Scribd and PDFdrive For Online Chess Book Reading, Downloading
Scribd.com has lots of books, including chess books, to read online, and to download. You can browse/search content for titles, or by subject, e.g. 'chess' etc. for free. Otherwise, to read or download content the site is fee-based - $11.99USD per month, as of this writing (you can easily cancel at any time). They also have a 1-month free trial offer.
The online reading ('Books' menu) and the download functionality ('Documents' menu) are mutually exclusive areas of the website, with separate content. That is, titles available for reading are not necessarily available for downloading, and vice-versa. The downloadable books are actually copies of books in pdf and Word document format which Scribd subscribers have uploaded to the site.
You can download copies (from the 'Documents' menu only) of books using the free trial. In fact, over a period of several hours of browsing and searching chess titles/topics I have downloaded dozens of chess books while using the free trial.
Based on my extensive experience using it, the site is safe and easy to use.
For example, the following are two excellent books to get started playing good chess...
From the 'Books' menu (online reading only) Pandolfini's Ultimate Guide To Chess by Bruce Pandolfini; from the 'Documents' menu (the downloadable content) The Complete Idiot's Guide To Chess by Patrick Wolff.
This is a totally free site for downloading copies of books, including chess books. From my extensive experience with it, the site is safe and works reasonably well. Most files are available for download in pdf format, however occasionally you will encounter files available only in .djvu format, which can be viewed using the free WinDJView app available here....
https://windjview.sourceforge.io/en/
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