The Amazon Kindle e-book reader is a great gadget. It will not only change the way that people read books but, just as importantly and frequently overlooked, it will change the way that books are published and distributed.

It is a fairly expensive item, $299 for the Kindle 2 - the price was dropped to $299 from $359 in July of 2009 - and $489 for the larger format Kindle DX - but you should be able to save quite a bit of money due to the fact that you will be able to get your books cheaper. It will depend upon how much you read but, heavy readers will probably recover the price of their Kindle relatively quickly.

And, on the subject of saving money, are you aware that you can get free Kindle books direct from the Amazon Kindle store? There's a surprisingly large choice available and, given the price, you can take a chance and have a look at some authors that you might not otherwise have considered.

Okay, this is easy. Just go to the Amazon website and then go to the Kindle store.

Once you're there, do a search for any kind of book and click on the option "sort by - price low to high" - the drop down menu used to select this is near the top right hand corner of the page.

You'll find that you're presented with a list of classic titles by a variety of authors - The Origin of Species, Sherlock Holmes, Treasure Island etc. The last time I checked there were over 150 free books, primarily classics but there were quite a few more modern books available as well.

Once you've exhausted the free books available you will find a fairly lengthy list of available titles ranging from $0.01 to $1. These are fairly nominal costs, and significantly lower than you might expect to pay for the conventional physical product.

You could very quickly recover a good part of the price of your lovely new Kindle and, considering the bargain prices on offer, you may find yourself reading some authors which you wouldn't normally select.

The titles available in the Kindlestore are updated all the time, so it's well worth your while to check back every once in a while to keep up to date with what the latest bargains are.