Pulp magazines and reprints aren’t the only way to enjoy classic pulp fiction — or New Pulp. Many readers find e-readers, tablets, and even mobile phones a convenient way to read pulp fiction, and the sources below offer a wide range of ebooks, PDFs, and scanned magazines for purchase or free download.
Formats vary by source, so if you can’t find a particular title at one site, it may be available at another. If you know of a source we’ve missed, please let us know.
- Adventure House ebooks
- Adventure House sells a handful of pulps as ebooks, and has a number of free stories.
- Age of Aces Presents
- In addition to their printed books, Age of Aces offers a selection of free PDFs of air combat stories from pulp fictioneers such as Frederick C. Davis, Arch Whitehouse, Donald Keyhoe, and others. PDFs of Alden McWilliams’ illustrated tributes to flying pioneers from Flying Aces magazine are also available.
- Comic Book Plus: Pulp Fiction
- The website devoted to scans of comic books and strips also includes a “pulp fiction” category. Using a broad definition of the topic, Comic Book Plus features pulp magazines and their precursors, dime novels, penny dreadfuls, and story papers. You can read the magazines online, but must register to download them.
- Dieselpunk Industries: Pulp Magazine Library
- This site has hundreds of pulp magazine scans available for reading online for free.
- Futures Past Editions
- This publisher, run by Renaissance E Books Inc., puts out ebooks and paperbacks of science fiction, fantasy, adventure, and horror — many from the end of the pulp era. It also offers a number of free ebooks on its website.
- Galaxy Press
- The fiction publishing arm of Author Services Inc., Galaxy Press specializes in the works of L. Ron Hubbard and offers ebook editions of his science fiction, Western, detective, and fantasy pulp stories alongside audio dramatizations.
- Luminist League Library & Archives
- The Luminist League has a collection of periodicals online in PDF form, ranging from spiritual texts to chapbooks to fiction. Pulp fans will be interested in their pulp magazine and science fiction categories. (Some non-pulps are mixed in each section, too.)
- Mysterious Press
- Mysterious Press takes a relaxed view of “pulp,” but pulp aficionados will find ebooks by Lester Dent and George H. Coxe here. The ebooks are sold in a variety of e-reader formats through third-party vendors, such as Amazon, Apple, and Google.
- The Online Books Page
- A comprehensive index of more than 3 million free books available on the web, maintained by the University of Pennsylvania Library. Useful for tracking down public-domain pulp-era fiction available through various digital libraries.
- Open Road Media: Lester Dent
- Open Road Media, in partnership with Mysterious Press, publishes Lester Dent’s non-Doc Savage fiction in ebook form. The ebooks are sold through third-party vendors such as Amazon, Apple, and Google.
- Project Gutenberg
- Project Gutenberg provides public domain texts in a variety of formats. Because copyright laws vary around the globe, Project Gutenberg’s international sites — in particular its Australian version — may contain stories that aren’t yet available elsewhere.
- Pulp Fiction Book Store
- The Pulp Fiction Book Store makes its ebooks available in .epub and .mobi formats for many reading devices. It offers a range of genres and includes some non-pulp material.
- The Pulp Magazine Archive at Archive.org
- The Internet Archive is a wonderful resource for archived websites, videos, audio, and text. Pulp magazines have their own collection there. Read them online or download them in a variety of formats, including ePub, PDF, Kindle, and plain text.
- Pulp Magazines Project
- The purpose of the Pulp Magazines Project is to create an open-access digital archive of pulp magazines. The project’s scanned pulps are available as free PDFs and can also be read online through a browser-based viewer.
- PulpMagazines.org
- Here’s another archive of dozens of digital pulps for reading online or downloading. You’ll also find information about the pulps and links to pulp replicas for sale.
- PulpGen Archive
- Since 2002, Larry Estep, John Locke, and others contributed, scanned, and reformatted pulp stories at the PulpGen website. After that site shut down in 2021, Ed McBride resurrected it as the PulpGen Archive. The hundreds of free, downloadable PDFs can be sorted by author or magazine.
- Radio Archives Pulp eBooks
- Radio Archives offers a substantial catalog of pulp ebooks under the banner of “Will Murray’s Pulp Classics,” each reformatted for modern reading and introduced by Murray. Some ebooks contain a single novel; others comprise the feature novel and supporting stories from a complete issue. Titles include The Spider, G-8 and His Battle Aces, Captain Future, Doctor Death, Dr. Yen Sin, and more.
- Le Site de Capitaine Flam (Captain Future)
- This French website devoted to the Captain Future TV series also includes a handful of PDFs of Captain Future and Startling Stories pulp stories in English, as well as French translations. You’ll also find PDFs of some of “The Worlds of Tomorrow,” profiles and maps of the planets that originally appeared in the pulp.
- Steeger Books
- Steeger Books (formerly Altus Press), one of the premier pulp reprint publishers, also provides many of its books in ebook formats for the Kindle and other e-readers.
