great kindle: free books

Showing posts with label free books. Show all posts

Tips for new Kindlers on Mother's Day. Free Kindle books. Battery use.

Mother's Day greeting at left, is from the Manhasset Library.

Since many will be opening new Kindles today, I thought I'd mention a couple of things that can help with finding free books, to give it a workout, and do a reminder on tips for getting the most out of the Kindle battery.
At the top of this blog's reference column, you can always find free books available at the moment (some are temporarily free due to promos).

Temporarily-free books -
Non-classics - USA: by:
NEW: Last 30+ days May 2011
Publication Date Late-listed
Bestselling High-ratings
UK: PubDate Popular

Most Popular Free K-Books
U.S. & Int'l (NOT UK):
Top 100 free
UK-Only:
Top 100 free
USEFUL for your Kindle (U.S. only, for now):
99c Notepad for Kindle, 99c CalendarPro

You can also get an idea of other sources for over a million free books as well as get some pre-set links for low-cost Kindle books, at the Free Kindle Books guide here

SPECIAL BOOK DEALS TODAY - temporary promos
The Amazon Kindle Forums often has message threads on discounted books that include some free books.

Yesterday's included a tip on Kindle books from Rosettabooks that have tie-ins with movies, available at $0.00 today. I've no idea for how long. These include: A Passage to India, The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, and others.

There are also some Dr. Vook TextVooks available for $0.00 today BUT BEWARE of any that are animated, with audio/video, as those features work ONLY on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod (Touch) -- they don't work on the Kindle or even the Kindle for PC app either.

However, the NON-animated TextVooks are extremely "brief" (maybe 15-20 pages only) and said to be good 1/2-hour refreshers for some. For $0, those may be worth a download for the Kindle. I have to believe the product descriptions are thoroughly tongue-in-cheek, by a cheeky professor who says outfront that these are written by graduate students. The "Did you know?" boxes can be fun, and the TextVooks are like more-filled-out outlines.

More from The Complete Works Collection

The blog entry just before this had to do with the Complete Works Collection offerings for $2.99.

What I hadn't noticed among the sets was the Harvard Classics set, which my family actually had when I was growing up. A lot of families did. They must have been sold by radio or door to door. This is quite a set though.

TIP 1 - for using Table of Contents to get to Chapters and back
I've read that some who jump to a chapter have felt that they must then page through until they can get the next chapter or another one they want.

The trick is that if you want to go back to the LAST place you were when you 'jumped' by clicking a link, you just press the "Back" button and you're back where you were before the 'jump.' This works for footnotes too, generaly.

For those who bought Shakespeare sets, some families might be interested in a not-free but much-praised Shakespeare GLOSSARY. Warning: it's $12 but many feel it's well worth it while trying to read that old English :-)

BATTERY LIFE
The Kindle is known for its long battery life, but certain functions use a lot more battery power than others, and one involves a process that's a part of putting new books on your Kindle (UK: K3).

Indexing - The Kindle allows you to do a Search on the entire device to find a key word or phrase that may occur in any book or magazine on the Kindle.

In order to do that, the Kindle "indexes" all new text material that is placed on it, which means it makes lists of key words found in each so that they can be found when you decide to do a Search, either within a book (commonly done) or of all the text on the Kindle (less common and it takes awhile to get search results but this can be very useful).

That indexing takes a LOT of battery life. New Kindles seem to use a lot more juice than people had expected, and that's because they are usually getting a lot of new books on them, with a lot of indexing to be done.

Sometimes, a book might not finish indexing for some reason, and that can cause slowdowns.
TIP 2 - If you think the Kindle is being a bit slow and you want to check to see if a book has not completely finished indexing but should have completed (a day later, say), do a SEARCH on a nonsense word, such as "xwzq" and the search will end without finding that (normally!). However, if a book has not completed indexing, you'll get a message to that effect.

It shouldn't take more than an hour or 4 to do indexing, but I've seen that people put hundreds of books on right away, or even a thousand, in a couple of cases. That will take quite a bit of time to index.

If a book never finishes indexing (after a day or two), it probably became corrupted during a downloading session due to weak reception with the WiFi or 3G. I'd delete it and re-download it.

TIP 3 - Plug in the charger when you're putting a LOT of books on it, because you can read while the device is charging. That way, the indexing won't use battery power, and you won't be surprised by the battery being unusually low after you've added a great many books. A few books, no big difference -- but as I say, some just download or transfer hundreds right away.

BATTERY ADVISORIES FROM KINDLE CUSTOMER SERVICE FORUM MESDAGES
I collected the ones that were made over a year ago, and they still hold.

Essentially, no battery power is used for a screensaver/screensleeper or for any page of content, until something changes in that page. Kindle Team recommends you just let the Kindle go to sleep rather than power it down. It takes more power to turn it on often, actually.

TIP 4 - When you're through reading for a while, CLOSE the book by pressing the "Home" button. This records the last-page you read so that you return to that page when you next open the book (or when you next open the book but you're using your smartphone which is sync'd with the Kindle - a nice feature). Closing the book by pressing the "Home" button also saves, to a special file, your highlighting and notes, so it's important to do that.

The type of battery in the Kindle shouldn't be brought down to Zero. Amazon recommends you not let it get below 25% or so. Leaving enough there prevents problems. There's no harm in topping off, because there's no "memory" effect as with the older type of batteries.

Read much more in the Battery Advisories from Amazon Kindle Customer Service.

That should do it!

FREE Kindle book - Student Travel Guide to Europe, 2011

Let's Go Europe 2011 - Normally $21.95, FREE currently

Let's Go Europe 2011: The Student Travel Guide (Kindle Ed.), is authored by Inc., Harvard Student Agencies whose Kindle books with more specific European locations cost between $9.66 - $9.99. They're providing this Kindle book for $0.00 right now, on what is likely a temporary 'price.'

Released in January 2011, it has 9 customer reviews with 4 stars out of 5. It's quite large (at 1,232 pages), as most Kindle books that are mainly text average less than 1 meg, and this one is about 3 megs and will take longer to load, which indicates it has more than the usual number of images. Product description:

' From Portugal to the Ukraine, from Norway down to Greece, Europe is a lot to take on. Luckily, the student adventurers behind Let’s Go Europe 2011 know that any traveler can handle it — with a little help. Whether whipping through London, Barcelona, and Prague in five days or spending a leisurely year abroad, travelers get all the info they need from Let's Go. Their wit and irreverence can brighten even the drabbest Renaissance museum — if travelers didn’t take their advice to skip it. From German beer halls to Roman ruins, Let's Go Europe 2011 is the ticket to adventure. '

CAVEAT The two Kindle book reviews I see (the rest are paperback reviews) say it's well worth downloading as a free book, but is written by Harvard students for other students and one reviewer thinks it's mainly for students with money to spare -- I used to go on the $5/day books :-) And the paperback version had less information on hostel locations than a couple of people wanted.

On the other hand, another reviewer says:

' However, to be honest, the listings for stuff like accommodations and nightlife are just UNBEATABLE, so I'm willing to deal with the flaws in order to get those recommendations.

I was trying to keep to a budget, so maybe I'm biased, but when I opened the Lonely Planet and Frommer's guides in the bookstore, their idea of "cheap" was like...65 euro a night. Even the "shoestring" book was borderline. That's just not the sort of budget I'm operating on.
Let's Go, on the other hand, listed hostels and cheap mom-and-pop places that got me through most of Western Europe on 20 euro or less a night. No complaints about those prices. '

Some think the writing is fun while others find it geared toward those who look for drinking places. The maps and even some icons are said to be very hard to read on the Kindle (I recommend viewing these in Landscape mode, which may handle better some bad layout problems mentioned.)

For $0.00, it's worth a look.

Kindle 3's (UK: Kindle 3's), K3 Special, $114 DX Graphite

Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources. Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

Free Kindle books, more info. Are new e-book royalties cheating authors?

A REMINDER RE ONGOING FREE AND LOW-COST KINDLE-BOOK LINKS

At the end of most recent posts here you'll see a section of links like the one just below, so you won't have to wait for a blog entry to see the latest free nonclassics at Amazon.

You can check for yourself at any time:

' Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources. Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or highest-rated ones
Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers. '

I recently added to the reference section a newer Amazon page of Kindle books that are tagged by Amazon customers as "99 cents kindle" to make these easier to find.

A problem there is that e-book prices are always subject to change, so the tags on some are no longer accurate. Amazon asks that customers use the tagging system to "vote down" those that are no longer related to the "99 cents kindle" tag.

Kindle books that are tagged only "99 cents" might be missed using the link above, depending on other tags involved. This link is to the shorter-tag results for Amazon products in general because the word "kindle" is not part of the tag and may interest those looking for low-cost products in general.

The ongoing Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources includes links to non-classic/contemporary ebooks that are within the range of $1 to $2 as well as free.

More important to many will be the section titled:
FREE CLASSICS AND PUBLIC DOMAIN BOOKS AVAILABLE ELSEWHERE,
as many, if not most, gadget columnists are unaware that Kindle owners can download e-books from other sources.

KindleClassics
New to me is a guide to some of the better editions of the classics blog that will be useful for many who may not know where to start with all that's available or who have been frustrated by the bad formatting too often seen in public-domain e-books. Marilyn Sue recommends (for both US and UK readers) classics she's enjoyed and also warns of the downsides of some releases. The blog header explains "Because some conversions are sloppily done, a free download can be a waste of time." The blog is ranked #1 on the Amazon UK Literature Blogs list & is in the Top Ten listing of Amazon US Literature Blogs.

NEWS: "How E-book Royalties are Cheating Authors"
andyrossagency writes that the Authors Guild posted an analysis of the dynamics of competition in the e-book market and "came down very hard on Amazon" but that they posted another analysis, this one showing how "the prevailing formula for author royalties on e-books unfairly diminishes authors’ income even as publishers earn more for each e-book sold."

Many of us cautioned authors about this when their publishers sent them to the Kindle forums to explain how customers, publishers, and authors would be much better served under Apple's Agency model. We explained in detail how the traditional reseller model used by the online bookstores was better for authors.

The Big5 execs explained in interviews that the pricing of e-books was too low and "devalued" their books (their hardcover or paperback books). They were also worried about the power that Amazon could have over publishers, explaining to us that Amazon, once they owned the market, would raise prices on us all.

Their solution to that was to raise prices now. :-)

The reality is that publishers were primarily concerned about Amazon's power over publishers, of course, and that's understandable. What's not is their decision-making on e-book pricing and their open disinterest in what today's book customers want.

At the end of the blog article, andyrossagency gives a breakdown on the numbers, as they read them, from the Authors Guild analysis (emphases mine) :

' Here’s the math:

“The Help” has an e-book list price of $13 and is sold under the agency model. Publisher grosses 70% of retail price, or $9.10. Author’s royalty is 25% of publisher receipts, or $2.28. Publisher nets $6.32. ($9.10 minus $2.28 royalties and $0.50 encryption fee.)

“Hell’s Corner” is also sold under the agency model at a retail list price of $15 list price. Publisher grosses 70% of retail price, $10.50. Author’s royalty is 25% of publisher receipts, or $2.63. Publisher nets $7.37. ($10.50 minus $2.63 royalties and $0.50 encryption fee.)

“Unbroken” is sold by Random House under the reseller model at a retail list price of $27. Publisher grosses $13.50 on the sale. Author’s royalty, at 25%, is $3.38. Random House nets $9.62. ($13.50 minus $3.38 royalties and $0.50 encryption fee.) '

However, other analyses have shown that because Amazon took a loss on $10 bestsellers (making this up elsewhere) while guaranteeing publishers 50% of the list price set by the publishers -- under the traditional reseller model -- both publisher and author would tend to make less under the Agency model.

The brouhaha has actually been over control rather than current profit-taking. One publisher focus was to try to slow e-book sales because they hurt hardcover sales, and if customers were willing to buy e-books at those higher prices, all the better.

Kindle 3's (UK: Kindle 3's), DX Graphite

For New and Olde Kindlers Wanting to Do More with their Kindles

CREATIVE USES OF THE KINDLE
Well, pleasurable reading is good enough for most, but there is a lot more that can be done with the Kindle, as shown in the short list just below.
(I recommend bookmarking this for quick access later.)

1. an old, continuing favorite forum thread about the more unique uses of the Kindle's capabilities thought up by members of the Amazon Kindle Community, and I saw another idea added today.

2. a newer forum thread of favorite tips for new Kindle owners from Kindle oldtimers.

NOTE: If your web browser (especially Firefox) drops you onto the Amazon forum list of topics instead of bringing you to the forum thread, click on Refresh or Reload to get the message thread itself -- or click on the link again. I don't know why a 'retry' is often needed, but it is.

3. The Kindle Chronicles
This is a very informative, fun resource for Kindlers at http://thekindlechronicles.com, a weekly podcast hosted by Len Edgerly who, each Friday night, brings us a roundup of the latest news (with links), excellent tech tips, an interview with someone from the Kindle world at large and some from just outside it who are of course in the Kindle net then :-) Len also presents video reviews as well. At the site are summaries of what is included in the latest podcast report. Links are given there for items mentioned in the podcast.

4. the new Kindle book by Stephen Windwalker, who has been explaining what can be done on Kindles since the Kindle 1, and this just-released book that includes info for the Latest Generation Kindles is only $0.99, which is more than a bargain.

STARTING GUIDE - BY AMAZON KINDLE SUPPORT TEAM - TOP10 FAQs
To START, though, Amazon has made a new 'Announcement' in the forums which introduces Kindlers to Kindle Top Ten FAQ's, and oldtimers add to the thread, explaining some of it from their experience and helping some there who have specific problems starting out.

Here is a regular WEB version of Kindle Team's TOP10 FAQs with active links (bracketed comments are mine).

I'll keep a link to this post in the right-hand reference column of the web blog).

' Last edited by the author on Dec. 25, 2010 10:35 AM PST

Amazon Kindle Customer Service says:
(AMAZON OFFICIAL)

Did you recently receive Kindle as a gift? Welcome to our growing family of Kindle users! To help you quickly get started with your new Kindle, we've created a list of some of the most common questions new users have:

1. How can I start reading on my new Kindle?

Visit our Getting Started page to see the simple steps (including videos) to start reading on your new Kindle right now:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_200580340_gettoknow?nodeId=200580340

2. How do I set up the Wi-Fi connection on my Kindle (Latest Generation)?

Kindle (Latest Generation) automatically detects nearby Wi-Fi networks and hotspots that broadcast their network name. You can watch a video about how to connect to a Wi-Fi network here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200588130#connect

For more information on how to connect to a Wi-Fi network see our guide here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200505540&#setupwifi

[Note that you can click to get larger videos, if wanted, at the video pages.]

3. How do I apply and use a gift card to purchase Kindle titles?

To use an Amazon.com Gift Card for purchases from the Kindle Store, redeem the gift card in Your Account (http://www.amazon.com/your-account). Any gift card balance available on your account will be applied to purchases from the Kindle Store, except for content with recurring subscription charges.

To successfully complete your purchase, you'll need to establish your home country or region and set a valid 1-Click billing address. You can set your billing address at the link below:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/css/account/address/view.html.

[The billing-address page sometimes takes a while to load.]

4. How do I register/deregister my Kindle?

From Amazon.com, you can register or deregister via the Manage Your Kindle page

(http://www.amazon.com/myk).

From your Kindle, select Home > Menu > Settings > Register or Deregister.

5. How do I start shopping in the Kindle Store?

You can shop in the Kindle Store directly from Kindle or from Amazon.com. Shopping the Kindle Store on your Kindle is a convenient way to find and buy Kindle books, newspapers, magazines, and if you are a U.S. customer, Kindle active content and blogs for your Kindle. If you are in your wireless coverage area, your purchases from the Kindle Store are delivered to your Kindle, typically in less than 60 seconds.

[KINDLE SHORTCUT: If on the Kindle, press Alt-Home keys at the same time.]

6. How do I give a Kindle book as a gift or redeem a Kindle book that I received as a gift?

To gift a Kindle book, click the Give as a Gift button located under the Buy button on Kindle Store product detail pages, and follow the prompts to complete your order.

You can find more information about Kindle book gifts here:

http://www.amazon.com/help/kindlegift

7. Are there any free books available for Kindle?

The Kindle Store contains the largest selection of the books people want to read. This includes the most popular classics for free with wireless delivery in under 60 seconds to your Kindle, computer, or other mobile device.

Learn more: Free eBook Collections (http://www.amazon.com/b?node=2245146011)

[Also see this blog's Free Kindle Books for more.]

8. Can I read Kindle books if I don't have my Kindle with me?

You can read anywhere with our free reading apps, no Kindle required. Whispersync technology saves and synchronizes your last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights across your devices.

To download: (http://www.amazon.com/kindleapps)

9. I have the Kindle (Wi-Fi), but I don't have a Wi-Fi network at home. Can I still buy and download books from home?

If you don't have a Wi-Fi network set up in your home, you have the following options for receiving Kindle content:

I. If your Kindle was recently ordered, you may return the Kindle (Wi-Fi) and purchase the Kindle 3G (Free 3G + Wi-Fi). The added convenience of 3G enables you to download books anytime, anywhere, while on the go-without having to find a Wi-Fi hotspot connection.

The full Return Policy is posted on the Kindle Support pages
(http://www.amazon.com/kindlereturnpolicy).
You can process your return and print a mailing label by visiting our
Online Returns Center (http://www.amazon.com/returns).

II. Even without a home Wi-Fi network, you can still buy content from the Kindle Store and access your Kindle items Archived on Amazon.com through your computer and transfer them via USB to your Kindle. Information about transferring content to your Kindle with USB is available on our Kindle Support pages here:

http://www.amazon.com/kindletransfer

III. You can purchase a home Wi-Fi router to establish a Wi-Fi network in your home with which the Kindle can connect.

10. I have a problem with my Kindle, what should I do?

If you're experiencing software or hardware issues with your Kindle, please reach us by phone for personalized support. You can reach us by phone directly and toll free from many countries by clicking the Contact Us option in the right-hand column of our Kindle Support pages at:

http://www.amazon.com/kindlesupport

Contacting us through the website allows you to verify security before a call is placed and ensures we have your account information ready when we call you. If your country isn't listed or you're unable to take advantage of the Contact Us feature, you can call us directly at 1-866-321-8851 or 1-206-266-0927 if you're calling from outside the U.S.

Still have questions?

Additional information, including answers to frequently asked questions, how to use Kindle, and the Kindle User's Guide can be accessed from our Kindle Support pages here:

http://www.amazon.com/kindlesupport

Happy Reading! '

The "Do More" idea is represented by an overview, at the top, of what Kindle owners have enjoyed doing beyond reading a book and there'll be more detail in the new year.

Be sure to check the reference-section in the right-hand column of the website version of this blog, for guides to making Collections, using the Send Passage to Facebook and Twitter features, and many other tips.

In the coming weeks, I'll be updating those and streamlining them a bit in newly modified blog articles that can also be read on the Kindle edition of the blog for those with not enough time to get here regularly.

NOTE: At the end of each more-recent blog entry, you'll see ready-made links to getting the very latest temporarily-free Kindle books available whenever you're curious about what has been offered since you last checked, sorted by publication date, most recently posted, best-selling, etc. These are links to both the Amazon-US and Amazon-UK sites. Also there are links to information on all free books available for your Kindle.

Kindle 3's (UK: Kindle 3's), DX Graphite

Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources. Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or highest-rated ones
Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

Tips: PDF Scissors tool - and reminder re non-Amazon free books - Update

I couldn't be here the last day and a half, and I hope any tips from this blog's comment areas and from my visits around the Kindle world will help. I'll be doing more of these with one or two tips at a time so people can focus on those and have time to work with them, rather than tossing a bunch of them in one blog article which might be put aside until there's time and then forgotten.

TIP: PDF SCISSORS
This is a new free tool to help enlarge the essential portion of a PDF when the words are too small to read and to divide the pages to ease navigation when viewing the results in Landscape mode.

PDFs with content too small to read
I JUST saw a comment at the a Teleread.Com comment area, offering a new free tool (on a good site) to help with PDFs that are comprised mostly of image pages and therefore cannot be converted to normal Kindle text format since there are no text fonts to enlarge while keeping within the screen frame.

This would be for the most adventurous among you as it is new and he feels people may find bugs, but he wrote it so he could get rid of margins in his PDFs to see the words on the pages better as they'd be larger, whether using a text-based or image-based page (images of a book's pages). There are other tools that do this kind of thing, but using them requires comfort with Perl, Python or other scripts and files.

Remember that mostly-text PDFs can be converted by Amazon (or by yourself using a free tool I've written about earlier) to text using standard size fonts which are of course larger and re-flowing the text lines to fit the a small e-reader screen.

Image-based PDF pages
With pages that are actually pictures of pages, however, rather than actual text, that's not possible with the type of PDFs which are merely images of a physical book's pages.

Images enlarged would just be larger than the screen and while we have zoom-in tools on the Kindle (UK: K3), those are always awkward to use even on a computer with a large monitor but rewarding when you just need to look at an occasional table, figure, or diagram with tiny words inside them. Using Zoom-in and scrolling for each page is a no-go.

The basic thought is that if the words of an image'd page are too small to read, we can put the Kindle into Landscape mode with the Aa key, which might help enlarge the image to fill the wider space across while keeping everything visible, requiring no scrolling to read it. But until very recently, what we got instead was usually the same sized image with much wider margins on each side.

The latest Amazon software for the Kindle 2, DX's and Kindle 3 (July 2010) included enhancements that can crop margins when viewing in Landscape mode so that the image or text can expand to fill the wide-screen mode. That can make quite a difference.

However, when the images have words that are really tiny, sometimes they're just not helped by rotating the page to Landscape mode unless there are margins we can crop, AND some images are of pages which themselves have humongous margins and a bit of text in the middle.

With image-based pages there's no way to have something meant to be on 8-1/2" x 11" paper be highly readable on a 6" screen. If you just enlarge it in vertical/Portrait mode, the lines go off the page.

BUT, if there are wide margins, then if the margins ARE cropped, the image can enlarge to fill that new added space and the resolution will usually still be good because they were usually made for larger physical pages.

It'd be nice if we could do this for Portrait mode too the way Amazon does this for Landscape mode. The free utility utility offered may help with that although the video tutorial shows a person doing this for Landscape mode.

PDFS USING MULTIPLE COLUMNS
You may also find yourself with a PDF with multiple columns that continue vertically for so long that you have to press Next Page to get the rest of the first column and then press Previous Page to go back to see the top of the 2nd column, etc. Very awkward and confusing too.

How PDF Scissors might help
So, the new tool offers some help if it works well. PDF Scissors by Gagan Mazed at SourceForge.net offers the following, in the author's words:

' What:

In short, It's a tool to crop pdfs.
Objective to create this, was to read pdf files (specially the scanned ones) easily in ebook readers, like kindle.
And by the way, it's a free tool! '

That's followed by a short, fast videoclip showing how it's done. I used the Pause button to see the video'd procedure better, after clicking on it to take me to the larger version at YouTube since, ironically, it's too small on the PDF Scissors page to see what's happening.

The idea seems to be to crop out HALF of any given page (in Portrait mode), enlarge the width of the page-image by omitting or drastically minimizing the margins and then having the software batch all of these half pages together based on your cropping, ultimately putting each half-page onto a Landscape mode page, which will be especially helpful for multi-column pages as you won't have to scroll down and then back up with the awkward Next/Previous page button procedure.

I don't have time to try it myself tonight, but be sure to keep a copy of your PDF of course and try the utility on another copy. Mazed goes on to say:

' How
Create crop areas to drop the white margins or crop columns.
Show all pages together in a stack.
Pages will be see-through with transparency.
This will help you a lot to decide how much to crop .
Create crop areas easily
Draw, resize, move crop areas
Copy / paste crop areas using usual Ctrl +C / Ctrl + V
Why:

I myself faced a lot of difficulties to read pdf in kindle (and mobile phones / internet tablets), specially the image based pdfs (scanned image pdfs). Got tired of zooming and scrolling while reading a nice book. So created this to help me 'dive into the reading'. I hope it helps you too.
'

This will be more work than many will care to put in, but if you have a PDF that's very important for you to read on an e-reader, it could be worth it. And some will have assistants who can do the cropping for them.
I think, though, that if Amazon ever lowers the price on its 9.7" Kindle DX Graphite (which is a beautiful reader), there'd be a run on them by people just needing a good-sized, extremely easy to read e-Ink based PDF reader. See reactions by some hard-nosed Mobileread forum members who had long felt the Sony PRS-505 text contrast was the one to beat. It's a very entertaining read.

UPDATE - See the FOLLOW-UP info from author PDF Scissors author Gagan Mazed and feedback from those who have tried the new tool so far.

TIP: REMINDER RE HOW TO FIND NON-AMAZON FREE BOOKS
This was written today in answer to someone who asked a question in the Comments area and is mildly modified for the blog.

Q: I am in the UK and and trying to find all the free books everyone is talking about. So far I only know how to get books directly from Amazon. Are there other Kindle-friendly sites. A friend told me I have to download free stuff from my computer and then use my wires to switch it from my computer to my kindle. Is this correct?
Thanks for your help.

A: Anonymous in the UK,
At the bottom of every post for the last few months I include a link to free book sources and and how to find them everywhere.
The shortcut for that is http://bit.ly/kfreelow3 .

You'll see a lot of non-Amazon sites linked there (as well as the usual Amazon ones).
(BUT I haven't added the Amazon UK free book links there yet though they are seen at the bottom of each recent blog post).

Remember that when you get a free book from Amazon, it can be sync'd with your other Kindle-compatible devices because Amazon has the book on its servers.

There are the usual good sources, such as feedbooks.com, mnybks.net, etc., but you can read about them at that free-books source/guide page.

Also see (mentioned on that linked page):
Project Gutenberg books downloadable from Project Gutenberg direct to your Kindle (no charge) using 'the Magic Catalog':
http://bit.ly/kgutenb

and
How to convert any of 1 million or so free Google books to Kindle-readable books:
http://bit.ly/milkbooks

and
The Internet Archive's 2 million+ free texts, most of them made readable on Kindle - see the article here at
http://bit.ly/kwarchiveorg

That should get you started. There is also a link on that http://bit.ly/kfreelow3 page to the Amazon Kindle Community message thread in which other Kindle users give you information on how to get Kindle-readable books from other sites.

Kindle 3's (UK: Kindle 3's), DX Graphite

Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources. Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or highest-rated ones
Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

Free Kindle Books - an update. Amazon-UK free non-classics added also

This blog tends to focus on the Kindle (UK: K3) and its world of auxiliary apps, updates, and competitor devices. Unlike most Kindle blogs, it has a technology-oriented view.

Because of that, rather than regale you with lists of linked free Kindle books that become available each day, I've added, into the footers of each blog article, the links where you can see at any moment the new, temporarily-free Non-classics that are available that day, or that hour.

I know that many people use these links regularly, but I also imagine that some ignore footers, so I am doing a reminder here. This way I can focus on news and/or tips each day, with an average of 5 articles a week. I spend a lot more time researching than writing, as that involves reading most Kindle news articles published (often adding information in the comment-areas) and visiting several forums each day, where I also contribute in exchange for what I learn from those.

As I've mentioned, if you're interested in general e-reader-world news that I'm monitoring as well, I use Twitter to send or retweet alerts on some of those and even, at times, more general odd news such as health-related information, and it's probably easiest to use Tweetree to see those.

Today I'm adding links, for the temporarily-free Amazon-UK books, to the article footers.

Unfortunately, for those of us in the U.S., the U.K. Kindlestore products are available only to UK customers.

As with the U.S. ones, use them at any time to see the latest. These will be by bestselling, publication date, and average rating.

This is the line that will be added to the footer for temporarily-free Non-classics:
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestselling, or highest-rated ones

The continuing Free Kindle Books page that explains the many sources available (and which I'll organize better someday) will be updated this coming week to include the UK links also.

I generally don't list the books because (for me) it can look almost like an endorsement, so I prefer to just give people the source links.

I hope those in the UK will also find these helpful, and the rest of us can watch the differences in offerings and pricing, although, as mentioned in an earlier article here, Amazon is resisting the Big5 movement to use the Agency model in the UK also, with fixed-prices of their choice, to be the same at all online UK e-book stores. That article links to the UK forum discussion of this and there are currently 452 notes of reaction, pro and con on the situation.

Kindle 3's (UK: Kindle 3's), DX Graphite

Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources. Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or highest-rated ones
Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

Internet Archive: treasure trove of free books, articles + movies, concerts, recordings - Update

On January 24, I included most of the info just below about the quite incredible, free Internet Archives' text area.

Internet Archive Text area - over 2 million free books and documents - Kindle formats included -- via ".mobi" or ".prc" files or even specifically labeled "Kindle."

Remember that the Kindle models (UK: K3) also directly read .txt and PDF files although .prc or .mobi ones may be more readable in font size than PDF ones and many of the PDF versions will be much larger files usually - with images of pages that are accurate renderings of original pages though they then can't be searched as text or annotated unless the pages were put through OCR or optical-character-recognition processing rather than just left as images.

There are also areas of files with somewhat less obvious value, but the main sub-collections include American Libraries, Canadian Libraries, Universal Libraries (Carnegie Mellon, governments of India, China, Egypt), Project Gutenberg (another access point) -- and there are recent contributions from The Library of Congress, UCLA Scanning Center's special collections, etc.).

Additional sub-collections of books, articles, and other texts as well as a listing of All Collections (usually organized by topic) are accessible via this linked page, most recently added first.

I added this resource in January to the ongoing free and low-cost books posting. Note that there is also free live music and audio linked on the home page.

The Washington Post did a story about the Internet Archive, which is based in San Francisco. Rob Pegoraro took what he called a 'field trip' to the organization's new headquarters, which was once a Christian Science church, in San Francisco. He points out that while the site has long been known for its "WayBack Machine" that displays the initial days and ongoing development of websites, it's far more than that fun feature.

The Archive founder, Brewster Kahle, gave him a good tour of the place and and the work they do there. They recently moved from the Presidio, near the Marina, to a building in the Richmond neighborhood that looks remarkably like the logo they developed 16 years before (well, they did get to choose the building) and dates back to 1923, "the last year of the public domain"; most works created since then remain under copyright.

The photo at the right, just above, was taken by the richmondsfblog, which notes

' [The Internet Archive] is a non-profit that was founded in 1996 for the purpose of creating an Internet library. Their goal is to offer permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.
...
The Internet Archive is also well known for its Open Library project, which seeks to create “one web page for every book ever published”. In other words, free and easy access to all published books online.'

They'll be hosting the "Books in Browsers" Conference there, October 21-22, co-sponsored by O'Reilly Media, with a demo and gathering at the SF headquarters on Oct. 21 from 6:30 - ~9:00 pm, an evening event that will be open to the public (unlike the conference itself).

As you'll see in the photos by ZYZZYVA, the main hall still looks like a church, which can indicate a reverence for the idea of a universal library, but they do plan to make it more of a library setting eventually. Staff offices are on the lower level. Other photos on that page are of a book-scanning device, the unobscured building, the main hall, and a room for gatherings. Pegoraro describes the offices:

' Next door, the old Christian Science reading room has been turned into a scanning center, as part of the archive's mission to preserve print as well as pixels. On each side, staffers were operating specialized scanners -- operated by pedals, like old sewing machines -- that photograph two pages of a book at a time. In the center, other employees were running computer-driven microfilm scanners. "That looks like the 1900 census," Kahle said as he peered over one staffer's shoulder at a screenful of handwritten documents.

Poring over page after page in a room made hot by that accumulation of computing machinery seemed like it could get a tad repetitive. I asked Kahle if there was a risk of burnout. Yes, he said, pointing to himself as an example of the wrong sort of person for that work: "I would get fired!" But some employees, he said, have been there three years.

One of the archive's newer projects is a site called Open Library, which both catalogues books and provides access to electronic copies of them. Anyone can download public-domain works, while visually impaired users can access text-to-speech versions of works through a program set up by the Library of Congress. The archive is also working to set up a system for direct downloads of e-book loans. '

It turns out that that the founder, Kahle, doesn't own an e-book reader, which reminded me of Barnes and Noble's head, Len Riggio, who says he doesn't use the bookstore's Nook. However, I like that Kahle objects, Begoraro said, "to the way some libraries have begun to rely on Google's collections and 'de-accessioning' paper copies -- that is, trashing them"... and would "rather see libraries keep their original source material while also using the Internet to make that content available to more people. 'Let's not lose it all,' he said."

Last year, about 40 percent of the organization's income was contributed and 60 percent came from indexing and scanning services it provides to other libraries.

Re Kahle's preferred file formats for long-term storage, Kahle said that the archive uses FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Compression) for music, had adopted H.264 for video storage after trying five other formats, used JPEG for photos and employed a related format, JPEG 2000, for text-heavy images. But he also said that for personal storage, PDF or nearly universally supported commercial formats -- even Microsoft Office -- would be fine, too.

UPDATE - Commenter Stbalbach draws to our attention the fact that the Kindle does not support jpeg-2000 format. Kahle does say that they use JPEG for photos and the related JPEG 2000 "for text-heavy images." Stbalbach advises: "To read PDF's from Internet Archive, you need to download the .djvu version and convert it to PDF. Instructions can be found here:
http://www.archive.org/post/277920/pdfs-on-amazon-kindle.

There are very forthright and interesting responses by Kahle to questions in the Comments area, but, as this is the Internet, rudeness comes pretty quickly. Comments were closed after a couple of days. Here are some replies by Kahle:

' sniz15 asks: lossy formats for images. Any chance they mentioned why?

We used to store uncompressed TIFF (50MB/image) and then RAW (17MB/image), but when you are scanning 1000 books/day it gets big, and also, we (folks from Harvard, Library of Congress, UC and Internet Archive) did studies to find out what kind of degradation we get if we use jpeg-2000 at about 1MB per image and we found very very little. So for mass scanning we are using jpeg-2000. A big problem is that it is not supported in browsers.

Try zooming in on one of our books-- I hope you will find it pretty good: http://www.archive.org/stream/lifeofabrahamli2463tarb#page/n7/mode/2up

+++
dltj asks: what about the PDF/A?

Yes, PDF/A is better for long term access. For our book scanning we were disappointed that it did not support an image layer as jpeg-2000 (or at least not originally) and we found that to be a dramatic enough improvement in quality per megabyte over a jpeg layer for books that we chose normal PDF. We also don't think of this as the preservation format for these books.

What most end-users are doing is scanning documents with their scanner or taking office documents and writing them to disk. For these purposes, PDF, we have found, works quite well. PDF in this case is a container format that keeps metadata, images, and text together. sometimes even has page numbers, chapter starts etc.

When users upload these to the Internet Archive for long term preservation, we use open source tools to process these files and adobe has not gone after those developers, so we are happy with the format.

+++
Hemisphire asks: Will older music sets in SHN be transferred to FLAC?

We are not migrating from user uploads from SHN to FLAC yet. They are pretty big, and SHN is still commonly supported. If people are finding this a problem, please let us know on the archive.org forums.

Posted by: brewster2 | May 19 '

By the way, at the RichmondSFBlog, they added that:
"One of the more enjoyable archives on the site is old time radio programs. Click below to check out an episode of 1953′s The Six Shooter, which brought James Stewart to the NBC microphone for a series of folksy Western adventures. This episode is called “The Coward”."
Go to their site, at the bottom to play that if intrigued.

Kindle 3's (UK: Kindle 3's), DX Graphite

Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources. Top 100 free bestsellers.
Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

Free books and an mp3 for free download

Stole My Heart
While noting the new Kindle in the Park tv ad the other day and the mp3 that was available for that ("Fly me away"),
I ran across the mp3 ("Stole My Heart") for the second commercial (image at left, with Ryan Curry), which Amazon is offering for free (below).

I like this song (also by Marcus Ashley and Annie Little) a lot better than the Fly me away track, which is heard again in the

latest ad.
.

Mobipocket Guide
After reminding readers about the Project Gutenberg Magic Catalog for use on the Kindle (UK: K3) the other day, I realized that I haven't mentioned MobileRead's Mobipocket Guide yet, though I've pointed to the Mobileread Forum site that offers and displays this guide online (updated daily).

Mobileread's download listing is one of the free-book sites linked to at the Free Books Reminder Page. Online, it shows a Genre column, file format ("PRC" for Kindles), date, and Author/E-Book, and you can click on a column to sort by that category.

The Mobipocket Guide that is downloadable for the Kindle doesn't show genres and the only sorting displayed is the alphabetical one. You should press Menu button, select GoTo (which is the default at the Home screen's Menu), and choose Table of Contents, which gives you a link to almost each character of the alphabet.

As with the Project Gutenberg's Magic Catalog, you can search the Mobipocket "book" for an author's name or a book title. Kindle book searches always require a full word. "Shakesp" won't find "Shakespeare" but since "Shakespear" is a whole word in the Project Gutenberg's catalog, you will find "Shakespear" there. It was a variant used in the title of Nicholas Rowe's Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear.

The Mobipocket Guide explains:

'We have thousands of different books available for download, with new books added every day. What sets these books apart is the fact that they've all been hand-formatted by volunteers to take full advantage of the device for which they've been created; many are fully illustrated, have tables of contents, and other features that will make you want to come back to them time and time again.
. . .
Clicking on the link for any book will take you to a page containing a brief description of that book (written by the person who edited and uploaded it) and a download URL ...you can simply click the link to add the book to your [Kindle] library. '

Kindle 3's (UK: Kindle 3's), DX Graphite

TIP: Gutenberg E-Books direct to Kindle - repeat + Update

UPDATE2 - 9/18/10 - Original posting was April 2, 2009
In addition to the convenient Magic Catalog for Project Gutenberg, which is available for use on the Kindle for searches, browsing, and direct downloading of its free books to the Kindle (see below), Project Gutenberg recently made a MOBILE-device-oriented version of its website, which will of course work more quickly than the main website, via wireless conection with all Kindles. The 'go to' address is http://m.gutenberg.org - but with Kindles it's better not to enter the "http://" part.

UPDATE3 - 9/20/10 for Kindle 3 users (Kindle 2 users experience no problem in this case):
In the comments area, Bart reports that the mobile-device-oriented URL m.gutenberg.org does not recognize input in the search field from a Kindle 3. It does from a Kindle 2 or DX.

(SIDEnote: I have seen similar oddities with the m.gmail.com and gmail.com sites, which is why I recommended instead (shortcut entries) bit.ly/g_mail or, better yet, NOT using the sym key, either of the following: bit.ly/kindle3gmail or, shorter, bit.ly/k3xgmail when using the Kindle 3, until Kindle-3 programmers fix this.

Any of these bring you to a gmail that requires less slow-cursoring around and allows input. A drawback is that if you reply to a gmail note you have to down-arrow to the end, after writing it, to get out of the reply box to Send the reply.
While a 'Next Page' press instead does allow you to get down to the end quickly, it doesn't allow an escape from that reply box, unfortunately. End of SIDEnote)

However, on the K3, I can successfully go to the main site - gutenberg.org - and search & download a "Kindle" format file, but the webpage print is smaller because that fits the regular screen contents into the space of the 6" Kindle screen. While you can use Archive Mode to view the lists, I would not as it takes too long to gather and display these and it can SEEM to freeze the K3 although it's just taking its time. Don't choose it for lists...

The Project Gutenberg Magic Catalog for the Kindle
While updating this entry for that news, I decided that since the last update was 5 months ago, the many who are new to Kindle in the last 2 months (two customer reps have been quoted as saying "millions" but who knows?) probably don't know about this excellent feature at all. In my wanderings through online columns about the Kindle, I've found that about 95% of those never mention that the 30,000 free books from Project Gutenberg are instantly available to the Kindle at no added cost for direct download to the device. Instead, most tend to promulgate the fable that you can get books only from Amazon.
So, this is for new visitors and those who subscribe to the Kindle blog edition of this site in order to have the last 25 blog articles at any time, to be read offline when it's convenient (99 cents/mo. + free trial).

The 30,000 free Project Gutenberg books are laid out well and proof-read.
This tip allows you to directly download a Project Gutenberg book to the Kindle, although that will work only where 3G whispernet web-browsing is enabled already or via WiFi.

International Kindle users who live outside the U.S. and who do not have 3G web-browsing enabled in their countries (a gray area right now) and who don't have WiFi capability can download these free books to their computers instead (choosing "Kindle" or "mobi" or "prc" format) and then move them to their Kindles with the USB cable that is part of the Kindle power cord.

Originally posted April 2, 2009
TIP OF THE DAY: James Adcock tells us how to download chosen Project Gutenbook books direct to our Kindles. First, you need to get the catalog on to your Kindle, and you can download it by webbing via your Kindle to http://www.freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html
(mucho typing on that Kindle keyboard, however).
On the Kindle, use this shortcut instead: http://bit.ly/gutmagic

After downloading "The Magic Catalog of the Project Gutenberg E-Books (MOBI Edition) to your Kindle (or transferring it from your computer to the Kindle if you don't want to type in the long URL on the Kindle), follow James's instructions which are:

"Use your Kindle's Search Feature to find your favorite Author and/or Title. Click to go to that page. Click again on the Author: Title listing and your chosen E-Book will automagically download directly from the Project Gutenberg website to your Kindle..."

Thanks, James!

Added tip from James - How to use mobipocket.com's mobigen.exe, to easily convert EPUB books (at the DOS prompt) to MOBI versions. Downside, any illustrations in a book are not included at this point.

ADDED UPDATE, along with Sept. 18, 2010 update
Also, the 1 million free Google books in ePub: How to get one converted to Kindle
Not only can you convert any of these to a Kindle book via a free tool (with most illustrations intact), there is also a publishing website that offers to do conversions of free-Google-books for you upon request and will give you a link to the completed Kindle-ready copy, on their website, for you and any other interested parties, to download. See the details here

Kindle 3's (UK: Kindle 3's), DX Graphite

Time out, post-flooding note

Missed a day of blogging yesterday due to a burst valve cover and flooding, and now for 4 days will have 7 of the machines at the left going full tilt 24 hours a day, to 'dehumidify' (meaning it acts as a furnace and is very hot, with each one having loud fans that sound together like 3 vacuum cleaners going full tilt). The 2nd one is a partial pic, saving you the rest of the bathroom.

It was like a geyser. But the worst is over. Carpeteting was lifted and removed.

Will resume later on today. Thanks for your understanding, since I know people want new info each day.

In the meantime, there are always book finds at the destinations below:
Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources. Top 100 free bestsellers.

Free Kindle books to go off Bestsellers list and onto own bestseller list

Amazon's been busy this weekend getting more changes in place, and a lot has happened in the one day I was not able to be here. I'll keep them separate.

First, the Kindle books change that affects all of us, Free Kindle Books to go on own list, which I think was inevitable considering complaints that something offered for 'free' cannot be normally be said to be 'sold' and certainly not convincingly 'best'-selling.

Add that the Big5-Agency-model books priced higher than $9.99 almost surely are not selling as well as the Big5 had hoped and there will be pressure to highlight them, and then there's the need for Amazon to make book profits despite their battles with the Big5 to avoid the higher pricing.

So, this is a compromise that probably can work fairly well, because Amazon customers in the habit of looking for free non-classics (using my shortcut currently to get at the meat of these) would still be able to find those when they're on a list of their own.

Publishers Weekly, quoted by L.A. Times, writes:

'...Amazon’s practice of including free downloads in its list of most popular Kindle titles. It will soon no longer be an issue. A representative at the e-tailer has confirmed that the company will be splitting its Kindle bestseller list, creating one list for paid books and another for free titles. The date for the switch is vague—the rep would only say it will happen in “a few weeks” '

I found it interesting that HarperCollins was quoted as thinking this MIGHT make free promos less effective while they have been the one of the Big5 most using the free-promo feature.

I think that both lists will be used by customers and that the bestseller listing of free books will make it that much easier to find them for those who are especially interested in those.

In fact, it could also mean that some people will now never even see the buyable Bestsellers because of this. Sometimes it's good to be careful what you (Big5) wish for.

Image credit: switched.com

See the ongoing Guide to finding Free or Low-Cost Kindle books and Sources
Check often: Latest temporarily free non-classics or late-listed temporarily free nonclassics.

Free Kindle books (non-classics). See them easily anytime. UPDATE2

UPDATED April 12, 2010 - Original posting April 4, at 10:42 PM
I added a 2nd method of seeing latest free non-classics (latest free contemporary) but also needed to add that some international Kindle users in Europe, Canada and some other countries are in high wireless-cost areas, so Amazon charges about $2.30 for the otherwise free book, sorry to say. Amazon hopes to be able to change this someday with low-cost local arrangements.

If you want to always be able to see the latest currently free non-classics Kindle books without waiting for someone to tell you which are free today, do bookmark these two pages:
(1) the Latest Free Nonclassics page (shortcut http://bit.ly/latestfreenonclassics)) and
(2) the Late-Listed Free Nonclassics page (shortcut http://bit.ly/latelistedfreenonclassics), to see the 55 to 65 non-classics or non-public domain books that are free at any particular time (very often only briefly)

This set, in two views, is the main source for free-book information used for blogs though many will prefer newest ones pointed out daily. However, you can catch them even earlier this way if you use the link before the new books are reported. The free non-classics usually last a few days, some less, and some stay on for quite some time.

While I omit the hundreds of 'excerpts' for the ongoing Amazon contest, be aware that a very few of the new free non-classics displayed on these pages are promoting a "Chapter" or two. They are clearly marked but can still be missed.

Although the first group is sorted by 'publication date,' Amazon's publishers will sometimes offer for free -- suddenly and temporarily -- books that were published even a year to 3 years ago. So latest free ones can be in the middle.
Often they're so new that they're listed as least-selling of course, so I've added a link for that method also. Use these links whenever you want to, and you'll see quickly which ones are new though.

ALTERNATE VIEWS OF THE SET
While at the page, you can choose at top right to see them sorted by Bestselling and Average Customer Rating as well. I've used only one image for this article, as you will quickly see which currently free e-books might be of interest depending on genre and product descriptions there.

The new free books are dominated by the Christian Fiction genre, and some will find those inspiring while others are looking for more general-interest books or for other genres.

FREE BOOK HIGHLIGHTED IN IMAGE ABOVE
The book whose image you see for this blog article is Bite Me, by Parker Blue who is offering the book free as a promo for his more recent book. Bite Me has 9 customer reviews averaging 4-1/2 stars. The paperback is listed at $12.78 and the Audible audio version at $13.10.

The book is described as "An edgy book for teens that spans the gap between YA and adult fiction..." and, as with so many bestseller books today, it has a vampire-hunter theme.

[From original posting, unchanged]
FREE BOOKS THAT DISAPPEARED WITHIN A DAY, AND AGENCY-PLAN SOFTWARE CHANGES
There were temporarily-free Kindle books released as free the last couple of days which are currently missing from the Kindlestore lists -- there may have been a glitch that caused the listing of a bunch of HarperCollins free-books that are currently missing. There are also longer-term free books that are temporarily missing due to the rather huge programming changes needed to convert the store price calculations to Agency for the Big5 publishers and all their many imprints, not easily identifiable usually as under the big tent of the larger publishers.

So, missing books are likely due to programming changes being made (or errors) in the rush to program store-wide price calculation changes needed by the time of Applestore's opening Saturday to make sure prices are as high as Apple and Big 5 publishers insist they be from now on.

The big switchover to Apple's Agency plan requires that iBookstore publishers get all other online bookstores to change to the higher-pricing Agency plan for their e-books as a condition for their inclusion in Apple's store.
In previous blog entries I've noted there will be taxes on these also, as that is based on states where the publisher of the book has a presence.

The larger publishers have been very pleased to find a new bookstore willing to (and even recommending that publishers) raise prices 30-50% while demanding that other online e-bookstores do as well.

But that meant that other bookstores like Amazon's and Fictionwise are having to switch to the Agency plan with its higher customer-pricing.
"Competition" has brought on non-competitive prices that are, coincidentally considerably higher.

Therefore it's not super likely that HarperCollins, who just made an Agency agreement with Amazon, would be likely to have lots of free books for more than a day or two. If they do bring those back, as a promo, it'll be a nice surprise, but they disappeared after one day -- and if they're not brought back, then it was entirely a network programming error. We'll see.

See the ongoing Guide to finding Free or Low-Cost Kindle books and Sources
There is also a page of links that confine searches to mid-range priced e-books for those looking for a larger selection of non-classics below $7.

30,000 free books for iPad are for Kindle too - UPDATE

(Special note: The March 26 blog entry has not been released by Amazon blogs dept - some kind of glitch. I hope it comes through along with this post. Apologies to Kindle Edition subscribers. The gap is not what it would appear.)

Columns about the Apple iPad are highlighting the 30,000 free Project Gutenberg titles that come with it.
As many regulars know, that's also available to Kindle owners.
But for the benefit of those who have become Kindle users in the last 6 months and those who are Kindle Edition subscribers, I'm reposting the information on that as it will have fallen off the current pages.

The below is from a popular Kindleworld blog-article which is being highlighted for newcomers and Kindle-blog edition subscribers (who can reference it on the Kindle for another 25 days or so).

ALL Kindle-compatible books with file extensions ".mobi" or ".prc" that you download to your computers (rather than to your Kindle, which is possible from many places) can be read on the computer by the free Kindle for PC or Kindle for Mac software by just clicking on the book file that is on your computer (wherever it is downloaded and kept).

The 30,000 free Project Gutenberg books are laid out well and proof-read.
This tip allows you to directly download a Project Gutenberg book to the Kindle, although that will work only where whispernet web-browsing is enabled already - U.S., Japan, Hong Kong, Mexico.

International Kindle users who live outside the U.S. and do not have web-browsing enabled in their countries can download these free books to their computers instead (choosing "Kindle" or "mobi" or "prc" format) and then move them to their Kindles with the USB cable that is part of their Kindle power cord.

Originally posted April 2, 2009
TIP OF THE DAY: James Adcock tells us how to download chosen Project Gutenbook books direct to our Kindles. First, you need to get the catalog on to your Kindle, and you can download it by webbing via your Kindle to http://www.freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html
(mucho typing on that Kindle keyboard but I did it).
OH, for the Kindle, try this instead: http://tinyurl.com/gutmagic

After downloading "The Magic Catalog of the Project Gutenberg E-Books (MOBI Edition) to your Kindle (or transferring it from your computer to the Kindle if you don't want to type in the long URL on the Kindle), follow James's instructions which are:

"Use your Kindle's Search Feature to find your favorite Author and/or Title. Click to go to that page. Click again on the Author: Title listing and your chosen E-Book will automagically download directly from the Project Gutenberg website to your Kindle..."

Thanks, James!

Added tip from James - How to use mobipocket.com's mobigen.exe, to easily convert EPUB books (at the DOS prompt) to MOBI versions. Downside, any illustrations in a book are not included at this point.

UPDATE - 3/30/10 This blog entry was first posted 3/27/10.
- It's better now to convert these using Calibre instead. For detailed info on how to do that, see the Kindleworld article on converting ePub files to Kindle-readable 'prc' files.

See the ongoing Guide to finding Free or Low-Cost Kindle books and Sources
There's also a page of links that confine searches to mid-range priced e-books.

New Free Kindle Book(s) late March 2010

(Had to make a new, separate entry for this, as the RSS-feed Google Reader does not move the recent new free Kindle books to the current date on the feeds. Click for other recent books.)

NEWLY/TEMPORARILY FREE BOOKS - NOT Recommendations, but only Alerts
UPDATED 3/26/10 (Orig'l post was dated 3/13 at 11:50 AM)

Publish on Amazon Kindle with the Digital Text Platform, by Amazon.com. 315K size (small) Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, March 14, 2010
No customer reviews yet, current price $0.00

Text-to-speech: Enabled. Genre: Desktop publishing, Graphic Design, Reference
From Product Description: "A guide to publishing your book on Kindle with Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP). DTP is a fast and easy self-publishing tool that lets anyone upload and format their titles for sale in the Kindle Store. If you have an Amazon.com account, you're already signed up with Digital Text Platform. ... Digital Text Platform gives you everything you need to become your own publisher today."

Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewishness of Jesus Can Transform Your Faith, by Ann Spangler. 802K size (normal) Publisher: Zondervan, June 1, 2009 & March 23, 2010
42 customer reviews with 4-1/2 stars out of 5, current price $0.00

Current hardcover price: $14.95. Audio: $15.59 Genre: Christology, Bible, Faith
From Product Description: "What would it be like to journey back to the first century and sit at the feet of Rabbi Jesus as one of his Jewish disciples? How would your understanding of the gospel have been shaped by the customs, beliefs, and traditions of the Jewish culture in which you lived?"

UPDATED 3/24/10 (Orig'l post was dated 3/13 at 11:50 AM)

The Twelve Sacred Traditions of Magnificent Mothers-in-Law, by Haywood Smith.
6 customer reviews with 5 stars out of 5, current price $0.00

Current paperback price $9.95. Genre: Family Relationships
From Product Description: A very Southern mother-in-law's humorous advice to mothers-in-law everywhere. From the multiple New York Times bestselling author of The Red Hat Club.

New Free Kindle Books 3/13-3/14 Updated 3/26

NEWLY/TEMPORARILY FREE BOOKS - NOT Recommendations, but only Alerts
UPDATED 3/26/10 (Orig'l post was dated 3/13 at 11:50 AM)

Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewishness of Jesus Can Transform Your Faith, by Ann Spangler. 802K size (normal) Publisher: Zondervan, June 1, 2009
42 customer reviews with 4-1/2 stars out of 5, current price $0.00

Current hardcover price: $14.95. Audio: $15.59 Genre: Christology, Bible, Faith
From Product Description: What would it be like to journey back to the first century and sit at the feet of Rabbi Jesus as one of his Jewish disciples? How would your understanding of the gospel have been shaped by the customs, beliefs, and traditions of the Jewish culture in which you lived?

UPDATED 3/24/10 (Orig'l post was dated 3/13 at 11:50 AM)

Take One (Above The Line Series #1), by Karen Kingsbury.
34 customer reviews with 4-1/2 stars out of 5, current price $0.00

Current hardcover price $14.99; paperback price $6.00. Digital List price was set at $11.99. This Kindle book is published by Zondervan with a displayed date of March 10, as a free Kindle book promo, I guess. As with so many of Amazon's faster-selling Kindle books lately, this is labeled Christian Fiction. It's about two who decide to make a feature film in Hollywood and their travails with that process. There aren't any external newspaper reviews cited though.

The Dark Tide (Free for a Limited Time - With Bonus Material), by Andrew Gross
55 customer reviews with 4 stars out of 5, current price $0.00.

This is a pre-order for March 23 release date (Harper Collins)
At its former Amazon Kindle listing (without the bonus material) where the reviews are shown, the Kindle price is listed as $7.99. The free copy will be, as usual, temporary, for a relatively newer book (2008).

Rides a Dread Legion Free, with Bonus Material, by Raymond E. Feist.
33 customer reviews, with 4 stars out of 5, current price $0.00

This is another pre-order for March 23 release date (Eos)
At an alternate Amazon Kindle listing (without the bonus material) where the reviews are shown, the Kindle price is listed as $7.99 although the little box underneath the main header says that the Kindle Edition is $12.59. A new paperback edition, with the extended title of Rides a Dread Legion: Book One of the Demonwar Saga (Mass Market Paperback) is being released on April for $7.99 according to that little box.
The free copy will be, as usual, temporary, for a relatively newer book.

Stopping Time, Part 1
by Melissa Marr
March 16 pre-order
Temporary price $0.00

Stopping Time, Part 2
by Melissa Marr
March 23 pre-order
Temporary price ~~$0.99~~ - now $0.00

Young adult novels, fantasy genre. Her Ink Exchange for Harper Collins received a positive review by The Washington Post's Mary Quattlebaum: "As the sequel to last year's popular Wicked Lovely, Ink Exchange is even more compelling, thanks to Melissa Marr's more nuanced characterizations..."

HarperCollins is putting a lot of teen-market money behind Marr. See the video they've produced.

See the ongoing Guide to finding Free or Low-Cost Kindle books and Sources
There's also a page of links that confine searches to mid-range priced e-books.

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