If you are a new Kindle user and a little confused about how find, download free ebooks and transfer them to your Kindle, you might want to start by learning how to download books from Project Gutenberg. That collection is free and simple to use. Downloading books for the Kindle from Google Books often requires converting them from one file format to another, so your skill and computer comfort level needs to be a bit higher than if you are using Project Gutenberg.
Free eBooks: Google Books
The ambitious goal of Google Books is an integral part of Google's history. Back when Google was called Backrub, the founders' plan based on their idea that "envisioned people everywhere being able to search through all of the world's books to find the ones they're looking for," according to Google's history of the Google Book project. Google has books in over 35 languages, and it can be a overwhelming if you do not know how to refine your searches.
How to Find Free Books on Google Books
To begin your search for free ebooks, bookmark Google Books Advanced Book Search. If you have a specific book, author, or topic in mind, you can start at this search page and fine tune your potential results. You do not need to fill in every box on the search page.
First, set the "Search" option to "Full view only." This means your results will show the entire ebook instead of just a snippet. For "Content" you should choose "Books." There are a lot of magazines on Google Books that are full view but can not be downloaded, and you want to have books you can download. In "Language" you should choose whatever language you use to read your books.
If you have a specific title or author in mind, put that name in the search field. It is best to use quotation marks around the names, because you are going to get a lot of results and it helps to be as specific as possible. To experiment with this, search for "Jane Austen" and press the Google Search button. We will use the results to learn how to download a book.
How to Download Free Books for the Kindle
Some of the results will show Jane Austen and another name. The other person could be a translator, editor, or someone who wrote a forward. Near the top of the search results will be Persuasion. Click on this title, and you will be brought to a new page that shows the scan of the book. You can read the book online, or you can download it for your Kindle.
On the far right corner, there are several options. Choose "download" and a menu will pop open. Sometimes there is only one choice, but usually you can decide between EPUB and PDF. If you have a Kindle 1, you should choose EPUB. Kindle 2 and 3 can handle PDF files better, but EPUB is still the best choice. If you click on the image at the bottom of this article, it will get larger and you can see the EPUB choice example.
When you click EPUB, a dialogue box will open to save the file. Choose "Save FIle" and press OK. Remember where you are saving it, because you are going to need that file soon. After you have saved the file, you need to learn to use Calibre to convert the EPUB file to Kindle format.
Once the file is converted, you can either transfer it with a USB cable or pay a few dimes to have Amazon transfer it to your Kindle. Amazon has detailed instructions on different methods to transfer files to your Kindle. If converting books with Calibre seems to troublesome or an EPUB option is not available, you can download the PDF file and send it to Amazon for conversion. Soon your new book will appear on your Kindle, and you can start enjoying your free ebook.
Sources
"History of Google Books" and statistics about the number of books is from Google Books info page, which was accessed on November 27, 2010.
TLE101
Alex Sharp - Alex Sharp is a teacher who has been keeping Suite101 readers up to date with the latest in audio- and e-book gadgetry since 2008.
