Free kindle ebooks

[xouper]

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]

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.

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

[xouper]

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/

[xouper]

I have been collecting free kindle books from this series for more than three years:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01ABTC48A/

Meet Amazing Americans Workbook (46 Book Series)

. . .

And today I noticed that 20 of them are free (seemingly selected at random by the publisher), so now — at long last — I have the whole set of 46 books.



That's one of the things that makes this a fun hobby, like completing a set in your stamp collecting book.

[Witness]

Good for you! But does it leave you with enough time to read them?

I'm not the collecting type, save precisely for (paper) books – for a time I surmised I'd one day be killed by the collapse of one of my bookshelves. But now I'm less attached and have started giving them away, makes nice gifts.

And there's a Romanian saying for that: shrouds have no pockets.

[xouper]

. . . But does it leave you with enough time to read them?

Your question reminds me of a review I recently read for a free kindle book. Essentially the complaint was that the book was poorly written. And I thought, there's your problem, free kindle books are not for reading, they're for collecting.

I get that question a lot. And no, I have way more free kindle books than I will ever be able to read in my lifetime. Especially if I reach my goal of collecting a million of them. But I can still do data mining experiments on them, and that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I suppose the ultimate goal (or fantasy, take your pick) might be to develop a computer program that "reads" all the books ever written and then synthesizes a knowledge base from that.

[xouper]

I'm not the collecting type, save precisely for (paper) books – for a time I surmised I'd one day be killed by the collapse of one of my bookshelves. But now I'm less attached and have started giving them away, makes nice gifts.

I'm in the process of disposing of most of my paper books too. I scan them onto dvd-rom and then out of the house they go. Two thousand done, about 2000 more to go. So far: more than 670,000 scans, 244 gigabytes.

[Witness]

For the "time to read": I know, just teasing.

I suppose the ultimate goal (or fantasy, take your pick) might be to develop a computer program that "reads" all the books ever written and then synthesizes a knowledge base from that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

If the AI writes articles/books about his findings, infinite regress – we're doomed (again)!

[xouper]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

I had not seen that before. Thanks.

I would have been surprised if someone had not already started such a thing. They have a long way to go, but hey, that's what hobbies are for, no?

I'm gonna hafta look into that. Say what you will about wikipedia's shortcomings, but one of its strengths are the citations and "further reading" recommendations. I have the book they cite: Domingos, Pedro (2015), The Master Algorithm, and although it's on my todo list, I haven't got to it yet.

[Witness]

For a time you could download (a version of) it. Seems they have changed their mind: http://www.opencyc.org/.
But it certainly is still to be found somewhere.

[xouper]

I just bought this free kindle ebook on amazon and I thought I'd share it with our Chicagoland friends:



https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B073HN35CF/

Weird Chicago: A History of Mysteries, Strange Tales, and Hauntings across the Windy City
by Charles River Editors (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars 1 customer review

eBook $0.00
Paperback $6.99

Print Length: 48 pages
Publisher: Charles River Editors (June 28, 2017)
Publication Date: June 28, 2017

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Religion & Spirituality > Occult > Unexplained Mysteries
#2 in Kindle Store > Kindle Short Reads > 90 minutes (44-64 pages) > History
#2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Americas > United States > 19th Century

I don't know how long it will be free. But based on past observations about this publisher, perhaps not long, a day or two.

[xouper]

Another of the fun things about my hobby of collecting free kindle books is finding goofy book titles.

For example, I just bought this one today:



https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073B6BYQM/

You're Worthless And You Know It: The worlds first Anti self-help and De-motivational book
by Will Jorden
4.5 out of 5 stars 8 customer reviews

I assume it goes without saying, I haven't read it.

[xouper]

Bought another free kindle book with a noteworthy title:




https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073HHKBYQ/

Autocorrect Fails: Hilarious Autocorrect Fails Memes and Pictures! Ultimate Memes!
by Morgan Memesfreeman

And because of the recommendations list, I also bought these next two free kindle books by the same "author":




https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073NMDRBD/

MEMES: Super Memes! The ULTIMATE Collection of Memes 2017
by Morgan Memesfreeman




https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073HLWP8S/

CAT MEMES: Hilarious Cat Memes and Funny Pictures Book - Over 2,000 Pages
by Morgan Memesfreeman


And then I had the not so brilliant idea of searching the kindle store for the keyword "memes" (and then sort by price low to high), and I ended up buying another dozen or so free kindle books. If I can keep up the pace of three or four hundred free kindle books per day, I might actually get to a million before I die.

[Abdul Alhazred]

So you can have all your clickbait even when not connected to the 'net?

[xouper]

Exactly.

And no one gets harmed paid.

[xouper]

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073NMDRBD/

MEMES: Super Memes! The ULTIMATE Collection of Memes 2017
by Morgan Memesfreeman

My curiosity wrestled with my better judgment and I took a look in this one. It is, as Abdul said, a collection of clickbait stolen from the interwebs, one per page.

For example, on page eight is this one:




One thing handy about the book is if a bunch of memes all use the same photo, they are grouped together on consecutive pages.
For example, there are 20 memes using the following photo:



I mention all this only in case someone was curious. All I can say is, it's a good thing I didn't have to pay for it.

[Abdul Alhazred]

One thing handy about the book is if a bunch of memes all use the same photo, they are grouped together on consecutive pages.

Not merely a collection of clickbait.

It is a thesaurus of clickbait.

[Rob Lister]

I mention all this only in case someone was curious. All I can say is, it's a good thing I didn't have to pay for it.

Since we're gedunkin' here, let me tell you a no-shit cool story, bro.

The first navy jet I worked on was a A6A bomber. A two engine, two man bomber. The nav panel it that it used was an almost identical computer as what flew on Apollo, or so I was told (with the expectation of being impressed). It was an IBM processing unit motherboard with 2K of (mag core) memory and 2K of chip-based rom.

And with that they could track roughly a dozen targets. Every byte counted. There was no room for bugs.

To run programs, the BN (bombardier navigator) would enter the rom memory address of the program he wanted.

That's how we used to point and click, ladies.

[xouper]

Since we're gedunkin' here, let me tell you a no-shit cool story, bro.

The first navy jet I worked on was a A6A bomber. A two engine, two man bomber. The nav panel it that it used was an almost identical computer as what flew on Apollo, or so I was told (with the expectation of being impressed). It was an IBM processing unit motherboard with 2K of (mag core) memory and 2K of chip-based rom.

And with that they could track roughly a dozen targets. Every byte counted. There was no room for bugs.

To run programs, the BN (bombardier navigator) would enter the rom memory address of the program he wanted.

That's how we used to point and click, ladies.

I can identify with that. In my early days as an assembly language hack, every byte counted, as you noted.

I wrote my first machine code program on a DEC PDP 8, like the one below, where you entered the code in binary using the switches, one switch per bit. That was 1976.



Fast forward to the 1980s, I was sent on a mission to Delaware to reconstruct the source code from the binary executable in the ROM. In those days I could literally read the Z-80 hex codes and decode it in my head.

Ahh, the good ol' days.

[xouper]

This happened to me again today. In the recommendations section I see a kindle book with an advertised price of $0.00, so I click the link which will take me to the product page where I can click the buy button. While I'm waiting for that page to fully load, I stepped away from the computer for a moment to visit the women's restroom, and when I come back the price is indeed $0.00, so I click the buy button. Except it tells me the price is no longer $0.00 and that my purchase was rejected. WTF?? I'd only been gone a few moments. This happens several times a month (about once every 3000 to 4000 purchases more or less) with no apparent way to predict when it will happen. Is amazon fucking with me or did I just get unlucky and the publisher/author changed his mind while I was momentarily preoccupied? Enquiring Minds Wanna Know™.