Well, something must be going on at the Amazon HQ. According to Kindle Nation Daily there are 17,995 free public domain ebooks available on the Kindle store as of 7 am EDT today. This is an increase of 10,500 in the last five days. Kindle Nation has some more details on its site. Here is the link to the Amazon free book page.
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I’ve just visited the said Amazon page from the UK and, as Kindle Nation points out, all these ‘free’ books are indeed listed as $2.30. Given that we should be able to buy these through our computers and download them via USB, it makes one wonder about Amazon’s international pricing strategy. Yes, we might just be convinced that price hikes are not the company’s fault but the big-bad telcos or the tax man. I will be watching this closely, ready to cancel my order despite waiting so long for the Kindle to cross the pond. Perception is as important to buyers as ‘facts’. This does not look good.
My observation of this addition: most are Scientific American Supplement, Punch, The Mirror, and a selection of literary magazines from the 1800’s. Not really books, and not really that interesting.
And Amazon has added a fun little feature: “buy” seven of them, and the price of all free items goes to $2.00 for five minutes. And no way to permanently get rid of them once you’re through.
What they should have done is kept the old magazines in the magazine category, so we could subscribe to the issue put out 150 years ago (or some other mechanism that automatically removes old issues).
1- I checked in and found that the category filters on the left work nicely to separate the books from the magazines.
2- The generic covers to the PD books seem awfully familiar. A quick check over at Mobipocket.com solves the mystery:
http://www.mobipocket.com/freebooks/default.aspx
3- I downloaded one from Amazon and changed the file extension from azw to prc and good old MobiReader PC opened it up just fine, confirming my suspicions: Amazon is (wisely) renaming their Mobipocket PD collection files and making them available for kindle.
4- Anybody interested in getting them free can just go to mobipocket.com and get them there. No renaming needed, as Kindle natively supports (drm-free) mobipocket files.
5- There are plenty of sources of free mobipocket PD content; munseys.com, mobileread, etc.
6- But if volume is sought, the most cost effective way is to swing round ebay and so a search for “Munsey’s masks” which will point the way to a whole bunch of repackaged versions of the old Black Mask Collection. (Remember those?) One vendor in particular offers up 20000 mobi-format ebooks on a single DVD for something like US$20. Similar subsets can be found for Sony lrf and MSReader Lit format. None of this is new, of course, but I figured it worth bringing up for folks are interested in free classic ebooks.
I checked Mark Twain’s 1601 under this free listing, and found that an inset box on the product page also listed another Kindle edition for sale at $0.75, as well as a paperback edition.
The specific publisher was listed as ‘Public Domain Books’ and a note added in the product description that the work had been digitized by volunteers, and that the original was available online for no charge. Sounds like a PG title, then.