Free kindle ebooks

[xouper]

I posted the following book in response to a question in another thread (where few people are likely to see it), and then I wondered if anyone might appreciate if the book had a little bit more visibility in its own thread.

Or maybe not.



https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005OMBTKY/

The kindle edition is free (as I write this), but I do not know how long it will remain free.

I haven't read it and the odds are slim (but not zero) that I'll ever read it. Unless of course its contents become a matter of discussion here.

The reason I bought it (for free), aside from the charming title, is that some time ago I started collecting free kindle books from amazon just for the fun of it, without the expectation that I would ever read any of them, although I have in fact read some of them. Perhaps similarly to collecting bottle caps, sometimes the fun is merely in the collecting.

I now have almost 130,000 free kindle ebooks from amazon (with a corresponding email invoice for each one as proof of ownership). My goal now is to discover if it's possible to collect one million of them. I am curious to know if anyone has already done that.

As a result of this hobby, I have noticed something peculiar. Or maybe not.

First, some background to set the context for my conjecture below. On the product page for a free kindle book, there is sometimes a list of recommended books based on what other people have bought or viewed. Sometimes the list of recommendations can be 100 books long. Sometimes some of those recommendations are also free. If you click on one of those recommendations it will take you to the product page where you can buy it, and often there is another list of recommendations, not necessarily the same as the one you just came from.

So here's my conjecture, based on random (and unscientific) observations:

• Starting from any free kindle book of any genre you like, and if you follow the links of recommendations for the free books, then on average, after buying all the free ones going six levels deep, you will have got a free kindle book about knitting. Or gay porn. One or the other.

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to discover an obvious (but boring) corollary to that conjecture.

Think of that as the six degrees of separation idea as applied to free kindle books, if you like.

[shemp]

"How to Knit Gay Porn"

[sparks]

I don't need to read a book to know that the Universe Doesn't Give A Fuck About Me.

But it is an interesting title.

One thing: A Kindle will actually hold 130,000 books? Wow. What's the limit on Kindle memory?

[Anaxagoras]

I don't need to read a book to know that the Universe Doesn't Give A Fuck About Me.

But it is an interesting title.

One thing: A Kindle will actually hold 130,000 books? Wow. What's the limit on Kindle memory?

I don't know about that, but according to the Google, one terabyte could hold 337,920 copies of War and Peace. Most books are probably not as large as War and Peace, it's kind of a stand-in for a really honking ginormous book. I don't know how large the hard drive on a Kindle is, but with an external hard drive, you can buy a 1 TB portable hard drive for about $55 bucks on Amazon for example or a 4 TB one for about $110 (that's the first price I Googled; you may be able to find one for even less.).

[gnome]

These days they expect you to rely less on a Kindle's internal memory and more on their cloud service, anyway.

That's the reasoning behind the 2GB Paperwhite. It's not how I like to think, I like to store locally and sync to a cloud backup. But it is workable. And so far I haven't even filled up the 2GB even with every e-book I own downloaded.

[xouper]

One thing: A Kindle will actually hold 130,000 books? Wow. What's the limit on Kindle memory?

I don't have a kindle device. I use the kindle app for windows as my main interface to amazon.

Based on the size of the books I have so far, I estimate a million kindle books will take about 800 gigabytes. So that's not a problem.

Most of the time, I use my iPad Mini as a reader and it only has the books I actually read on it, which isn't very many at any given time.

The problem now is that I need a better way to catalog my collection so I can find books easily. Preferably an online catalog that I can access from any browser from anywhere.

And ideally that would include my collections of non-kindle ebooks as well, including the paper editions that I personally scanned and converted to PDFs (about 2000 already scanned and about 2000 more to do).

[xouper]

These days they expect you to rely less on a Kindle's internal memory and more on their cloud service, anyway.

That's the reasoning behind the 2GB Paperwhite. It's not how I like to think, I like to store locally and sync to a cloud backup. But it is workable. And so far I haven't even filled up the 2GB even with every e-book I own downloaded.

So, did you buy the book in the opening post?

I just checked and it's still free, as are the other three books in the series.

[xouper]

"How to Knit Gay Porn"

My first reaction was, yeah right. But funny nonetheless.

Then today while surfing amazon for free kindle books, I thought, what if there is actually such a thing.

Imagine my surprise when a search turned up this one:



Jack Gets His Man (The Gray-Haired Knitting Detectives Book 2)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00YBZITC6/

It's part of a trilogy, none of which are free, so I didn't buy it.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. After all, what are the chances there's a kindle book about Lesbian Zombies from Outer Space?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XXNSWSV/

[sparks]

Careful what you wish for...

[gnome]

One thing: A Kindle will actually hold 130,000 books? Wow. What's the limit on Kindle memory?

I don't have a kindle device. I use the kindle app for windows as my main interface to amazon.

Based on the size of the books I have so far, I estimate a million kindle books will take about 800 gigabytes. So that's not a problem.

Most of the time, I use my iPad Mini as a reader and it only has the books I actually read on it, which isn't very many at any given time.

The problem now is that I need a better way to catalog my collection so I can find books easily. Preferably an online catalog that I can access from any browser from anywhere.

And ideally that would include my collections of non-kindle ebooks as well, including the paper editions that I personally scanned and converted to PDFs (about 2000 already scanned and about 2000 more to do).

Amazon's Kindle (both their devices and their apps for non-Amazon hardware) will happily mingle stuff from their catalog and stuff you uploaded. You can even make collections that mix and match.

[xouper]

. . . The problem now is that I need a better way to catalog my collection so I can find books easily. Preferably an online catalog that I can access from any browser from anywhere.

And ideally that would include my collections of non-kindle ebooks as well, including the paper editions that I personally scanned and converted to PDFs (about 2000 already scanned and about 2000 more to do).

Amazon's Kindle (both their devices and their apps for non-Amazon hardware) will happily mingle stuff from their catalog and stuff you uploaded. You can even make collections that mix and match.

Agreed.

Only one problem. And it's serious. The kindle app for windows struggles with the number of books I have.

For example, it takes almost half an hour for the app to initialize before I can even use it. I'm guessing the programmers never imagined it needed to handle that many books, so I don't really blame them.

I am curious to see how badly it struggles to handle a million books.

Also, the kindle app doesn't have all the features I want. Even the Calibre app doesn't do everything I want. I may have to roll my own, but I am tempted to use Calibre as a starting point, having already downloaded the source code for it.

[gnome]

That's a good app, I use that to manage my non Amazon books on my PC.

[Witness]

Calibre works very well, and keeps its stuff in folders so if everything crashes (and you made no backup…) you still have the books (but not the metadata).

Sumatra PDF is an excellent and lightweight reader for a lot of e-book formats.

We had a thread about free science books: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=36926&hilit=free+e+books#p679030. Didn't gather much attention.

[xouper]

What I find more amusing than the title is that I didn't pay anything for the following kindle book.




Why Won’t They Pay Me What I’m Worth? by Rodney Koop

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071WMXQKP/

[Rob Lister]

This is a public service announcement from Distributed Proofreaders.

There are tens of thousands of free books, out of copyright, available to you for the price of a click.
https://www.gutenberg.org/

The fact that they made it there makes them worthy.

Any format that is worth a format, ebook, kindle, html, text, et-fucking-cetra

[Rob Lister]

As an addendum can I just say that we live in an information utopia. Everything is available moments after publication. For free if you want. So, ya know, this is a redundant thread.

[Witness]

↑ Rob is right (even if grumpy as usual).

Yet I'll give two links:
– https://monoskop.org/Monoskop:About, for art & humanities, from old Dadaist magazines to the latest 3D-printed art. A wiki with tons of links;
– http://www.pdfsearchengine.org/, as its name says. Often more efficient than the usual search engines, but doesn't like NoScript.

[xouper]

This is a public service announcement from Distributed Proofreaders.

There are tens of thousands of free books, out of copyright, available to you for the price of a click.
https://www.gutenberg.org/

The fact that they made it there makes them worthy.

Any format that is worth a format, ebook, kindle, html, text, et-fucking-cetra

I've downloaded hundreds of ebooks from gutenberg. They don't count towards my goal of buying one million free kindle books from amazon (with an email invoice for each one). Although many of those same books are also available free on amazon in kindle format, sometimes the same book from several different "publishers", and those do count towards my ultimate goal. (Hey, it's my hobby, I can have whatever rules I want, eh?)

As an addendum can I just say that we live in an information utopia. Everything is available moments after publication. For free if you want. So, ya know, this is a redundant thread.

Legally free? Where?

↑ Rob is right (even if grumpy as usual).

Yet I'll give two links:
– https://monoskop.org/Monoskop:About, for art & humanities, from old Dadaist magazines to the latest 3D-printed art. A wiki with tons of links;
– http://www.pdfsearchengine.org/, as its name says. Often more efficient than the usual search engines, but doesn't like NoScript.

Is there a website that has an exhaustive list of links to all the sources for free ebooks?

[Rob Lister]

Who the fuck said legally? Smegally.

arrg.

[xouper]

Who the fuck said legally? Smegally.

arrg.

This one was free when I bought it in January, but not free today as I write this.



https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N6Q37D4/

100 Reasons Why Donald Trump Is A Great President Who Deserves Your Support and Admiration
by Carl Makeshi, 106 pages

I've tried, and I simply couldn't find anything to say on this subject yet. The reasons/pages are currently blank, perfect for getting stares on a bus, as a drink coaster, or for taking notes! Maybe I'll find a reason to update it in four years.

I just thought some people here might appreciate this one. Although I suspect the print version would make a better gag for carrying around and showing people.

If yer a Hillary fan, there's also one about all the reasons to support her (also all blank pages, of course) but I can't find it at the moment.