Yesterday I linked to Amazon’s list of the top 100 best-selling free ebooks. But Amazon also has a special web page that points to many more collections of free ebooks!
“We wanted to make it easier to find these collections,” Amazon’s page explains, noting that there’s nearly 2 million more free ebooks out there, since “the Internet is huge and there are lots of older, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books online.” There’s free ebooks for the Kindle available at three major web sites — Archive.org, OpenLibrary.org, and ManyBooks.net — and on this “Free book collections” page, Amazon offers careful instructions about how to download them all. Their last step in the instructions is always: “Open the ebook from your Kindle’s home screen and enjoy.” But it turns out there’s also a couple of more ways to get free Kindle ebooks.
Right now there’s also 147 current books for the Kindle which are available for free in Amazon’s Kindle store. They’re special short-term promotional offers, and the free ebooks are available in lots of different genres, from romance and erotica, to two different free versions of the bible. There’s even a book called the Acupressure Guide For Relieving Hangovers, plus a series of Star Wars science fiction/fantasy novels called “Lost Tribe of the Sith.” (Click here for the first, second and third book in the series…)
But Amazon also offers a list of all the free classic ebooks that are available in their Kindle store — and it turns out there’s over 16,480 of them! Right now their top best-selling classic ebooks are The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice — but if you’re a horror fan you can also read the original Dracula, Frankenstein, or even The Complete Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. I’ve had a lot of fun reading Jules Verne’s original novels about 19th-century expeditions, and autobiographies of some fascinating American lives by Benjamin Franklin and Buffalo Bill Cody. If you keep browsing, you’re bound to find something entertaining. And you’ve got to love their price: zero dollars and zero cents!
In fact, this may ultimately change the world, according to John Sutherland of the London University College. “We are now creating an immense public library without walls,” he told the Sunday Times. Many people have worried that the Kindle might somehow stop people from books, but Sutherland believes that the opposite is true, with free classic works of literature becoming the “saviour of book reading, not its death.”
It’s like a dream come true. Thousands and thousands of the greatest books of all time are now all absolutely free!