Free kindle ebooks

[Rob Lister]

That's not the cover art I recall, but what I said in general still goes.

[Abdul Alhazred]

Just as an aside, anyone here who hasn't read it yet should get on the stick already.

[xouper]

That's not the cover art I recall, but what I said in general still goes.

I like that cover better. Does anyone know why the amazon store shows a generic cover?

[gnome]

It appears they are collections of short stories, one per chapter.

Chapters 10 through 19 appear to be the same in both books. I only spot checked some of the paragraphs, so there could be differences I suppose. If I were truly motivated, I could convert them from kindle format to text format and do a document compare.

The other chapters appear to be the same stories but in a different chapter order.

Except each book has one chapter that is not in the other book:

In Flavor of the Week: BOOK 6: THE OUTLANDISH (ALIEN ROMANCE)
In Set Up: BOOK 9: GOOD ENOUGH (GAY ROMANCE)

I did not check the other pair of books (The Stranger vs Don't Arrest Me).

I'm glad I didn't pay good money for them. It might be interesting to read some of the reviews, assuming there are any. Except all four books have gone missing from amazon. Good thing I archived the original product pages on my hard drive.

Wait, I found them. All four are still there on amazon but using different ASINs. All four have a new publishing date of July 24, 2017, and they are priced at $0.99. Same covers, same titles, and same authors. Probably same content, although I have no way to verify that unless they become free some day (they're on my watch list).

Fascinating.

I'm envisioning a particularly spazzy author with little sense of version control.

[Rob Lister]

That's not the cover art I recall, but what I said in general still goes.

I like that cover better. Does anyone know why the amazon store shows a generic cover?

It's actually a very good, if quick read; worthy of an afternoon. More entertaining than most things on Netflix. I'm a little surprised none of the publishing houses picked him up.

[gnome]

I concur, I really enjoyed it myself.

[xouper]

cross-posted: viewtopic.php?p=878207#p878207

[Witness]

[xouper]

As part of today's haul, I bought this free kindle book by Chris Michael Wilson, what appears to be book one of a series:



https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074875L4L/

So I thought I would search the kindle store for other books by the same author, so (from the book product page) I clicked on the author link and here's what I got:

10 results for Kindle Store: "Chris Michael Wilson"

1. Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip-Hop and Beyond (Painted Turtle)
   by M. L. Liebler and Dave Marsh
2. The Strong Gray Line: War-time Reflections from the West Point Class of 2004
   by Cory Wallace and Jim Wilson
3. The Best Australian Poems 2010
   by Robert Adamson and Ali Alizadeh
4. Children and Adolescents in Trauma: Creative Therapeutic Approaches: 18 (Community, Culture and Change)
   by Chris Nicholson and Michael Irwin and Kedar Dwivedi
5. An Occupational Therapist's Guide to Sleep and Sleep Problems (Occupational Therapists Guides)
   by Carly Brown and Andrew Green
6. The Best Australian Poems 2015
   by Geoff Page and Michael Sharkey
7. Intellectual Disability and Dementia: Research into Practice
   by Karen Watchman and Trevor Chan
8. Campbell Biology, Canadian Edition
   by Jane B. Reece and Lisa A. Urry
9. Magium: The Mage Tournament: Book 1
   by Chris Michael Wilson
10. A New Imperative: Regions and higher education in difficult times (Universities and Lifelong Learning MUP)
    by Chris Duke and Michael Osborne

Seriously??

Only one of those books is by the author I was searching for.

Yet another example that amazon's search function is borken.

[Abdul Alhazred]

Bonfire of the Vanities etc

[Witness]

Yet another example that amazon's search function is borken.

Not at all, it just "expands your choices".

[xouper]

One of the interesting things about this hobby is finding some strange stuff.

In today's haul of free kindle books, I got this one:



https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0713X13Y6/

It's The Worst Book Ever Written:
Don't Waste Your Money Buying This,
You're Not Going to Get a Refund
by Lucas Robak

1.0 out of 5 stars 19 customer reviews

Kindle $0.00
Paperback $21.77

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > True Crime > White Collar Crime
#3 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Education & Teaching > Teacher Resources > Education Theory

Maybe later I'll look through it to see if I should ask for my money back.

[xouper]

Another free one, and topical for this forum:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=47859

[xouper]

Today I hit a milestone. As of a few moments ago, I now have more than 300,000 free kindle books, according to amazon. And I have an email invoice for each and every one of them.

It took me three years to get the first hundred thousand.
It took me another year to get the second hundred thousand.
And then six months to get the third hundred thousand.

That's about 550 books per day, every day for six months.

At that rate it will take me maybe another 3.5 years to get to a million. Assuming I can actually get that many. And assuming I can keep up that high rate, which at this point seems less than certain. I found out recently that Amazon only has about 5 million kindle books, so it may not be possible to get to a million freebies. We shall see.

[xouper]

The most expensive free book I got so far is this monster, which I got about a month ago shortly after it was published. Retails for $500.00.



Safety and Reliability – Safe Societies in a Changing World
Proceedings of ESREL 2018, June 17-21, 2018, Trondheim, Norway
Print Length: 3234 pages
Publisher: CRC Press; 1 edition (June 15, 2018)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DV5F71F/

It's also available for free (as a pdf) directly from the publisher, which is a reputable publisher of technical books.
https://www.crcpress.com/Safe-Societies ... 0815386827

I now have both, the kindle and the pdf. In fact, I suspect the kindle edition is merely the pdf in a kindle wrapper, since the kindle edition text does not reflow like a normal kindle book does.

Previous years proceedings are $494.99 for the pdf. I was not able to find any of those previous years for free, not even on amazon. Thus I am predicting that the 2018 edition will also be $500 by this time next year, when I hope to get the 2019 edition for free.

That's a lot of pages. Thumbing through the table of contents, there is a lot of interesting stuff in there — and I do mean a lot, since the average chapter is maybe ten pages — and I can now say I have actually read one of my free kindle books. Well, one chapter anyway, called, "Safety analysis of autonomous driving using semi-Markov processes". I was curious to know how they used Markov models and what their conclusion is. I was surprised to learn they recommend skipping level three autonomy mode and going straight to level four. Makes sense to me.

[Witness]

That's about 550 books per day, every day for six months.

You automated the downloading process?

At that rate it will take me maybe another 3.5 years to get to a million.

1 h / book, 8 h / day, it would take 300+ years to read that million. But I understand it's not for reading…

[xouper]

That's about 550 books per day, every day for six months.

You automated the downloading process?

The kindle app for windows automatically downloads my purchases to my hard drive. And it crashes regularly while trying to do that. I suspect the programmers did not anticipated this level of usage. I'm watching the memory usage and I predict that by 500,000 books, because it is a 32-bit app, it will hit the 2 gigabyte limit and crash permanently, even though I have 8 gb ram installed. I am hoping by then they will release an update that might (perhaps inadvertently) solve that problem.

[xouper]

Of the 627 free kindle books I got today, this one seemed (somewhat) noteworthy:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=48483

[xouper]

Of the 663 free kindle books I got today, this one seemed especially noteworthy:
viewtopic.php?p=937801#p937801

[xouper]

I like when this happens (which isn't often), an author offers their entire catalog of kindle books for free on amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entit ... B079M74VTF

They write cookbooks and all 44 of them are free today so I scarfed them up (the kindle versions, of course). I have no idea how long this promotional price will last.

At an average of 80 or 90 pages each (no I didn't look at them all), that's more than 3000 pages of recipes. The paperback versions list for seven dollars each.



I know nothing about these authors and having read none of the books, I cannot comment on their content, other than it appears they are self published.

I found them accidentally when doing a keyword search for "green". Go figure.

Anyway, I'm now that much closer to my goal of one million free kindle books.