read these books with your child, both of you will learn something – if only a good command of the English language. The grammar in these old books is really spot-on perfect.

The Rosetta Project aims to have the largest collection of illustrated antique books online. You can even click under each page in the ebooks for an online translation in several different languages including Italian, Spanish and French.

International Children's Digital Library
http://en.childrenslibrary.org/

The nice thing about this site is that you have books that come from around the world and in various languages including Mongolian, Persian and Tagalog! Some of them have translations. But the English ones are pretty good, too. In fact, I found one that was in English and Spanish – a bilingual book.

A lot of the books are really beautifully illustrated and the great thing is that the pages are scanned in to fill your screen. The images and text are really sharp and the colours are so vibrant. And you can even click to enlarge the text size.

I highly recommend Magic Dogs of the Volcanoes – LOVELY graphics and nice story about magic dogs which protect the Salvadorean villagers who are pursued by wicked soldiers.

Sharing Books
sharing-books.com

You need to register to use this site, although it is free and works on donations. This site does not have an option that allows you to read on the site itself. You will need to log in to download the books in PDF. Some are pretty good, some are by amateurs and there are even ebooks written by children! I did like some of the books but you have to download before you know what you're getting. The great thing about Sharing Books is that the content has been vetted and declared safe for children.

You can even use this site to publish your own stories or your children's stories.

If you're not sure where to start, click on Most Read Books or Most Loved Books. Either one is a fairly safe bet to find some good ebooks.

Children's Books Forever!
www.childrensbooksforever.com/

This site does not have many ebooks. However, the ones that they do have are quite splendid! When you click on the book, you go straight into the PDF in your browser and you can start reading straight away. The books are easy to read and printed clearly with beautiful illustrations to keep both you and your child mesmerised.

Because the quality is good, you will have to wait a while for it to load in full.

I enjoyed the Ten Little Bunnies, Never Lonely Again and Tyrone the Horrible. I think I'll finish reading all the other books soon.

All Books Free
http://www.allbooksfree.com/childrens.htm

Well, as the name of the site states, every book here is free and they're all in HTML format. That means you can just click on the name of the book to read the story and see the illustrations. It's not really fancy and it's pretty simple but you'll find some nice stories here.

I even found one from an Indian author and the drawings show something of the Indian culture.

Some of the books even come with illustrations that have mp3 files embedded so that when you click on an image, the sound file starts playing to read aloud the story to you.

There you go, something even better. Just get your kid to keep clicking on Next and your child will be entertained for at least a few minutes. I do wish the text in the JPEG files were bigger though so that the child can read along. Right now, it's not so for all the books and I'm not sure small children will be able to read along if the words are too small.

That said, it is still a good site to get free ebooks.

Conclusion

Try out these sites and see how your child likes reading ebooks. If your child likes it, do consider investing a bit more to download the paid ebooks. You can get some for pretty cheap and your kid will love it. Plus, imagine all the bookshelf space you'll save, too!