Hi! Lately I discovered this cool site with many free chess books. Most of them were already deleted but some nice works are still there.. including:

„Play like a grandmaster” - Kotov

„The Tarrasch formula” – Palatnik

„My chess career” – Capablanca

„God of war – Bobby Fisher at the peak of power” – Franco-Perez (looks like it's very well annotated, but it's only first 3 chapters)

„A guide to chess endings” – Euwe

„Can you be a possitional chess genius?” - Dunnington

..and many more!

The site: http://www.wtharvey.com/books.html

All of these books are copyrighted how can they be free?

Don't know man but I definitely didn't pay for them, but still downloaded a few..

They are only the games and positions in the books in PGN format, no text. If the publisher doesn't permit even sharing those, the files require a password that you can obtain if you have the book. So no violations here, and it's a terrific resource if you frequently want to analyze positions or games from books you're reading with the computer.

I wouldn't click that link Yuck all books been deleted anyway. Manybooks.net has a couple if your desperate from before 1930 something.

Nimzowitsch alert!

Best free chess books seem to be Google books (over 500 chess books I have downloaded), chesszone.com (50 scanned books), db books (close to 1,000 PGN collections from books), ossimitz (about 100 PGN collections from books), chessville, the chess.com downloads section, and perhaps some other sites.  I am not familiar how RapidShare works, but there seems to be lots of chess books there.  I am also not familiar with torrents and book file sharing.  If anyone has used these services, I would be interested in knowing how it works.  It would be nice if we had some volunteers that could create pgn game databases from books not yet converted (I created over 100 PGN files from chess books in my library and put them on the DB books site).

I put a list of lots (over 1,730) of free chess books and magazines in the public domain.  They are from google books, db books, chesszone books, etc.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AiF9ULO9hJY3dG5CNEZCTEdfSjhDeGowZmdNYlU5Zmc&hl=en