There’s a new gadget in town, and it’s turning a lot of people’s heads. Some have called Amazon’s Kindle 2 “The iPod for Books.” Others have called it the “first nail in the coffin” for paper books. Most of the reviews of the device have been very positive, but it’s $359.00 price tag will probably leave you without a lot of money to actually buy books for the thing. Fortunately, there are ways that you can get a lot of free content for your Amazon Kindle.
The first and best way to get free Kindle content is from Amazon itself. If you search on Amazon for Kindle books and then sort by price from low-to-high, you’ll find over 5000 books that are available for electronic delivery to your Kindle for absolutely free. Most of them are from the public domain, but there are a few other gems that can be found too. Alternatively, you can click this link to go to the search listing now. My favorite “free item” from the Kindle store was a copy of the ESV Study Bible.
If you’re looking for public domain books, you can head on over to a website called ManyBooks.net. They provide copies of Project Gutenburg and other public domain books at no cost. ManyBooks offers books that are specifically formatted for the Kindle, so they look a lot better on the device than sending plain-text to it.
Feedbooks offers a great service for the Kindle that lets you download one e-book in the .MOBI format that will provide you downloadable links to hundreds of other e-books. Two gems that I found on this service were 1984 and Princess of Mars.
You can also check out FreeKindleBooks.org. They claim to offer “1000’s of free classic e-books in Kindle-compatible .MOBI and .PRC formats.” The site looks like it came straight out of 1991, but still does have a lot of great, free files.
There are a few extensive lists that people have come up with that have lists of sites that offer free e-books, but aren’t specifically designed for the Kindle:
There’s a myriad of public domain material available for the Kindle, but there are also a few new titles released for free as a promotional means too. Kindle Books are only $9.99, but if you read a lot, it can add up rather quickly, instead consider reading a classic in-between each New York Times Best Seller that you pick-up.