Free ebooks for your Kindle

If you have a Kindle (here’s a review of the graphite Kindle 3), or even if you don’t have a Kindle but have one of the free Kindle reading apps for your PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPad/iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone 7 device, you may be interested in locating free books to read.

Of course Amazon sells a large selection of ebooks, and you can also gift ebooks to other people or even give someone an Amazon.com Gift Card to let them buy what they want.

But there are also many free ebooks available, many even on Amazon. Here are a few ways you can look for free ebooks on Amazon:

• Copy/paste the following query into a Google search box. Simply replace the word “phrase” in the query with the book category, author, title, etc. you are interested in.

  intitle:kindle site:amazon.com “you save * (100%)” phrase

  For example, to search for free mystery books on Amazon, copy/paste the following query into a Google search window:

  intitle:kindle site:amazon.com “you save * (100%)” mystery

  • On the Amazon website itself, you can search in the Kindle Store for books using desired search terms. You can then sort the found items by various options using the “Sort by” selector on the right-hand side of the Amazon page. If you sort by “Price: Low to High” then the free Amazon kindle ebooks matching your search criteria will be first in the list. For example, here are kindle ebooks available after a search for “romance” and then sorted by price, lowest to highest .

  There are also many free ebooks available outside of Amazon. For example:
  • Project Gutenberg contains many thousands of free ebooks and many are able to be read on the Kindle. Once you have found a desired title, find the ‘Download this ebook’ section on the Download tab and click the download link for the Kindle format.
    • The Google ebookstore offers many free titles that can be read on any device with an Internet connection. Simply find the book you want and start reading!
      • Open Library contains many thousands of free books submitted by users, and many are available for the Kindle. For example, here’s Alice in Wonderland.
        • Finally, many forget that the Kindle also plays audio books. LibriVox provides free public domain audiobooks.
        Happy reading!