Free Kindle Books -Special links, English-only, Contemporary - UPDATE9

From the Top 100 Free Kindle Books list, U.S.   (UK: here)

UPDATES 1-9. - Am updating lists and links because Amazon added tons of German books to pages 2 and on.  Have done them for U.S. and later revised the UK list somewhat, explained in the updates.

  NOTE: I'm trying to include only free full, contemporary books.  But in the UK, they also include, from what I can see, the classics also.

NEW experiment:   Amazon has new Kindle books in various categories and they don't all get caught in the various lists.  Here are attempts at still-free ones in  Last 30+ days and  Apr 2011.  I'll need to change these at the start of each month.
  These will be near the top of the A Kindle World blog's reference column at the right, and kept up to date each month.

  Have updated quite a bit today the ongoing Guide to Free Books and Resources and am moving it up to the top, as the changes are fairly extensive.  Will reorganize it later to remove Logged detail, as it confuses eyes and mind.

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Original Post, with revisions
About 70% of visitors here each day are new to the page, arriving after a search on a specific topic, and won't know about the popular Top 100 free listing on Amazon.  The top-selling free Kindle books are shown alongside those that are not free, but Amazon gives them equal space on that page.

  I've included just a few at the top which have had a good number of customer reviews, which guarantees many of them will be identified as an 'Amazon Verified Purchase.'  Some were added to the Kindle store too recently to have much customer feedback yet despite receiving many downloads.

  Click on any image above to get details on the specific book.

  Backstage Pass was added as a free book about 3 days ago, probably as a temporary promotional listing, so if interested, get that one earlier.  A good number of contemporary books, non-classics, tend to be free for a short time.

  Last week, Amazon had about 16,000 free Kindle books, and they have doubled that this week, as now there are about 33,600 free.   Most would be new versions of public-domain classics and it's reported that the formatting tends to be somewhat better than on the earlier ones submitted to Amazon.
  Amazon currently has over 905,000 Kindle books.

Less known is the section for Foreign Language eBooks.

There's also a probably fairly lucrative section for Oprah's Book Club Series for Kindle.   :-)

  At the Kindle Store, browse the left column to see a lot more.

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ONGOING LINKS TO TEMPORARILY FREE BOOKS AND 99 CENT PAGES
On this webpage, there are always links at the top right to temporarily free non-classics (contemporary) sorted by latest or bestselling.  I'll include some here, for those who spend more time with the Kindle Edition of this blog, which doesn't include the reference column on the right:

Kindle-Edition subscribers should go to the website via computer to use these:
    http://kindleworld.blogspot.com
Any of these can be bookmarked on your computer if you find them useful.
  Thanks very much for the subscription support.

TEMPORARILY-free books -
Non-classics - USA: by monyh and special sortings.

  As mentioned above, these will be near the top of the reference column of the A Kindle World blog so they can be accessed at any time and are changing

Also, the 99c Amazon Kindle books page
99c Notepad, for Kindle

  UK:
  Am flying blind in the U.S.- Can't see prices, but free ones seem to be at the front of the long list, which doesn't use U.S. search process.  Also, I can't see the number of stars for highest rating, so removed that link.  Have added one for 5 GBP and under, as many ask how to find these at the Amazon-UK Forum.  By:
    PubDate   Popular   £5 Max

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Also check out the 30,000+ Project Gutenberg books and the "Magic Catalog" that you can download directly to the Kindle, where it can be browsed or searched, and ebooks of interest downloaded directly to the Kindle also.

Another blog article to bookmark shows you how to either get a free conversion to Kindle format of any free book(s) from Google's 1.5 million or more ePub books, as well as describing how you can do it yourself and customize it to your preferences, a conversion that after a set-up takes only a few minutes.

The footer of each article will have some of these links, plus one to to the guide to many sources for free books as well as pre-made searches for Amazon's Kindle books in the lower-cost ranges.  It's a lot of information, quite jumbled and will be reorganized soon.


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 £5 Max ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

Some Amazon self-service publishers sell Project Gutenberg's free books

SEE UPDATE at the end.
Washington Post Technology writer Rob Pegoraro reports a complaint that "Amazon charges Kindle users for free Project Gutenberg e-books" -- meaning that Amazon is allowing suppliers to sell, through Amazon's self-service publishing, versions of public domain books that are apparently derived from Project Gutenberg editions and nearly identical to them.

Note that it's considered okay to spiff up basic public domain books (which is why they're called that) and then sell them for the value of what you've done to make them comfortably readable on an e-reader and, we hope, typo-free.

  Public domain books make up the bulk of the 20,000+ free Kindle books that Amazon makes downloadable to Kindles at any time, but apparently some suppliers are uploading to the self-servicing publishing area of Amazon (for the 70% revenue offered self-publishers of Kindle-formatted books) copies of the Project's e-books that were essentially created earlier by them from scanned images.  Even this would be legal, as, again, the basic text, once there are no Project title pages, is in the public domain.

  Pegoraro explains:

' The titles in question aren't just public-domain books that have long been freely available at such sites as Project Gutenberg.  They appear to be the exact Gutenberg files, save only for minor formatting adjustments and the removal of that volunteer-run site's license information. '

 You'd think that the work that another organization spent converting image-based pages into proofed text to make them more easily readable on an e-reader should not just be taken for re-selling while the original organization is offering their work for free.

Pegoraro expands on this:

' Gutenberg contributor Linda M. Everhart complained in an e-mail in late October that Amazon was selling a title she'd contributed to Gutenberg, Arthur Robert Harding's 1906 opus "Fox Trapping," for $4.

  "They took the text version, stripped off the headers and footer containing the license, re-wrapped the sentences, and made the chapter titles bold," wrote Everhart, a Blairstown, Mo., trapper. She added that "their version had all my caption lines, in exactly the same place where I had put them." '

  Everhart identified other "instances of Kindle cloning" and Pegoraro writes "These titles appear to be sold with Amazon's standard digital-rights-management restrictions, a limit absent from Gutenberg downloads."  (However, most of the public domain books I have, for free, from Amazon, don't have DRM restrictions on how many Kindles can share the book. )

  Everhart describes the kind of work she and others do to make the free Project Gutenberg books available, which involves downloading a scan of the book's pages from the Internet Archive's collection, running it through optical-character-recognition software and then correcting mistakes and stripping out extraneous data "before formatting the text to Gutenberg's strict guidelines.  Next comes converting that text file into an HTML version with linked images that can finally be uploaded to Gutenberg."

  Pegoraro adds, "Apparently it's less work to convert that output to a Kindle Store download..."

  Some don't think so, but there are definite indications that too many Amazon digital-text-publishing uploaders do not consider proof reading important.

  But, again, all this is permitted under the Gutenberg license.

  Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation chief executive Greg Newby wrote in an email, "Is this legal? Yes. Is it ethical? I don't think it is."

  Newby added that although many other booksellers do this, Amazon is "the worst offender" because of the number of of suppliers for Amazon.

See the article for Amazon's response so far.

Newby has suggested to Amazon that it could directly offer Gutenberg titles as no-charge, DRM-free downloads -- something Apple did in its iBooks store.  He doesn't mention what the terms were though, on Gutenberg's part.

SOLUTION
Pegoraro sees a simple solution:

' Search the Gutenberg site for a title you're interested in buying for your Kindle and download it from there if it's available.
  Not only does that site usually offer books in Kindle formats, you can even download them directly to a Kindle. '

The link he gives there is to this blog's article on how to browse/search a Project Gutenberg "Magic Catalog" on your Kindle for one of the 30,000+ books available there and then click to download the book direct to the Kindle.


OTHER POSSIBILITIES
  At this blog's Free Kindle Books page, I also include MobileRead Forum books, another non-Amazon e-book source, which displays its public-domain books sorted by Amazon-readable 'PRC' (Mobi) format and by most recent first.  These tend to be even better formatted, with linked table-of-contents page when applicable, and mostly free.

 And then there are the 2 million+ free books at Internet Archive, downloadable directly to the Kindle also.
  I explain that at the Internet Archive article.

ONLY AMAZON KINDLE BOOKS CAN BE SYNC'D WITH COMPATIBLE DEVICES
  One thing needs to be mentioned about getting or not getting public domain books from Amazon (there are over 20,000 free e-books in the Kindle store -- see the footer of any blog article in this blog to find them and the temporarily free contemporary Kindle books as well).

You can "sync" the Kindle editions with any reading you do on apps for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Blackberry, Android smartphones, PC, Mac, etc., and resume from where you were on the other device.

  That syncing can't be done for ebooks that Amazon doesn't have on its servers.
  Also, highlighting and notes made on non-Amazon books aren't backed up to the Amazon servers (as Amazon doesn't have the books) and therefore aren't viewable and copyable at the customer's private, password protected website at Amazon.  This might be important to those who have a student's approach to books.

  Amazon probably should have a rule against self-service publishing (in Kindle format) of a public domain book that has been carefully converted to text by another entity, proofread, formatted in HTML and already released in Kindle-readable format at no charge -- but then Amazon would have to spend time checking all the uploaded public domain books against other editions of those books.

  Still, they could probably stipulate that there is no publisher payment for books just taken from Project Gutenberg and the Project's identifier statements stripped.

UPDATE - If you're reading this at the web edition of the blog, please read the first two comments to see the licensing language that Project Gutenberg has, which says that that if anyone modifies a Project Gutenberg book and does charge for it, they don't claim a right to prevent someone from "copying, distributing, performing, displaying, or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed."


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.

Alert re updated Project Gutenberg blog article

This is just an entry to compensate for Google Reader's inability to 'see' the Project Gutenberg article updated today.