Free kindle ebooks

xouper · Post by **xouper** » Sun Jun 18, 2017 9:33 am

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 · Post by **shemp** » Sun Jun 18, 2017 3:30 pm

"How to Knit Gay Porn"

sparks · Post by **sparks** » Sun Jun 18, 2017 9:52 pm

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 · Post by **Anaxagoras** » Mon Jun 19, 2017 2:11 am

sparks wrote: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 · Post by **gnome** » Mon Jun 19, 2017 4:02 am

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 · Post by **xouper** » Mon Jun 19, 2017 4:10 am

sparks wrote: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 · Post by **xouper** » Mon Jun 19, 2017 4:18 am

gnome wrote: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 · Post by **xouper** » Mon Jun 19, 2017 9:29 am

shemp wrote:"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 · Post by **sparks** » Mon Jun 19, 2017 5:44 pm

Careful what you wish for...

gnome · Post by **gnome** » Tue Jun 20, 2017 3:20 am

xouper wrote:
sparks wrote: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 · Post by **xouper** » Tue Jun 20, 2017 3:41 am

gnome wrote:
xouper wrote:. . . 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 · Post by **gnome** » Tue Jun 20, 2017 11:06 am

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

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Wed Jun 21, 2017 2:28 am

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 · Post by **xouper** » Wed Jun 21, 2017 4:14 pm

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 · Post by **Rob Lister** » Wed Jun 21, 2017 4:29 pm

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 · Post by **Rob Lister** » Wed Jun 21, 2017 5:16 pm

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 · Post by **Witness** » Thu Jun 22, 2017 12:46 am

↑ 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 · Post by **xouper** » Fri Jun 23, 2017 3:37 pm

Rob Lister wrote: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?)

Rob Lister wrote: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?

Witness wrote:↑ 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 · Post by **Rob Lister** » Fri Jun 23, 2017 3:52 pm

Who the fuck said legally? Smegally.

arrg.

xouper · Post by **xouper** » Fri Jun 23, 2017 4:04 pm

Rob Lister wrote: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

in the blurb, the author wrote: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.

sparks · Post by **sparks** » Fri Jun 23, 2017 7:35 pm

At least the Kindle version doesn't consume much memory space....

Rob Lister · Post by **Rob Lister** » Fri Jun 23, 2017 7:50 pm

sparks wrote:At least the Kindle version doesn't consume much memory space....

Really? That surprises me. It's the same format as epub but arranged different because Bezo thought it would be cool to have his own.

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Fri Jun 23, 2017 11:28 pm

sparks wrote:At least the Kindle version doesn't consume much memory space....

I looked at a bunch of latest e-books on Gutenberg (so the sample should be random), taking the liberty to assume 1 kB = 0.001 MB:

Depends of course how they have been generated/converted. For some technical details: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/899 ... -same-book.

For scanned documents, nothing is up to djvu ("DéjàVu").

sparks · Post by **sparks** » Sat Jun 24, 2017 5:35 am

I was attempting sarcasm. I have no idea really.

Rob Lister · Post by **Rob Lister** » Sat Jun 24, 2017 11:01 am

Witness wrote:
sparks wrote:At least the Kindle version doesn't consume much memory space....
I looked at a bunch of latest e-books on Gutenberg (so the sample should be random), taking the liberty to assume 1 kB = 0.001 MB:

Depends of course how they have been generated/converted. For some technical details: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/899 ... -same-book.

For scanned documents, nothing is up to djvu ("DéjàVu").

That's very surprising. Thanks for that.

xouper · Post by **xouper** » Sat Jun 24, 2017 8:50 pm

Witness wrote:For scanned documents, nothing is up to djvu ("DéjàVu").

I have a bunch of textbooks in that format.

xouper · Post by **xouper** » Sun Jun 25, 2017 4:50 pm

Of the many free kindle books I bought today, the title of this one caught my eye and seems noteworthy. (Or maybe not.)

The Parable of the Dumbass by Antonio Scotto Di Carlo

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0734D1WLP/

I haven't read it, although I confess my curiosity has been tickled.

xouper · Post by **xouper** » Sun Jun 25, 2017 5:40 pm

Also from today's amazon basket of goodies, I like this title even better than the one above:

The Mathematical Proof for Christianity by Dan Delzell

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AR3CADY/

Oh my.

xouper · Post by **xouper** » Sun Jun 25, 2017 7:01 pm

Good find, Abdul. I haven't read that one (yet), but I have the ebook.

Aldous Huxley wrote: ... You know the formula, m over nought equals infinity, m being any positive number? Well, why not reduce the equation to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by nought? In which case you have m equals infinity times nought. That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity. Doesn’t that demonstrate the creation of the universe by an infinite power out of nothing? Doesn’t it? ...

Um, no.

What it demonstrates is that you can play word games and dress them up with mathematics. Even the clever mention of the theory of limits doesn't legitimize the proposed argument.

But y'all knew that already.

Not having read the book, I don't know Huxley's resolution to this question.

The fundamental flaw in the argument, in case anyone wanted to hear me say it, seems to be that mathematical models are descriptive, not prescriptive. The universe is under no obligation to conform to the mathematical mumblings of any of God's sentient creations.

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Sun Jun 25, 2017 9:59 pm

xouper wrote:
Witness wrote:For scanned documents, nothing is up to djvu ("DéjàVu").

I have a bunch of textbooks in that format.

And if they have been correctly brewed, the scanned text is searchable (OCR embedded).

ed · Post by ed » Sun Jun 25, 2017 10:03 pm

Salting the tail refers to the old wives tale that if you can put salt on the tail of a bird, it cannot fly away and you can capture it.

I can state that I have empirical proof that it is bs, tried it as a tad.

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Sun Jun 25, 2017 10:05 pm

xouper · Post by **xouper** » Sun Jun 25, 2017 10:25 pm

Witness wrote:https://s17.postimg.org/4m4kk0yrj/12129 ... at-god.jpg

It's not free on amazon, ergo doesn't count.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CGANIZG/

But I put it on my watch list anyway, so if the author ever decides to offer it free as a promotional gimmick, I'll have a decent chance of snagging it.

Edited to add: Umm, sorry, I didn't mean to distract from your point.

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Sun Jun 25, 2017 10:31 pm

xouper wrote:It's not free on amazon, ergo doesn't count.

What? He wants to sell his ravings marvelous proof?

xouper · Post by **xouper** » Sun Jun 25, 2017 10:33 pm

Abdul Alhazred wrote:
ed wrote:Salting the tail refers to the old wives tale that if you can put salt on the tail of a bird, it cannot fly away and you can capture it.

I can state that I have empirical proof that it is bs, tried it as a tad.
You didn't use enough salt.

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Sun Jun 25, 2017 10:42 pm

ed wrote:Salting the tail refers to the old wives tale that if you can put salt on the tail of a bird, it cannot fly away and you can capture it.

I can state that I have empirical proof that it is bs, tried it as a tad.

I remember that from my youth:

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Thu Jun 29, 2017 4:35 am

Not necessarily all free (but DRM-free) and not necessarily Kindle, but there are lots of links to books on this page:
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks

You'll sort it out.

xouper · Post by **xouper** » Thu Jun 29, 2017 5:04 pm

Witness wrote:Not necessarily all free (but DRM-free) and not necessarily Kindle, but there are lots of links to books on this page:
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks

You'll sort it out.

Excellent. There are some sources on that list I hadn't seen before, plus a bunch of other stuff I'm interested in.

What would be cool is to find a wiki that allows people to add to the list.

Evolver · Post by **Evolver** » Thu Jun 29, 2017 8:56 pm

xouper wrote:
Rob Lister wrote: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

in the blurb, the author wrote: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.

Did they not have room for the author's full name: Carl Makeshitup?

xouper · Post by **xouper** » Thu Jun 29, 2017 9:54 pm

Evolver wrote:Did they not have room for the author's full name: Carl Makeshitup?

Ha!

You have a better eye than I.

I totally missed that.

Apparently there also isn't enough room on facebook for his full name:

https://www.facebook.com/CarlMakeshi/