Convert EPub books to Kindle format. ALSO, almost a Million free Google books already in Kindle format

EPUB TO KINDLE - Example: Free Google Books

I'm updating an older post on converting free ePub books from Google to work on the Kindle.  (The earlier blog article was updated often for Google-book changes and lost its basic focus.)

  The conversion is actually easy to do, and although we can now easily get free Kindle-versions of these Google books, it's good to know how to do this for any ePub book that doesn't have a form of digital-rights-protection or management (DRM) placed on it.

Google now combines its free Google books with the ones they sell in the the newish Google Book Store.  If you'd like to see how easy it is to convert a free ePub book, go to Google's "Best of the Free" page and select one.


USING CALIBRE TO CONVERT EPUB TO KINDLE ("MOBI" or "PRC") FORMAT
You can use Calibre to easily convert any free ePub file to Kindle format.
  You can also use the Retroread.com site to have it done for you for free but only for the free Google books.

  HOWEVER, almost a million of these free Google books are already in Kindle format and ready for simple downloads, thanks to Internet Archive, which will be covered right after the "Convert ePub to Kindle" section.

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Google offers over a million free e-books in EPUB format as well as in PDF format.  (Many don't know that the Kindle 2, 3 ("Keyboard"), DX and of course coming Touch models can read PDFs direct -- but this isn't ideal on the 6" screens.)

  The added ePub versions of the free Google books are better to work with than PDFs because they involve text-reflow capabilities instead of a focus on keeping a page exactly as originally laid out, giving us words too tiny on small screens.

  Also, with the ePub books, Google has done that text-reflow for us, which should bring more reliable ePub-to-MOBI conversions for e-books with complex layouts.

  The ePub file converted to Kindle Mobi format will also allow the Kindle features of highlighting, note-adding, font-size adjustments and a better book-Search process, and the converted book will be included in search results when the full Kindle is searched for key words.

  There are currently at least three popular free tools that can convert ePub files to Kindle-compatible MOBI files:  (1) mobigen.exe (not intuitive);  (2) Mobipocket Reader 6.2  (loses some of the styling); and (3) Calibre, which has a nice interface, is easy to use, works with pc's and Macs, and gets the best results.

So, Calibre it is.  Many use it already for organizing computer records of their Kindle books or for retrieving combinations of newspaper feeds for their Kindles (not as easily navigated as the paid subscrptions).
  This blog article focuses on converting the ePub file-format to a Kindle-readable one (Mobi or Prc).

  If you don't already have this free software, created and maintained by Kovid Goyal, download Calibre here.

  GETTING THE FREE GOOGLE BOOK IN EPUB at Google's "Best of the Free" page.
  If you have a Kindle DXG, you might prefer to just get the PDF.  If the words on the PDF are too small or if you want to use the Kindle features mentioned, then get the ePub file.  IF you download an ePub file, then it's time for

  CALIBRE
  Open and run Calibre.  On the LEFT will be your choices for set-up when you're converting a document.  Hovering over anything will usually bring a help tip.

  Accepting defaults is fine.  The ability to change the "meta information" is nice - so you can have names and authors as you like them.  If there is no Table of Contents you can 'force' Calibre to create one.  But there's no need to do any of that.

  At the top are choices to "Edit meta information: as well as "Convert E-books." Follow the instructions, and then press the 'OK' button and the conversion will take a few minutes.  I did one and moved it to the Kindle DX and it looks great.

Also, Calibre gives you the option to optimize your converted file for a specific Kindle model.

So, yes, despite news stories and story commenters who still post that the free Google books are not accessible on the Kindle, they are, with this one added step, but it's also great to be able to customize so much of the layout if you want.  Play with the software a bit.


ALMOST ONE MILLION FREE GOOGLE BOOKS ARE ALREADY IN KINDLE FORMAT
and ready for download, thanks to an amazing resource:

THE INTERNET ARCHIVE's Free Google Books - downloadable in multiple formats (direct to Kindle too).

  You'll see, on their main Google Books page, lots of interesting features.   At the top center is a box with the title "Internet Archive's Google Books" and the number of items currently available for that set, currently 903,273.

  There's an advisory that the files have been downloaded from the Google site and uploaded to the Internet Archive by users...and that they've been made text- searchable as a finding aid.

Then you're given a link to "All items (most recently added first)."

From that, select an e-book, like the one in the image above.  After I saw one I wanted to download, I got my Kindle 3 (UK: K3) ("Kindle Keyboard) and:

  1. I pressed "Menu / Experimental Browser" and pressed "Menu /EnterURL" and then typed in the URL, using the Sym key, which brings up a number/symbol box that can stay up while you enter alpha characters and forward-slashes as needed, etc.

  2. Then I asked it to Go and it took me to the book's page, which loaded almost instantly (it's all text).

  3. On a 6" Kindle, the full page is set to fit the width so the characters are small, but the Kindle then displays a movable zoom box with a "+" sign. (When you don't see a zoom box but you want one, you press the 'Aa' key at the bottom.)

  4. Then, using the 5-way controller, I went to "Kindle" on the Internet Archive's book page, left column, and clicked on it, which brought up a dialog box asking if I wanted to download the book and I clicked on "Yes."

  5. It took only about 7 seconds to get the half-megabyte file to my Kindle since my Comcast is fast and therefore my WiFi is too.

That's all it took.  Might add a screenshot of the Kindle downloading but this blog entry is already image heavy.  You can also save the Kindle file to your computer and then move it to the Kindle's "Documents" folder via the USB cable that's a part of the Kindle power cord.

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IF a free google book is not available from Internet Archive and you don't want to convert on with Calibre, then try RetroRead's Automated Free-Google-Book Conversions.

  The Kindle is covered well, with Calibre, Internet Archive and Retroread.

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Related articles:
  What is the Internet Archive?
  Read foreign-language Google-books in English online
  Google describes its own book conversion process
  How to download any of the 30,000 Project Gutenberg books to your Kindle, direct.

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Kindle Touch 3G   Kindle Touch WiFi   Kindle Basic   (UK: KBasic)   Kindle Fire
Kindle Keybd 3G   (UK: Kindle Keybd 3G)   K3 Special Offers   K3-3G Special Offers   DX

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Check often: Temporarily-free recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.  Liked-books under $1
UK-Only: recently published free books, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

  *Click* to Return to the HOME PAGE.  Or click on the web browser's BACK button

Amazon Kindle for Web vs Google EBooks and a roundup of news - UPDATE

KINDLE FOR WEB
The Kindle for Web demo took place today while I was writing this blog entry.  Here's the upshot, from Amazon, via Bradenton.com.  The new app was "demonstrated on-stage at a Google Chrome event today and will support Chrome OS devices, including the new Chrome OS Notebook, as well as the Chrome browser and other web browsers."

' “Kindle for the Web makes it possible for bookstores, authors, retailers, bloggers or other website owners to offer Kindle books on their websites and earn affiliate fees for doing so,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content.

  “Anyone with access to a web browser can discover the seamless and consistent experience that comes with Kindle books.  Kindle books can be read on the $139 third-generation Kindle device with new high-contrast Pearl e-Ink, on iPads, iPod touches, iPhones, Macs, PCs, BlackBerrys and Android-based devices.  And now, anywhere you have a web browser.  Your reading library, last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights are always available to you no matter where you bought your Kindle books or how you choose to read them.” '

NEWS STORIES: GOOGLE EBOOKS (See Update of Dec 8.)
Earlier today, the title at the Google eBooks site was "Google eBooks" but it now says "Google eBookstore" which probably differentiates it from the older Google Books site we've been using but which didn't have books for purchase from Google itself.

Kindle for Web, demo'd today for more than book samples finally, will provide web access to all purchased Kindle books also, functioning in a similar way to the Kindle for PC and Kindle for Macs apps (free), which have for some time made purchased books readable on any PC or Mac and have required no Kindle device).

  Now the Kindle books will also be readable on any web browser.  Does that sound familiar?

NOTE: The FREE Google eBooks are readable on the Kindle.
  See the blog article on converting free Google books to Kindle format, free, and easily done yourself or via the RetroRead website, which does it for you at no cost -- that's all explained in the article.  For a long time, free Google books can be read on the Kindle directly via these two methods, the latter one requiring only a download of the converted file after making a form request for a free Google book.

  The Internet Archive's Books in Browsers Conference (BIB10) that I was able to attend recently was a very timely one, with the sudden access to our purchased (and free) books online via a web browser at any time, whether via Google or Amazon.

I've read today that the Nook, Sony and Kobo owners can use the Google app to read the Google eBooks online via web browser AND can also download the books to the devices themselves (for easier navigation of the book pages), by downloading them via Adobe Digital Editions software and then transferring them to their devices via USB.

Zacks.com
  I'm not sure Zacks is aware of this, as they mention a couple of times in this article that the Kindle allows device usage while the Google is done through online web access.

  They also say that:
  "While Google’s ebook store is available from practically any device with a browser, including ebook readers, such as Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Sony Corp’s Reader and Apple Inc’s iPads, it will not be accessible from Amazon.com’s Kindle."

  That's not true, actually, as I used my Kindle to purchase a Google eBook today and then went to my Google eBooks area and used the Kindle's web browser to read it.  It certainly IS accessible from the Kindle.

  With the free 3G experimental web-browsing feature of the Kindle (on Kindles for 3 years so far), you can 'read' your Google eBook residing in the cyber-cloud from almost anywhere you are, including on a bus or at the beach.

However, it's very awkward and cumbersome to access a Google eBook that way, although once you're IN the Google book (online) and have set your font size, line spacings, justification style, foreground/background etc., and can bear clicking on the symbol used to do a Next Page instead, it is fairly useful for Kindle owners who want to read a book that's not available at Amazon.
  There is no other reason to go through that though.

  But, again, once set up it's not bad; however, those needing much larger fonts can't increase the fonts large enough this way without narrowing the column of text to uselessness, as google reserves space for its various Options on the left.

  While the Google eBook app for ePub E-Ink readers provides the access to the web reading of a G-book, I don't know yet how it handles the 'next page' mechanism (which, on the browser version, is similar to how the Kindle apps for PC and Mac handle that), as it's awkward on an e-ink screen using cursor access.
  Navigation should be much better on an LCD e-reader when reading through the web.  But the Adobe-rights-protected ePub files can be read in the normal way on these e-readers when downloaded for reading on the device.

 Google has scanned 15 million books and are making a few hundred thousand of them available for purchase when the rights-holders agree.  (I did some screen shots and might put them up later.)

  Zacks adds:

'...Kindle allows highlighting and marking, making studying online easier and this feature is not yet available for Google books. '

GigaOm.com
GigaOm's James Kendrick points out that this first launch of Google eBooks

  . has no Bookmark feature
  . ironically has no Search feature  [It does.*]

It also has no dictionary of course, but Wordweb can help with that, for Windows users.

It of course does record the last page you read and places you there when you next access the GBook.

******* Begin Update *******
UPDATE Commenter Tom Semple (follow the link to his thorough explorations of the Kindle and Google eBooks) said that there IS a Search feature and of course there is, though it had looked like a 'zoom' feature to me and I had not tried it out but just quoted GigaOm.

  He also mentioned that 'n' and 'p' (as well as 'j' and 'k') allow you to use the keyboard to go to the 'Next' and 'Previous' pages, which is TONS easier than moving the cursor into the areas of the ">" and "<" page-turn symbols.   When selecting your Google eBook, be sure (on the Kindle) to cursor to the right to find the "Read now" button, which once you click on it gets you into your eBook.   It's good to know that if we can't find a book on Amazon, we may be able to find it on Google eBooks area and read it there.   I have TWO shortcuts to get to Google eBooks for use on the Kindle.Remember that on the Kindle, you shouldn't use the "http://" portion as the Kindle does it for us.
  Yesterday, I'd used 'http://bit.ly/g-books' but the hyphen is placed in a very hard-to-reach area of the Kindle's "Sym" key so I made a 2nd shortcut today, which is "bit.ly/gbookstore" which has more characters than the first shortcut but doesn't require finding the dash on the Kindle keyboard.  And it has 6 less characters to type than "books.google.com/ebooks" and is easy to remember, if you're used to the "bit.ly" shortcut site.

BOOKMARK the google books page once you get there.

HOWEVER, the quickest way to get to a website is to:
  type the URL (w/o 'http://') on the HOME screen and then right-arrow to the "go to" to get to the website without having to go to the experimental features menu.

******* End Update *******

Bookseller.com
Bookseller.com has a "What the Media Said" feature that's very helpful here.  They mention that some were less impressed:

  . Washington Post

' "The company held up support for copy-and-paste and printing, for example, after too many publishers balked.  Highlighting and annotation features won't happen until later.   The same goes for text-to-speech capabilities that would allow Google's reader programs to read a book aloud."

  After trialling the service, it added, "I can only think this store could use another run through the typewriter." '

  . The New Yorker blog
    The New Yorker's Macy Halford in a mostly-positive article, and a distaste for enriching Amazon (he says), writes "faulty cataloging system that Google has used for Google Books since the beginning is exacerbated here".

  . Publishers Marketplace
    Publishers Marketplace repeats that the large publishers using the agency plan elsewhere get to use it here too and adds some info that other reports said was not available yet, but there seems to be an error there:  For publishers already selling via the agency model,

[Publishers already selling on the agency model] ' indicate they receive the same 70% of their consumer price as they get from all other retail partners.  Google takes 10% and Google's retail partners receive 20% (assuming one is involved in the sale).

    Under wholesale terms Google takes 10% of the RRP ['Recommended Retail Price'], while the publisher and retailer split the sale price 63%/37%. '

    That probably should have been that Google takes 10% while the publisher gets 63% and the retailer gets 27%.

EcoLibris blog
5 reasons why independent bookstores shouldn't count too much on Google Editions
 There are some very good points made in this article.

Digital Trends
Jeffrey Van Camp writing for Digital Trends points out that Amazon will demo new features for the Kindle that will “enable users to read full books in the browser and [enable] any Website to become a bookstore offering Kindle books.”

ComputerWorld
Computerworld's Matt Hamblen reported the email from Amazon that they'd be demo'g the new Web app today.

  Illustrating the confusion today around how Google eBooks works
    I originally wrote, while taking notes for this round-up:
    "What's odd is that Computerworld keeps referring to Kindle for Web as a "device" rather than a Kindle app and opines that
    "...it was clear the device isn't ready for sale" -- adding that "It could get an official launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January, said Allen Weiner, an analyst at research firm Gartner.  The Kindle for the Web concept first surfaced about a month ago and seemed like a "natural evolution" of Amazon's e-book strategy, he said.
    Weiner said he expects Kindle for the Web to still run on a proprietary Amazon operating system, something that he said Amazon needs to change to be fully competitive with Google's new e-book system."

Computerworld corrected the earlier report and added this later today:
"Editor's note: This story was corrected from an earlier version which incorrectly called Kindle for the Web a device from Amazon.  In a beta announced by Amazon in September, Kindle for the Web is actually an application for browsing the Web to read first chapters of Kindle books.  This story adds a new fourth paragraph with some adjustments to the third paragraph."
  The rest of the story had very interesting points though:

' James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester, discussed Amazon's ability to let independent booksellers sell books through Kindle for the Web as Google is doing (places like Powell's Books and Alibris).

"In the long run, Google eBooks may just convert more people to e-reading who may then go on to buy a Kindle," McQuivey added.

Google has talked about supporting the PDF and ePub formats for making its approach more open than Amazon's, although McQuivey dismissed those formats as not all that important.

[Blog comment: Writers keep describing Google's purchasable books as "open format" when what they mean is that Google and other companies challenging Amazon for market share are using the Adobe digital rights-management (DRM) system which is then the "standard" used while Amazon is using its open own DRM rather than paying Adobe to use theirs.  While ePub is meant to be an open format, it's not 'open' when DRM is wrapped around it for rights-protection.]

  "EPub doesn't mean anything to most buyers, especially when reading on the Kindle platform feels a lot like reading on the cloud," McQuivey said.
...
  Weiner said. "If Amazon is serious about the device space, they are
going to have to open up devices ... whether that is based on
Windows or Android or something else."
  ...Google has to "prove to be a worthy competitor to Amazon, which has years with a global footprint, really strong apps on every device and a great brand."

"Amazon also has the ability to allow a quick online checkout, which comes from years of experience selling books and other goods online, and is a tool that Google lacks, Weiner said. "Amazon also has a return policy that's amazing with great customer service," he added. '

Popsop.com   Brand Magazine Online
Popsop.com points out that "This is the largest collection of all types of books of different genres and by different authors of all epochs.  Most of them are available for sale in Google eBookstore—but only for U.S. citizens so far."

A GOOGLE EFFECT ON THE FIRST DAY
  And now we come to why that odd image is at the top left.  But I did that before writing too much from the interesting reports I was seeing.
  Los Angeles Times blogs reported on a curious effect of the Google launch today.

A book by a debut novelist ("The Pericles Commission: A Mystery of Ancient Greece" by Gary Corby) came out of nowhere to land up #16 on Google's new bestseller list.

  At Amazon, in a sub-sub category it's visible but barely.  He has all 5-star reviews, although the only-5 customer reviews so far isn't a reliable gauge.  One person with a 'Amazon Verified Purchase' titled her customer review: "A Riveting Romp Through Ancient Greece" and there are other colorful review titles.
  His Twitter following of 1600~ might have helped.  The Google eBookstore ranking stayed the same throughout the day, while Amazon's changes hourly.  I just like stories like this.


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or highest-rated ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

Tips: PDF Scissors tool - and reminder re non-Amazon free books - Update

I couldn't be here the last day and a half, and I hope any tips from this blog's comment areas and from my visits around the Kindle world will help.  I'll be doing more of these with one or two tips at a time so people can focus on those and have time to work with them, rather than tossing a bunch of them in one blog article which might be put aside until there's time and then forgotten.

TIP:  PDF SCISSORS
This is a new free tool to help enlarge the essential portion of a PDF when the words are too small to read and to divide the pages to ease navigation when viewing the results in Landscape mode.

PDFs with content too small to read
I JUST saw a comment at the a Teleread.Com comment area, offering a new free tool (on a good site) to help with PDFs that are comprised mostly of image pages and therefore cannot be converted to normal Kindle text format since there are no text fonts to enlarge while keeping within the screen frame.

This would be for the most adventurous among you as it is new and he feels people may find bugs, but he wrote it so he could get rid of margins in his PDFs to see the words on the pages better as they'd be larger, whether using a text-based or image-based page (images of a book's pages).  There are other tools that do this kind of thing, but using them requires comfort with Perl, Python or other scripts and files.

  Remember that mostly-text PDFs can be converted by Amazon (or by yourself using a free tool I've written about earlier) to text using standard size fonts which are of course larger and re-flowing the text lines to fit the a small e-reader screen.

Image-based PDF pages
  With pages that are actually pictures of pages, however, rather than actual text, that's not possible with the type of PDFs which are merely images of a physical book's pages.

  Images enlarged would just be larger than the screen and while we have zoom-in tools on the Kindle  (UK: K3), those are always awkward to use even on a computer with a large monitor but rewarding when you just need to look at an occasional table, figure, or diagram with tiny words inside them. Using Zoom-in and scrolling for each page is a no-go.

  The basic thought is that if the words of an image'd page are too small to read, we can put the Kindle into Landscape mode with the Aa key, which might help enlarge the image to fill the wider space across while keeping everything visible, requiring no scrolling to read it.   But until very recently, what we got instead was usually the same sized image with much wider margins on each side.

  The latest Amazon software for the Kindle 2, DX's and Kindle 3 (July 2010) included enhancements that can crop margins when viewing in Landscape mode so that the image or text can expand to fill the wide-screen mode.  That can make quite a difference.

  However, when the images have words that are really tiny, sometimes they're just not helped by rotating the page to Landscape mode unless there are margins we can crop, AND some images are of pages which themselves have humongous margins and a bit of text in the middle.

  With image-based pages there's no way to have something meant to be on 8-1/2" x 11" paper be highly readable on a 6" screen.  If you just enlarge it in vertical/Portrait mode, the lines go off the page.

  BUT, if there are wide margins, then if the margins ARE cropped, the image can enlarge to fill that new added space and the resolution will usually still be good because they were usually made for larger physical pages.

  It'd be nice if we could do this for Portrait mode too the way Amazon does this for Landscape mode.  The free utility utility offered may help with that although the video tutorial shows a person doing this for Landscape mode.

PDFS USING MULTIPLE COLUMNS
  You may also find yourself with a PDF with multiple columns that continue vertically for so long that you have to press Next Page to get the rest of the first column and then press Previous Page to go back to see the top of the 2nd column, etc. Very awkward and confusing too.

How PDF Scissors might help
  So, the new tool offers some help if it works well.  PDF Scissors by Gagan Mazed at SourceForge.net offers the following, in the author's words:

' What:

In short, It's a tool to crop pdfs.
Objective to create this, was to read pdf files (specially the scanned ones) easily in ebook readers, like kindle.
And by the way, it's a free tool! '

That's followed by a short, fast videoclip showing how it's done.  I used the Pause button to see the video'd procedure better, after clicking on it to take me to the larger version at YouTube since, ironically, it's too small on the PDF Scissors page to see what's happening.

The idea seems to be to crop out HALF of any given page (in Portrait mode), enlarge the width of the page-image by omitting or drastically minimizing the margins and then having the software batch all of these half pages together based on your cropping, ultimately putting each half-page onto a Landscape mode page, which will be especially helpful for multi-column pages as you won't have to scroll down and then back up with the awkward Next/Previous page button procedure.

I don't have time to try it myself tonight, but be sure to keep a copy of your PDF of course and try the utility on another copy.  Mazed goes on to say:

' How

• Create crop areas to drop the white margins or crop columns.
• Show all pages together in a stack.
• Pages will be see-through with transparency.
• This will help you a lot to decide how much to crop .
• Create crop areas easily
• Draw, resize, move crop areas
• Copy / paste crop areas using usual Ctrl +C / Ctrl + V

Why:

I myself faced a lot of difficulties to read pdf in kindle (and mobile phones / internet tablets), specially the image based pdfs (scanned image pdfs). Got tired of zooming and scrolling while reading a nice book. So created this to help me 'dive into the reading'. I hope it helps you too.

'

This will be more work than many will care to put in, but if you have a PDF that's very important for you to read on an e-reader, it could be worth it.  And some will have assistants who can do the cropping for them.
  I think, though, that if Amazon ever lowers the price on its 9.7" Kindle DX Graphite (which is a beautiful reader), there'd be a run on them by people just needing a good-sized, extremely easy to read e-Ink based PDF reader.  See reactions by some hard-nosed Mobileread forum members who had long felt the Sony PRS-505 text contrast was the one to beat.  It's a very entertaining read.

UPDATE - See the FOLLOW-UP info from author PDF Scissors author Gagan Mazed and feedback from those who have tried the new tool so far.


TIP: REMINDER RE HOW TO FIND NON-AMAZON FREE BOOKS
This was written today in answer to someone who asked a question in the Comments area and is mildly modified for the blog.

Q:   I am in the UK and and trying to find all the free books everyone is talking about.  So far I only know how to get books directly from Amazon.  Are there other Kindle-friendly sites.  A friend told me I have to download free stuff from my computer and then use my wires to switch it from my computer to my kindle.  Is this correct?
  Thanks for your help.

A:   Anonymous in the UK,
At the bottom of every post for the last few months I include a link to free book sources and and how to find them everywhere.
  The shortcut for that is http://bit.ly/kfreelow3 .

  You'll see a lot of non-Amazon sites linked there (as well as the usual Amazon ones).
  (BUT I haven't added the Amazon UK free book links there yet though they are seen at the bottom of each recent blog post).

  Remember that when you get a free book from Amazon, it can be sync'd with your other Kindle-compatible devices because Amazon has the book on its servers.

  There are the usual good sources, such as feedbooks.com, mnybks.net, etc., but you can read about them at that free-books source/guide page.

  Also see (mentioned on that linked page):
  Project Gutenberg books downloadable from Project Gutenberg direct to your Kindle (no charge) using 'the Magic Catalog':
  http://bit.ly/kgutenb

  and
  How to convert any of 1 million or so free Google books to Kindle-readable books:
  http://bit.ly/milkbooks

  and
  The Internet Archive's 2 million+ free texts, most of them made readable on Kindle - see the article here at
  http://bit.ly/kwarchiveorg

That should get you started. There is also a link on that http://bit.ly/kfreelow3 page to the Amazon Kindle Community message thread in which other Kindle users give you information on how to get Kindle-readable books from other sites.


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or highest-rated ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

Tweetree: an organized look at twitter output and the "BIB" conference output

Tweetree (clicking on the image or the text link gives you my Tweetree) is an organized look at any twitter stream of interest to you.

I'm enjoying the Internet Archive's "Books in Browsers" conference, co-sponsored by O'Reilly Media with support from Magellan Media and Copia Interactive,  held  in San Francisco Thursday-Friday, and will be back with a short report on that this weekend plus the usual Kindleworld news.

Until then, as treetree.com says on its front page:

  "Tweetree puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context.  It also pulls in lots of external content like twitpic photos, youtube videos and more, so that you can see them right in your stream without having to click through every link your friends post."

The format you'd use to search Tweetree for a topic of interest to you is:
    http://tweetree.com/search?q=bib10

That particular search for "bib10" gives you a Tweetree of spontaneous remarks from the 90 or so at the Books in Browsers conference, to their Twitter-stream followers, as it went along Thursday.  As with Twitter, the latest comments are at the top of the stream, which is always shown in reverse chron order.


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

Internet Archive: treasure trove of free books, articles + movies, concerts, recordings - Update

On January 24, I included most of the info just below about the quite incredible, free Internet Archives' text area.

The Internet Archive Text area has over 2 million free books and documents - Kindle formats included -- via ".mobi" or ".prc" files or even specifically labeled "Kindle."

Remember that the Kindle models  (UK: K3) also directly read .txt and PDF files although .prc or .mobi ones may be more readable in font size than PDF ones and many of the PDF versions will be much larger files usually - with images of pages that are accurate renderings of original pages though they then can't be searched as text or annotated unless the pages were put through OCR or optical-character-recognition processing rather than just left as images.

There are also areas of files with somewhat less obvious value, but the main sub-collections include American Libraries, Canadian Libraries, Universal Libraries (Carnegie Mellon, governments of India, China, Egypt), Project Gutenberg (another access point) -- and there are recent contributions from The Library of Congress, UCLA Scanning Center's special collections, etc.).

  Additional sub-collections of books, articles, and other texts as well as a listing of All Collections (usually organized by topic) are accessible via this linked page, most recently added first.

I added this resource in January to the ongoing free and low-cost books posting.  Note that there is also free live music and audio linked on the home page.

The Washington Post did a story about the Internet Archive, which is based in San Francisco.  Rob Pegoraro took what he called a 'field trip' to the organization's new headquarters, which was once a Christian Science church, in San Francisco.  He points out that while the site has long been known for its "WayBack Machine" that displays the initial days and ongoing development of websites, it's far more than that fun feature.

The Archive founder, Brewster Kahle, gave him a good tour of the place and and the work they do there.  They recently moved from the Presidio, near the Marina, to a building in the Richmond neighborhood that looks remarkably like the logo they developed 16 years before (well, they did get to choose the building) and dates back to 1923, "the last year of the public domain"; most works created since then remain under copyright.

The photo at the right, just above, was taken by the richmondsfblog, which notes

' [The Internet Archive] is a non-profit that was founded in 1996 for the purpose of creating an Internet library.  Their goal is to offer permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.
...
The Internet Archive is also well known for its Open Library project, which seeks to create “one web page for every book ever published”. In other words, free and easy access to all published books online.'

They'll be hosting the "Books in Browsers" Conference there, October 21-22, co-sponsored by O'Reilly Media, with a demo and gathering at the SF headquarters on Oct. 21 from 6:30 - ~9:00 pm, an evening event that will be open to the public (unlike the conference itself).

As you'll see in the photos by ZYZZYVA, the main hall still looks like a church, which can indicate a reverence for the idea of a universal library, but they do plan to make it more of a library setting eventually.  Staff offices are on the lower level.  Other photos on that page are of a book-scanning device, the unobscured building, the main hall, and a room for gatherings.  Pegoraro describes the offices:

' Next door, the old Christian Science reading room has been turned into a scanning center, as part of the archive's mission to preserve print as well as pixels.  On each side, staffers were operating specialized scanners -- operated by pedals, like old sewing machines -- that photograph two pages of a book at a time.  In the center, other employees were running computer-driven microfilm scanners. "That looks like the 1900 census," Kahle said as he peered over one staffer's shoulder at a screenful of handwritten documents.

Poring over page after page in a room made hot by that accumulation of computing machinery seemed like it could get a tad repetitive.  I asked Kahle if there was a risk of burnout. Yes, he said, pointing to himself as an example of the wrong sort of person for that work: "I would get fired!"  But some employees, he said, have been there three years.

One of the archive's newer projects is a site called Open Library, which both catalogues books and provides access to electronic copies of them.  Anyone can download public-domain works, while visually impaired users can access text-to-speech versions of works through a program set up by the Library of Congress.  The archive is also working to set up a system for direct downloads of e-book loans. '

It turns out that that the founder, Kahle, doesn't own an e-book reader.  I like, though, that Kahle objects, Begoraro said, "to the way some libraries have begun to rely on Google's collections and 'de-accessioning' paper copies -- that is, trashing them"... and would "rather see libraries keep their original source material while also using the Internet to make that content available to more people. 'Let's not lose it all,' he said."

Last year, about 40 percent of the organization's income was contributed and 60 percent came from indexing and scanning services it provides to other libraries.

Re Kahle's preferred file formats for long-term storage, Kahle said that the archive uses FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Compression) for music, had adopted H.264 for video storage after trying five other formats, used JPEG for photos and employed a related format, JPEG 2000, for text-heavy images.  But he also said that for personal storage, PDF or nearly universally supported commercial formats -- even Microsoft Office -- would be fine, too.

UPDATE - Commenter Stbalbach draws to our attention the fact that the Kindle does not support jpeg-2000 format.  Kahle does say that they use JPEG for photos and the related JPEG 2000 "for text-heavy images."  Stbalbach advises: "To read PDF's from Internet Archive, you need to download the .djvu version and convert it to PDF.  Instructions can be found here:
http://www.archive.org/post/277920/pdfs-on-amazon-kindle.

There are very forthright and interesting responses by Kahle to questions in the Comments area, but, as this is the Internet, rudeness comes pretty quickly.  Comments were closed after a couple of days.  Here are some replies by Kahle:

' sniz15 asks: lossy formats for images. Any chance they mentioned why?

We used to store uncompressed TIFF (50MB/image) and then RAW (17MB/image), but when you are scanning 1000 books/day it gets big, and also, we (folks from Harvard, Library of Congress, UC and Internet Archive) did studies to find out what kind of degradation we get if we use jpeg-2000 at about 1MB per image and we found very very little.  So for mass scanning we are using jpeg-2000.  A big problem is that it is not supported in browsers.

Try zooming in on one of our books-- I hope you will find it pretty good: http://www.archive.org/stream/lifeofabrahamli2463tarb#page/n7/mode/2up

+++
dltj asks: what about the PDF/A?

Yes, PDF/A is better for long term access.  For our book scanning we were disappointed that it did not support an image layer as jpeg-2000 (or at least not originally) and we found that to be a dramatic enough improvement in quality per megabyte over a jpeg layer for books that we chose normal PDF.  We also don't think of this as the preservation format for these books.

What most end-users are doing is scanning documents with their scanner or taking office documents and writing them to disk.  For these purposes, PDF, we have found, works quite well.  PDF in this case is a container format that keeps metadata, images, and text together.  sometimes even has page numbers, chapter starts etc.

When users upload these to the Internet Archive for long term preservation, we use open source tools to process these files and adobe has not gone after those developers, so we are happy with the format.

+++
Hemisphire asks: Will older music sets in SHN be transferred to FLAC?

We are not migrating from user uploads from SHN to FLAC yet. They are pretty big, and SHN is still commonly supported. If people are finding this a problem, please let us know on the archive.org forums.

Posted by: brewster2 | May 19 '

By the way, at the RichmondSFBlog, they added that:
"One of the more enjoyable archives on the site is old time radio programs. Click below to check out an episode of 1953′s The Six Shooter, which brought James Stewart to the NBC microphone for a series of folksy Western adventures. This episode is called “The Coward”."
  Go to their site, at the bottom to play that if intrigued.


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.