Kindle Buffet: Find and download the best free books, magazines and newspapers for your Kindle, iPhone, iPad or Android

O
ne of the best things about Amazon’s digital bookstore is that many of its most popular books are offered completely free of charge during brief promotional periods. If you manage to find and download a book while it’s offered free, it’s yours to keep—forever. It’s a great way to sample a new genre, or perhaps discover an author you hadn’t noticed before.

This section of the book will describe a series of websites designed to help you locate free Kindle books. The first,
KindleBuffet.com
, is dear to my heart: I’m the founding publisher and update the site each day.

Yes, I love downloading free books to my Kindles so much, I started the website and newsletter called
KindleBuffet.com
to help keep track of the very best books currently available free. (The free promotions usually last only a few days, but there’s a new crop every day). Take a look, and I’m sure you’ll be amazed at the wealth of great books—usually there are several hundred freebies in virtually every category of fiction and nonfiction, every day of the year. And these aren’t just the dogs that nobody wants, the selection includes bona-fide bestsellers from the most famous authors in the world. You may never have to pay for a book again! Heaven knows I’ve already downloaded more books than I’d be able to read in three lifetimes. But there’s two things I’ve never been able to refuse—free food and free books.

Of the thousands of new books made available every day, I whittle the list down to highlight only the best on Kindle Buffet . For this, I use a two simple yardsticks: how many five-star reviews have Amazon customers posted about the book? Then, to skim the cream a bit more, I compare a book’s number of positive reviews versus negative reviews. Although individual reviewers frequently disagree about a given book—and Amazon certainly has its share of knuckleheads offering their two-cents’ worth—the bottom line is usually clear: the best, most widely enjoyed books attract the most (and best percentage of) positive reviews.

Kindle Buffet also has bestseller lists, updated hourly, of free Kindle books for every Amazon category—fiction, romance, business, cookbooks—you name it. So if you’d like to load up your Kindle with plenty of great reading material without spending a dime, visit
www.
KindleBuffet.com
.

If you’re curious as to why authors and publishers sometimes offer their books free in Kindle format, the answer is pretty simple: it boosts overall sales, especially for authors who’ve written a series of books. Sure, a few sales are “lost” for a certain title while it’s free, but the word-of-mouth generated by the Kindle giveaway usually boosts sales of the author’s other titles.

Figure 1. The home page at KindleBuffet.com. Visit the site and get the free newsletter showing Editor’s Picks of the highest quality Kindle books currently offered free.

R
ecently Amazon’s line of Kindle devices have gotten so inexpensive it’s hard to resist buying at least one. But you don’t need any of Amazon’s hardware to enjoy Kindle books. Amazon offers free Kindle apps for nearly every brand of cellphone, tablet, and desktop computer. For that matter, you can read Kindle books in a Web browser.

One footnote: In a coming section, we’ll discuss how to “borrow” Kindle books, and for that you’d need a Kindle device.

A
s I mentioned, I have a special interest in Kindle Buffet since it’s my baby. But there are several worthy competitors, and I’ll list them here. Each has a different focus that you might find useful. Kindle Buffet’s main attraction is that its “Editor’s Picks” section focuses on the very best Kindle books currently offered free, so if your reading time is limited, Kindle Buffet might be an effective time-saver. Some of the other sites, however, offer a more complete selection. Also, some of the other sites accept advertising from authors who pay to have their books featured. Nothing wrong with that, except that it results in these sites recommending some truly awful books from time to time.

Like Kindle Buffet, the sites mentioned here participate in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program that pays advertising fees for linking to Amazon.com. While this list isn’t exhaustive, these sites are among the best:

Pixelofink.com

t
he-cheap.net

e
readernewstoday.com

f
kbooksandtips.com

k
indlenationdaily.com

t
hekindledailydeal.com

U
ntil now, our discussion has focused on current books—those published within the past few years and usually available free only through Amazon for a limited time. However, there is a whole new category of books freely available on Amazon and other sites. These “Public Domain” works include the classics from authors like William Shakespreare, Jane Austen, Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and countless others. Unlike the books featured in Kindle Buffet’s “Editor’s Picks,” these old classics remain free all year long.

These free classics can pop up any time you’re browsing or searching Amazon. For example, enter a search for “Bronte,” and among the results are free Kindle editions of up books by the Bronte sisters—Ann, Charlotte and Emily—as shown below:

Figure 1: Free eBooks of classic novels by the Bronte sisters.

Notice the books with the generic covers and the book with the Kindle graphic for a cover. They’re all priced at $0.00. These are Public Domain titles, so Amazon lets you download them for free to your Kindle. The beige and green covers appear on several of the books in my library, pictured below. These are all free—and rather hard-to-find in printed form—books that I got from Amazon.com.

In the image below, King Henry V by Shakespeare, Four Weird Tales by Algernon Blackwood, The Centaur by Algernon Blackwood, The Return by Walter de la Mare and the Raven by Edgar Allen Poe were all free. Amazon has a huge collection available.

Figure 2: My Library showing several free books.

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T
IP:
Many rare and out-of-print books are now available as eBooks from several different sites. If you’ve been searching for a book that means a lot to you to own—maybe something from your childhood or with similar sentimental value—be sure to check Project Gutenberg and Amazon. It may well be available on one of these sites.

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I
n addition to Amazon, several other websites offer vast selections of Public Domain books. The most well-known is likely Project Gutenberg, located at
http://www.gutenberg.org/
.

F
igure 3: The Project Gutenberg homepage

Figure 3
shows the Project Gutenberg homepage. The left navigation menu gives you access to the site’s entire book catalog. You can choose to
Search Catalog
,
Browse Catalog
or you can view
Book Categories
.

Let’s search for a well-known suspense story, “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James. Here is the result from Project Gutenberg: