Friday, June 1, 2012

So many free Kindle books, so little time

I just discovered a new free Kindle book site (DailyFreeBooks.com) and have been happily purchasing books. It's hard to resist the $0.00 price point. When I'm not dipping into my wallet, it's worth downloading even the long shots. Hopefully a few of my bargain-priced finds will lead to the discovery of a new author.

Yes, I know that there are a lot of free Kindle book resources out there, including the Kindle Forum on Amazon where I have unearthed a few treasures. What I'm enjoying about this new researce is that I can narrow by genre and then see a list that includes the book cover, description, and rating. There is also a "Free on" date, which is helpful because books often aren't free for long.

DailyFreeBooks.com is the US version of a successful UK-based free books site. In a follow-up to the May 24, 2012 launch announcement, one of the site's senior members said that they strive to ensure that the site "reads as well as possible on the Kindle browser as a computer."* I pulled out my Kindle Keyboard 3G to check. The page does display well, and I was able to quickly navigate to the Writing category, but I was disappointed to find that clicking on a book link results in the error "Web Browser could not open this link because opening multiple windows is not supported." Oh well, at least it works on my computer or iPhone. I also noticed that one book pulled into the Writing category was actually not a writing book, but I'm sure the cross-over was because the author listed the Genre as "The Writing Network."

I'm familiar with working out kinks in a website, even after publication, so these quirks don't bother me at this stage in their launch. I look forward to seeing how they grow and improve.

For now, I have signed up for their daily email with "a summary list of new and current free eBooks from Amazon.com and Smashwords plus Kindle Daily Deal". I also selected two favorite genres for inclusion. My only fear is that this will increase my already long reading list. Maybe I'll catch up someday when my son is no longer a toddler. A girl can dream.

At the risk of adding to that list..... What is your favorite free ebooks resource?

Below is a short list of the free Kindle book sites I have visited. Please comment and I will update my list with new links.

* Correction - My source on the Amazon Kindle Forum clarified this point: "When I mentioned optimised for Kindle in a previous post, I was really referring to the our forum (KUF) itself rather than dailyfreebooks.com where there are definite improvements needing to be made as far as Kindle goes."