Finding free books for the Kindle reader

As I write this, the Kindle version of The Joy of Pregnancy is free at Amazon and the rating of 4.5 our of 5 stars by 25 users makes me think that it would be worth considering—if I wanted a book on the topic! I didn’t download that one, but I did download G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Skye Jethani’s The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity, all for free!

You don’t have to own a Kindle in order to read free (or purchased) books in that format. Amazon offers free readers that work on PC, Mac, Blackberry, iPad, and iPhone (no Linux yet). Just go to the Free Reading Apps page or, if that link is broken, go to Amazon, click on Kindle and then on Kindle Store, and you should see the links in the menu to the reader apps.
There are many ways to find free books for the Kindle. For one thing, it can read books in the unprotected Mobibooks format (mobi or prc file extensions) which you can find easily online (just search for “free ebooks”). The quality of these varies, of course.

Amazon also “sells” many Kindle books free (cost = $0.00) or nearly free (cost = $0.01 to $0.99). Many of these are public domain titles that you can get free elsewhere anyway, but sometimes even those are better-formatted in the Amazon store than elsewhere. A quick way to find some of these, anyway, is the link to Free Book Collections on the main page of the Kindle Store – Books page. Examples include works by G. K. Chesterton, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Willa Cather, and so on. Just reading these could keep you going the rest of your life.

Amazon also offers some current books free in the Kindle version for short periods. The book on pregnancy is an example. One way to find them is to go to the Kindle store, do a search (publisher, title, author, subject, or whatever), then sort the results by price. See blog post “How to Find Free Christian Kindle eBooks” by Jeff Brewer.

You can also check the Limited-time Promotional Offers link found inside the Free Book Collections page. Be sure to notice, on the left side of the page, the list of topics to choose from. The cover images (you can exclude a book by its cover) and rating system (stars) can help you glance through the list quickly looking for the one or two candidates you might want to read. You can filter the list to show only books with a certain number of reader-review stars, if you want, by clicking on the appropriate line under “Avg. Customer Review.” Although this saves you from seeing all the poorly-rated titles, it also means you won’t see the ones that have not been rated at all.

Another tool to help you find the best titles in the shortest time is the “Sort by” tool at the top-right of the Amazon listing. Choose “Bestselling” and see which titles in your search are being downloaded the most, or “Avg. Customer Review” to see which have received the most stars, while not excluding titles that have not been reviewed. Of course, both the sort feature and the customer review (star) filter are invaluable when searching for any items on Amazon, not only Kindle books.

Another method for finding bargain Kindle books is to check the hourly-updated Bestsellers list, also on the main page of the Kindle Store. Since lots of people are interested in getting free books, those titles tend to end up on the bestsellers list for a time. Going even further, you can get news feeds for the Bestsellers and use your news reader (I like Google Reader) to show you the latest titles in a brief list format that contains the title and price.

A final warning, though. Someone recently pointed out to me that the real price of a book is generally the time you spend reading it. It’s tempting for us bargain hunters to collect free books, but it’s not a real bargain to spend several days of free time or study time reading a book just because it is free! Still, there are so many classics available free that perhaps a side effect of the ebook trend will be that we begin reading and valuing those more highly instead of only looking for the latest titles.