Reading for pleasure

How to access reading for pleasure books, magazines and audio books.

Reading for pleasure can positively benefit your mental health and wellbeing. The Reading Agency conducted research into the benefits:

"The research finds that reading for pleasure can result in increased empathy, improved relationships with others, reductions in the symptoms of depression and dementia, and improved wellbeing.

"The relationship between reading for pleasure and wellbeing is particularly interesting, with evidence showing a correlation between reading for pleasure regularly and lower levels of stress and depression. Reading also seems to reduce the risk of dementia, with frequent readers having lower incidence of dementia in later life.

"In addition to the health benefits, reading for pleasure has social benefits and can improve our sense of connectedness to the wider community. Reading increases our understanding of our own identity, improves empathy and gives us an insight into the world view of others."

Use library search and get a book transferred to the campus of your choice.

Our collection

We've curated some reading lists of our top reading for pleasure picks:

Use library search or our reading lists to choose an item, and request to collect it from the campus of your choice.

Where to find our collection

Frenchay - Fiction and DVDs can be found on Level 5. Fiction is located in the 800s, and for DVDs you can find films at 791.43, TV at 791.45 and documentaries at 791.435.
Glenside - The ground floor of Glenside Library has a fiction and wellbeing collection located in the East wing.
Bower Ashton (City Campus) - Our Arts Library at Bower Ashton has DVDs you can borrow and hosts a collection of poetry from Black poets.

Public libraries

Use your UWE Bristol ID card to register with any library in the LibrariesWest region.

You can borrow fiction, and also use an app to access popular digital magazines and e-books, or listen to audio books.

Find out more about joining local public libraries

Free audio and e-books

In addition to what public libraries offer, here are links to free audio and e-books:

Free audio books

Digitalbook audiobooks
Learn Out Loud
Free audio and video literature titles.
LibriVox
Free public domain audio books read by volunteers from around the world.
Loyal Books
Loyal Books offers a great variety of free audio books.
Open Culture
Free audio books, e-books, movies and online courses.
Project Gutenberg audio books
Storynory
Storynory offers free audiobooks for children, with a mix of classics, fairy tales, and original stories.

Free e-books

Digitalbook
Offers thousands of free e-books covering several categories such as fiction, classics, romance, sci-fi, history, horror, children's, and young adult.
Feedbooks
Feedbooks offers a collection of fiction and non-fiction e-books for free.
Free-Ebooks.net
Google Books
Find millions of books you can preview or read for free.
Internet Archive eBooks and Texts
Offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts.
Manybooks
Discover 50,000 free e-books.
National Emergency Library
A collection of books that supports emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship and intellectual stimulation.
Open Library
Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, which aims to provide a page on the web for every book ever published. It currently has over 20 million edition records online and provides access to 1.7 million scanned versions of books.
PDF Books World
Offers many free fiction and non-fiction titles which can be downloaded in PDF format.
Project Gutenberg e-books
Over 60,000 titles available.
Read Print
Read Print allows users to read classics online for free.
University of California Press Free e-books
Over 700 electronic editions of academic books available to the public.