How to download free or other e-books to your Kindle
One of great strengths of the Amazon Kindle is its superb integration with the Amazon Kindle Store. With this feature, you can simple select your desired e-book on the Amazon website and it will more or less automagically appear on your Kindle device within a minute or so.
That’s great, but suppose you want to get hold of a free e-book, or an e-book from another site apart from Amazon? Well firstly, good news for those of us in the USA; Amazon has a section containing ‘free’ e-books. For the rest of the world Amazon charge a small amount to cover electronic delivery cost (Typically $0.99c).
Kindles have three methods of obtaining digital content:-
- Wireless networking (IEEE 802.11G)
- (Kindle option) 3G Cellular (Amazon may charge for ‘Whispernet’ 3G delivery).
- USB link.
Of course, not all Kindle models have 3G delivery built in, and rely upon your Wireless Internet (eg. in your home) for communication with the store. In this case your Internet bill covers its usage too. Some sources have suggested that if you change your location in the “Manage your Kindle” section of the website, by switching to ‘USA’, it may be possible to access the free e-books without the delivery charge. Of course this suggestion probably conflicts with your terms of use of Amazon’s services at least, and is definitely not recommended.
There is another way to get free e-books and other ‘vendors’ e-books on your Kindle, so please read on. Firstly, however we need to address the situation about e-book formats. The Kindle best works with Amazon’s own proprietary format “.azw”, however this is similar to the Mobipocket ebook standard, and the Kindle can read these “.prc” e-books directly.
E-book Formats
Unfortunately many e-books available from other suppliers use the “.epub” Open Publication format. Converters are available (eg. KindleGen), or the Stanza program. With these you download the .epub file to your PC and then convert it to .mobi format using the program. Make sure you download the Stanza for Windows or Mac, not the iPhone version!
To use Stanza, load your .epub document into Stanza and then use the menu to export the document as a ‘.mobi’ file. Then, plug your Kindle into the USB port of your computer, navigate your computers’ File Explorer to the ‘documents’ folder in the Kindle drive and simply drag the converted file into that folder. Finally safely remove the ‘Kindle’ drive from your computer and your new book should appear on the Kindle book menu.
The Kindle only supports the following file formats directly:-
- Adobe Portable Document format (.pdf)
- Amazon proprietary format (.azw, .azw1, .azw2)
- Plain Text (.txt)
- Unprotected Mobipocket (.mob, .mobi, .prc)
- Audible (.aa, .aax) (Audiobook format)
- MP3 (.mp3) (Audiobook or background music format)
Some other file formats can be converted by Amazon (for free) by sending, for example, your Microsoft Word document to your Amazon Kindle’s email address. Amazon then delivers the content in a usable format to your Kindle. Files can be delivered to your device by the Wirelss method of your choice.
Getting free e-books
Project Gutenberg, Google Books and FeedBooks are just a few sources of thousands of free (and paid in the latter site) e-books. Assuming you access the sites using your Internet Browser, the first thing you want to do is check the format of the desired e-book to make sure it is “.epub” format. If the book is free, a simple way to do this is to download it to your computer and then check the file properties for the correct file extension name.
All you then do is convert the file to .mobi format using for example the free Stanza program, copy it to your kindle over USB and there is your new book.
We will shortly publish another article on e-book sites for free and paid-for downloads.
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Thanks for this great article!
Maybe that is one of the Kindle’s few weak points. Other readers such as the Pocketbook series seem to be able to handle a larger variety of formats. I guess the Kindle is great if you stick to Amazon with the occasional dabble elsewhere.
It’s all part of the same business implementation of the idea about ‘capturing’ your market that Apple and others have been using for a while now – channel your supply of media.
One thing not really covered was the issue surrounding ‘copy protected’ e-books. Many commercial e-books are encrypted (so called ‘Digital Rights Management DRM), and this means that it is highly unlikely that you will be able to convert such an e-book from one format to another. The reason for this is that the converting program does not have the ability to decode the original file. The e-reader designated to the user’s account (eg. on Amazon, or Adobe Digital Editions) contains a unique decryption key, which lets it (and only it) decode the file.