I don’t know about you but I love the weight and feel of a real physical book—except when I’m traveling.
When I’m lugging all my things around on my shoulders, you better believe I’m not bringing any more reading material than what fits in my Kindle Paperwhite. And thanks to the fairly svelte file size of most ebooks, I don’t think I’ll ever use up the 16GB of storage space.
The bigger problem, at least for me, is affording enough ebooks to sate my appetite. The Kindle Store often has some pretty good sales throughout the year, but even so I find myself scrounging around for new books to read that won’t cost me $10-$30 a pop. Over the years I’ve honed in on a few tried and true methods of loading new free books onto my Kindle to get my fix, so I figured I’d share my top three tricks for getting new Kindle books for free so you can save some money and get a bit more reading done this year.
Scope out the free deals on the Kindle Store
Did you know there’s a Free Books section of the Kindle Store where you can find dozens, if not hundreds, of ebooks that you can freely add to your Kindle with a few clicks?
Don’t feel bad if not. Amazon makes it harder and harder to find as the years go by. Once upon a time I could have sworn there was a way to navigate to the Free Books section of the Kindle Store by just clicking through the menus on Amazon’s website, but lately I can’t find it that way no matter how hard I try. In fact, the only reliable way I can find the free section of the Kindle Store is to run a Google search for “free Kindle books” and find a direct link in the search results.
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You can do the same or just click the link above, but however you get there know that you can find dozens of free Kindle downloads right on the Kindle Store. Most of them are the first entry in long-running serials (the better to whet your appetite and get you interested in the rest of the series), but you can also find free copies of comic books, cookbooks, puzzle books, and more. The selection is diverse and unpredictable, but one thing you can count on is that these Kindle books are completely free.
Log into Libby with a library card to start checking out books
Another great way to get free copies of Kindle books is to check them out through your local library via the Libby app. The way it works is simple. Just download the free Libby app to your phone, punch in your library card number (you do have a library card, right?), and you’ll instantly see a list of all the ebooks, audiobooks, and digital periodicals you can borrow via your local library.
Now, this is a little more complicated than just scouring a website for free books because you do need to have at least one library card and you do need to jump through the hoops of borrowing Kindle books through your library. First, each library only has a select number of licenses for a given ebook that it can loan out at one time.
So if every copy of the book you want to read is checked out at the moment, all you can do is put your name down as the next borrower and wait your turn. And once you do get to borrow a book to your Kindle, it will automatically be “returned” to the library after a set period of time unless you request an extension on your loan. It’s very easy to keep tabs on all this through the Libby app, but it does mean you’ll occasionally lose access to a book and not remember why until you think to check your library loans.
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Even with these extra hurdles to deal with, I think borrowing ebooks through your local library is one of the best ways to get free books on your Kindle because it grants you access to a wider, more relevant and contemporary selection than any other tip on this list.
Here’s a hot tip to get more out of your Libby app. Register for a card at every library you can (it’s free and many libraries don’t even require you to be a local resident), then plug each library card you have into the Libby app. You can then borrow from each library, expanding both the range of books you can borrow and the number of copies that are available to you, increasing the odds that you’ll be able to get a copy of the book you want to read without waiting in line.
Read the classics on Standard eBooks and Project Gutenberg
Sometimes you just want to own a copy of a classic that you can reference whenever you have a spare moment in an airplane lounge or a beach chair. For times like those I recommend places like Standard eBooks and Project Gutenberg, two great examples of websites that host open-source editions of classic texts that have entered the public domain.
There are a few places like this on the web where you can find public domain ebooks, but I recommend folks check out Standard eBooks first because it offers a good selection and the staff take time to go through each ebook to format and set the text so it looks attractive on your Kindle screen. I also like that you can download each text from Standard eBooks in a variety of formats (including the Kindle-compatible .azw3), plus you can see a detailed rundown of how long each book is and what specific changes were made to format it for Standard eBooks.
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So if you were to download Frank Baum’s The Road to Oz, for example, you could see it’s nearly 40,000 words long and was updated five times, including updates to the Table of Contents to match the latest standard. This ensures the texts you download from Standard eBooks look and read like a modern ebook despite being hundreds or thousands of years old, and to get that for free seems like a huge win for readers.
If you can’t find the book you’re looking for on Standard eBooks, you can also check out Project Gutenberg, which has been operating for longer and offers a free library of over 75,000 ebooks. Gutenberg has been around in some form since the ’70s and chiefly runs on the work of volunteers who digitize books that have entered the public domain—usually through copyright expiration. That means Gutenberg has a larger library than almost any other (legal) ebook archive on the web, but much of it is essay collections, mathematical treatises, and other works that are a bit more niche than your average summer romance.
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Luckily, the folks at Gutenberg maintain a list of the top 100 most popular downloads (where you’ll find classics like Moby Dick, Dracula, and Jane Eyre) as well as a ton of reading lists that offer curated bundles of books focusing on everything from Gothic fiction or World War II to texts appearing on the American Library Association’s list of banned books.
Paying authors is great, but you should never be without books for lack of money
Between these three strategies I never have a hard time finding new things to read, and I hope you won’t either. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big proponent of authors getting paid for their work and I love to buy physical books or audiobooks when I can afford it. But when I can’t, I think it’s wonderful that nowadays we have so many ways to easily access some of the best writing of the last few centuries without spending a dime.
So if you need a few new books for your Kindle this year, give these tips a try! And hey, even if you don’t have a Kindle, check ’em out—every stop on this list save the Kindle Store can serve up ebooks to you in a variety of formats, so you should be able to enjoy them regardless of whether you’re rocking a Boox, a Kobo, or some other Kindle competitor.
