At the Amazon Community Discussions area, there is an official
Announcement tonight from the Amazon Kindle Customer Service account about the new
Free Book Collections page:
' With over 420,000 titles, the Kindle Store contains the largest selection of the books people want to read including New York Times® Best Sellers and most new releases at $9.99, unless otherwise marked. And Amazon provides thousands of the most popular classic books for free including titles like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, and Treasure Island with more coming.
But of course, the Internet is huge and there are lots of older, pre-1923 books online. We wanted to make it easier to find these collections which today represent nearly 2 million titles [emphases mine].
Visit amazon.com/freebookcollections for sites with free book collections and download instructions. '
This has an advantage for Amazon as now they can say that the Kindle can access all those books, which is, of course true, which the Amazon Community Forums have
discussed for a long time and which you've seen on blogger sites such as this one's
regular reminders and links.
But this makes the free books available to the Amazon
Kindle a bit easier for most people to find, and Amazon has been working on improving the formatting of free books that had been uploaded to Amazon in the past.
The set of almost 20,000 or so
free Kindle classics at Amazon now has its own page.
At the new
Free Book Collections page (free classics and out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books available for Kindle), Amazon tells us:
' But of course, the Internet is huge and there are lots of older, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books online. We wanted to make it easier to find these collections, which today represent nearly 2 million titles. See the sites and instructions below to download free classic and other out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books and transfer via USB to your Kindle device or read on Kindle for PC.
Note that these large collections of older free books are typically created from scanned copies of physical books and can have variable quality. '
In fact, the 30,000
Project Gutenberg books are very well formatted and Amazon now links us to that website, but with that particular link they encourage you to browse the site on your computer (rather than the catalog on your Kindle) and you then need to download the books to your computer and transfer them to your Kindle -- instead of directly downloading a book to your Kindle via the catalog on the Kindle (see next paragraph).
There are ways (one of them promoted on this site) to get the
catalog of Project Gutenberg onto your Kindle and browse or search it on your Kindle and when you want to download a Kindle-compatible e-book ('Mobi' format), you just click to get it, direct onto your Kindle. The problem for Amazon is that Whispernet is used for such a download but it's direct from the Project Gutenberg area and is not chargeable as it doesn't come from Amazon servers.
So, give that a thought. Amazon wants to keep use of the webbrowser free (as it is now a defining, unique feature of this e-reader), and I imagine too much use of it could threaten Amazon's ability to keep that feature free. Downloading time is extremely brief though, for a text-based book, and can't compare with time and bandwidth spent actually browsing the web, something they still encourage with their built-in web bookmarks on new Kindles.
The
new Amazon page also makes it easy for people to know about and find
The Internet Archives, which I
wrote about here in January and which has about 1.8 million free books.
Amazon has been paying attention, it seems, to customer interests as expressed for a couple of years now on its own
Kindle Community forums in that
humongous thread about free books elsewhere and on many blog pages.
It always interested me that Amazon did allow the extremely-busy message discussions about how to find free books outside Amazon (while the world of news reporters and even e-reader analysts were -- and still are -- constantly writing that Amazon customers could buy e-books for their Kindles only from Amazon, which was never true). In the last 3 months, I've noticed many Kindle customers now correct those news stories in the comment areas.
Amazon closes its new free-book collections page with
"
Have you seen another great collection of free Kindle books on the web?
Drop us a line"
So, they are really into this now.
It was needed since Barnes & Noble, and Sony, were advertising
over a million books for their e-readers after getting the half-million free, pre-1923 Google books that are readable directly on their devices, and counting the ability to read ePub formatted ebooks. As regular readers of this blog know, while the Kindle doesn't read the Google books direct, Kindle users can easily
convert an ePub file to a Kindle-readable one in about 3 minutes using Calibre.
The Amazon Kindle reads free MOBI files (offered on many book sites) -- in addition to WORD doc files through free Amazon conversion, and also reads pure text-files (*.txt) direct, the latter two not supported by the Nook) but has not counted the free MOBI files elsewhere. Now it can count non-rights-protected MOBI files on other sites as directly accessible, a good thing to point out, finally, even if that takes customers away from busily buying at the Amazon store itself. It's probably more beneficial to let people know what the Kindle
can read.
Again, Amazon's own set of almost 20,000 free classics, directly downloadable by the Kindle from Amazon for some time, now has
an Amazon page of its own.
You can read the
Amazon forum discussions for customer reaction to this new welcome feature.
UPDATE - March 3, 2010I've updated the ongoing Free and Lowcost books page. Amazon's free book collections don't include feedback.com or manybooks.net, which have good formatting on them. That continues to be covered by the
free-books page here.
LINKS FOR SEARCHING FOR FREE OR LOW-COST E-BOOKS As ever, here is the ongoing set of
links for various Searches for free or low-cost Kindle-compatible books.
Below are ways to
Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The
Send to Kindle button works well
only on Firefox currently.
(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at
Facebook and
Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!
MORE FREE-BOOK LINKS
Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it. 
Send to Kindle
most wanted
Mighty Bright
You can access your books, periodicals, or the full Web* with Amazon's light 6" 
![[Valid RSS]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tK6aocjR53J1ICDG49HSrNatGEF999o86YWATPogYt-BQW9VqHK5cK9cnWQRjP2n6LzrDjc-NOCT2jkpkdZLeRu8K-i2lKhMIB=s0-d "Validate my RSS feed")
