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12 Best Free Ways to Read Articles Without Subscription on Any Website (2023)
As traditional media houses move online, access to good journalism comes at a cost. Some of the biggest newspapers in the world like The Guardian, Washington Post, and the New York Times keep their content behind a paywall and make it accessible only to paid members. For an average reader, subscribing to multiple newspapers can get quite expensive. Luckily, there are a few ways to bypass the paywall on these websites and read the articles free of cost. You may be familiar with clearing browser cookies and using incognito mode to read articles for free, but this may not work for every website. In this article, we bring you the top 12 free ways to read paywalled articles on any website, without needing a subscription or are behind a Paywall.
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Table of Contents
Open the article in Incognito Mode
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This is the simplest way to bypass any paywall you come across online. The only drawback is that it works for websites that offer users to read a few free articles before asking them to subscribe to the service. Opening a link in incognito mode prevents the website from using cookies on your computer. Without cookies to track your PC, the website has no way of knowing whether you’ve exceeded the free articles limit. Simply right-click on a link and select ‘Open link in an incognito window’ to bypass the paywall. You can also press Ctrl+Shift+N to open an incognito window and paste the link on the address box to access the article.
Reset Browser Cookies
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If you do not want to open the article in an incognito tab, you can also reset the browser cookies to prevent the website from tracking your article count. Simply click the three dots on the Chrome browser and select ‘Clear browsing data’ from the ‘More tools’ section. Open the advanced tab and clear all browsing cookies.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is an online library of over 60,000 free eBooks that you can download or read online without downloading. As the mother of all current ebook sites, Project Gutenberg offers the world’s great literature and classics. To read the book online, just simply click “Read this book online: HTML” to open the book in your browser.
Google Books
When it comes to a site to read books online, Google Books must be thought of. Book Search in Google Books works just like web search. Try a search on books.google.com. When the book with content that contains a match for your search terms is found, it will link to the book in your search results. If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given Google Books permission, you’ll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the full view of the entire text. If it’s in the public domain, you’re even free to download a PDF copy.
Smashwords
If you want to read free books that aren’t just fiction, Smashwords is the website for you. There are a variety of genres, including fiction, non-fiction, essay, plays, poetry, and screenplays. Just make sure that you click the “Free” tab when you search for books, because not all the site’s 300,000 books are free. And for those ebooks that can be read online, there will be an “Online Reader” option under “Downloads” that you can click to read in the browser.
