The Amazon store now has more than
360,000 booksthat you can
download and read on your Kindle e-book reader.
Read Kindle Books without the Kindle Reader
If you don’t have the Kindle device, you can still enjoy any of these Kindle books on your Windows computer using the free
Kindle for PC application. Amazon is also working on a Mac version of Kindle Desktop but until that happens, you can download the free
Kindle app from
iTunes store and read books on the move using your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Find and Download Free Books for Kindle
While most eBooks available on the Amazon Kindle store are paid, here are some simple ways by which you can find and download free books for
reading on your Kindle Reader or your Kindle Desktop application.
#1. Google Books on your Kindle
Project Gutenberg,
Google Books and
FeedBooks are some popular sites that offer a large collection of
public domain books in the standard
ePUB format.
The Kindle for PC application cannot read ePUB files directly but you can use the excellent
Stanza program (from Amazon itself) to convert these public domain books from .epub into .mobi format that you can then import into Kindle Desktop for reading*. That means you now have millions of out-of-copyright books for your Kindle for free.
[*] You can also use Stanza to convert PDFs, HTML web pages and other Office documents into .mobi format for reading inside the Kindle App but I see little reason why would anyone want to do so since the reading experience is not all that great.
#2. Find Free Kindle Books on Amazon.com
Before your proceed, please log-in to your
Amazon account, chooseÂ
Manage your Kindle and change the country associated with your Kindle account to
United States.
This is important because most “free” content on the Kindle Bookstore is currently restricted to North America.
OK, now let’s explore ways to find free Kindle books:
#2.1 Big Deals – This is more of an official listing of Kindle books that are currently available as a free download on Amazon.com to Kindle users. You should also check the
Bestsellers category on Kindle Store as it again lists quite a good number of free titles.
Big Deals
2.2 Sort by Price- When you search for a Kindle book (or any other item) on Amazon.com, it displays search results by relevance.
If you change this default sort order from
Relevance to
Price: Low to High, you’ll get a list of all Kindle books that match your search keywords and are available as a free download. For instance, here is a
list of Kindle books that are related to “India” but cost exactly $0.00.
Sort by Price
2.3 Listmania - This is another resource where you can discover Kindle books that are available for free.
Listmania Lists are basically a list of products compiled by Amazon users. You can use search phrases like free kindle books,
kindle freebie,
penny kindle book, etc. to discover lists that may free books you are looking for. For instance, here’s one
Listmania List of 27 classic books for Kindle that are absolutely free and here’s
another one that also includes copyrighted books.
#2.4 Use Google – Here’s an unofficial method to help you find Kindle books that are available for free on Amazon.com.
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Use Google
You can use the following search query in Google to search the Amazon
store for free Kindle books – just replace the search-phrase in green
with the name of the book, author, book category, etc.
intitle:kindle site:amazon.com “you save * (100%)” search-phrase
For instance, here’s a list of free Kindle books related to
Abraham Lincoln while here’s a list of Kindle books on
Shakespeare that are again free.
Note: Kindle Pricing for International users
If the cost of a Kindle book is mentioned as $0.00 on the Amazon
Store, it will still show up as $2.00 for you if the country associated
with your Kindle is something other than United States. This is because
Amazon charges a $2 roaming fee for “international downloads”.
You can either temporarily change your Kindle country to US or use the “Transfer via Computer” option when
buying a book and you won’t be charged that extra $2 fees. Thanks Dhamini Ratnam.
