More Free Kindle Books Than You Could Ever Read

***Update (1/3/13)***

After having had my kindle for a while I have really been spoiled by it versus paper books and really can't stand going back to low tech reading. I have also been slowly but surely purchasing some books from authors I really love, or series I hadn't yet finished. The article below only covers how to get free books that are made free for promotions or by authors that just decide not to charge for some reason, this eliminates the most popular books out there and you could miss out on some stellar reading material if you never purchase anything, so I decided to share how I am purchasing those titles not likely to ever be free and letting my reading indirectly fund itself. I have created a small facebook page, Easy Earnings where I have detailed a few sites that you can "earn" from online (or you can find these any number of other places), for purposes of a reader all we care about are the videos. Just do your reading at the computer, and let videos play as a background noise while you do. They pay for the hit on the video not for your eyeballs to be glued to it while it plays so perfect time to read and over the course of an entire book you can easily earn enough amazon credit to buy your next one. And if you don't quite make that goal, the methods below to find actual free books will easily fill in the gaps. Ebooks are getting cheaper again slowly, and not everyone will need a method like this, but I felt remiss in not mentioning it as usually those hunting free books are doing so because they can't afford to purchase them for whatever reason at the moment.

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I finally saved enough to order myself a kindle on October 13th of 2010, and the very first thing I did after confirming the order was to start searching for free kindle books. I was already aware that there were lots of free books to be had if you liked the classics so I checked out a few places to find those first. I'm sure I went through at least a dozen different sites with basically the same catalogs of free public domain ebooks old enough to have expired copyright before I stumbled across one that listed more modern titles that were free as well. Once I realized I could maybe find some kindle books from this decade that were free I changed how I was searching just a bit and started wading though various sites offering lists of the free books in Amazon's own kindle store.

I was very pleasantly surprised how easy it was to find free ebooks, but sorting through all of them was a bit daunting. I continued to search for different sites, hoping to find one that had a good selection, updated regularly, and hopefully did a decent job of putting them in categories as well. Eventually I struck gold in the form of the website eReaderIQ. If you own an Amazon Kindle, or if you actually use your Kindle Fire to read with then I can't recommend this site enough. You can opt in for a daily email update of new free releases, the email has links to browse the full list of free kindle books for various regions on their site, or if you just want to see the best of the lot they put the top rated 25 directly in the email so you don't have to visit the site to browse through them.

Once you are on the site they have amazingly flexible filters so you can eliminate those categories that either don't interest you, or that you would maybe find offensive. You can also setup multiple different filter sets if you want to organize your browsing into smaller chunks. You can also follow them on facebook and twitter for updates there. Personally I found the twitter feed to be a bit high traffic for my taste as they sent a tweet immediately every time a new free book was detected, and every time a book changed price. I do still follow them on facebook where they send one daily update, and I receive the email update as well.

As if this wasn't enough they have also added a price watch feature to the site. Pretty much anyone with a kindle will have some favorite author or series that is never likely to be made free even as some sort of promotion, and you would like to purchase it one day, just not at whatever price you are finding it at the moment. This is where EreaderIQ steps in. You can easily set a list of books you want to watch for price changes and the site will notify you when a change occurs. You do have to go to the site and view your list every so often or it will stop notifying you of any further changes, but it is a much easier way to keep an eye on those titles I would like to get than any other method I've found yet.

The site interface while browsing books is amazingly well done and makes sorting through all of them quite painless. I really like how much detail they put on each title directly, and if what you see makes you want to take a closer look, an excerpt of the description is just a mouseover away. You can see the star rating on Amazon and the number of reviews this is based on directly and the mouseover showing description usually shows enough you can be pretty sure if you want a title or not without ever clicking it. When you do click it you are taken directly to the book page on Amazon and can order it immediately. The only downside I can think of to this site is that you will never keep up with all the good stuff you can find. Be prepared to discover a lot of starting authors you've never heard of and enjoy the ride. I know I am.