PCMag reviews products, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page.. The Amazon Kindle is a great, but it's tightly tied to Amazon's ecosystem. If you have a Fire tablet or a smartphone, you can download other e-reading apps to beef up your library, but with the E Ink Kindles (including the, the, and the ), you're pretty much tied to getting your content directly from Amazon. Well, sort of. Using a bit of free software, you can take ebooks in the EPUB, Mobi, and PDF formats and zap them over to your Kindle lickety-split. Here's how to do it. Email The easiest way to put books on your Kindle is to do it via email. To get your Kindle's email address, go to using your PC's Web browser. Tap on 'Your Devices,' then choose the relevant Kindle from the gallery below. Next to 'Email,' you'll find the Kindle's email address. Now click 'Settings' and scroll all the way down to the 'approved personal document e-mail list.' Click 'add a new approved e-mail address,' and add the email address you intend to send your books from. ![]() Remember, your Kindle needs to be attached to a Wi-Fi or 3G network for this to work. It doesn't have to be your home network, of course; you can go to a coffee shop or a public library, for instance. Mobi Format Good news: If your books are in the Mobi format, they're already readable by the Kindle. Attach the.mobi file to an email, send it to your Kindle's email address (with any subject, and no body in the email), and it should appear on your Kindle shortly. You can also drag and drop the file onto your Kindle if you attach the device to your PC with a USB cable. PDF Format Amazon can automatically convert PDFs into the Kindle format, but you get two formatting choices. If you want your Kindle to display every page in the PDF as if it were a graphic, just email the.pdf file to your Kindle's address without a subject line. That will maintain the formatting and graphics, but the font size may be too small to read. If you're OK with this kind of formatting, you can also drag and drop the file onto your Kindle if you attach the device to your PC with a USB cable. Your other option is to attach the.pdf file to an email, and make the subject line 'convert' —just that word. Send it to your Kindle email address and your PDF will be converted into a Mobi file, where you can control the font size and formatting. The graphics will still be in there as well, but you'll lose the layout of the original PDF. EPUB Format EPUB is a common ebook format around the Web, but the Kindle can't read it natively. That's OK; you can convert.epub files to Mobi files for the Kindle to read. The key is a free piece of software called. Online shopping for Free Popular Classics from a great selection at Kindle Store Store. Sometimes free books exhibit variable quality or do not support all the great Kindle reading features, so we recommend browsing the reviews and ratings from other readers. Or choose deals for limited-time. ![]() Calibre can reformat almost any kind of ebook for almost any ebook reader, although cracking the copy protection on books purchased from Amazon or certain other stores is forbidden. Once you set up Calibre, click on 'Add books,' and pick out the free ebook files you've downloaded. They'll appear in the Calibre library. Now click on an entry in your Calibre library and choose 'convert books' from the top bar. In the upper right hand corner, make sure the 'output format' is 'MOBI.' Click OK, and wait until the 'Jobs' number at the lower right of the main screen goes from 1 down to 0. Now select the title again and click 'Save to disk.' Pick the folder you want to save it in. It'll create a subfolder with the name of the author. In Explorer or Finder, drill into that folder until you find the juicy Mobi file within, which you can email to your Kindle or drag and drop onto it using a USB cable. So Where Do I Get Free Ebooks? ![]() ![]() There are lots of places to get. Calibre actually has a good 'get books' metasearch function, but you need to know exactly what you're looking for; it's not for browsing. If you belong to a U.S. Public library, try downloading the Overdrive Media Console. Available for both Windows and Mac PCs, it hooks into public library catalogs and lets you download Kindle books through Amazon. You can find your library's Overdrive Web site at, and the Overdrive. If you want classics, a great place to start is. Project Gutenberg, which has been around basically as long as the Internet, has nearly 50,000 copyright-free ebooks. Has even more downloadable books; it also has a lending system that doesn't work with Kindles. For historical and academic texts, check out. Has about 2,500 more recent free books available, and they're even mostly in Mobi format. Mixes classics and self-published titles, with around 30,000 in its library. You'll find more classics and self-published works. There's also, but frankly, the stuff up there looks really awful. (Not dishonest or anything, just bad books.) If you like science fiction, the publisher also has a set of free ebooks. Some bookstores use copy protection that doesn't work with Kindles. Unfortunately, that's the case for Google Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. Also, remember, text files and Word documents can be emailed to your Kindle, too! Just send them to your Kindle's email address and enjoy. PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society. Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than his home town of New York, his favorite cities are Barcelona and Hong Kong. While he's a fourth-generation Manhattanite, he now lives in Queens with his wife and daughter. Remember those old vinyl records? Remember jumping on the 8-track bandwagon? Switching over to cassette tapes? How much money you spent converting your music collection to compact discs? How about your VHS movie collection? You probably emptied the bank switching over to DVD, and God forbid you upgraded to Blu-ray. Keeping up to date with technology is expensive, and it's happening to books, as well. With eBooks replacing hardcovers and paperbacks, you're in for easier reading access, portability and saving some space, but you're also going to shell out some cash to build up your library. But you don't have to. There are a ton of free eBooks out there, no matter what eReader or tablet you own—Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, Sony's Reader, Google's Nexus 7, etc. With those devices comes fantastic eBook stores for easy browsing and purchasing. They have tons of great digital literature for sell, but you shouldn't waste your money unless necessary (or want to). There's plenty of free options out there, so make sure you exhaust the free before you receive the fee. The majority of the free eBooks available are either promotional items or older, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books, which account for nearly. And it doesn't matter what device you own, or if you prefer reading digital copies on your computer, because you can convert almost any of the common eBook files into the version you need using something like. Okay, enough babbling—here's some of your options. Step 1: Amazon Kindle Store Yes, there's tons of costly eBooks at Amazon's Kindle Store, but there's also some free eBooks available. Actually, there's thousands of classics available for nothing, from to. Other Notable Places to Get Free eBooks The ones above are the best and most versatile places on the web to get free reading content for your e-Reader, but there are some still worth visiting. Here they are: • - Just search for a book (available web, Kindle, MOBI, Palm, ePUB, Nook, RTF, HTML and more). • - They don't have much, but it's worth a glance. • - Also not many, but worth checking out. • - Available in ePUB format. Do you know of any more places to download free digital books? Cover image via Related.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2018
Categories |