Q: Places that List Free eBooks (Kindle or other)? How to improve these services?

By , April 10, 2012

Please help me!  I’ve been using several resources to identify free Kindle eBooks, but I’m not very satisfied with them.  If you’ve searched for free eBooks, what resources have you used? What features or functions have your found most helpful, and what features are functions would make a resource more useful or helpful for you?

  • Topping my list of complaints are listings for “free books that aren’t free” (often these are books which are shown as “free” for Prime customers, but that actually just means that the book is available for “borrowing” for free, subject to the limit of one borrowed book per month for Prime subscribers who own an Amazon Kindle device (not Kindle Apps or Cloud Reader). Of course, it’s understandable that some books’ pricing will change (often, eBooks are offered for free for only a single day).
  • I’m annoyed by services which impose an “intermediate link” (so that when you click on a book title, you’re sent to a different web page, not directly to the relevant page at Amazon or another marketplace).
  • I’m also disappointed by services which list “anything and everything,” without any filter for quality.
  • It’s annoying to see eBooks listed (as if they were newly-released or newly-free) that have actually been available for free for many months.
  • Finally, I’m annoyed by services which fail to provide a meaningful description nor category information for a book. (I haven’t found any service which allows users to search by category, although some blog sites use searchable “tags” for most books.)

Here are several places I look for free eBooks for Amazon’s Kindle (most have both a web site and a Facebook “feed,” shown in parentheses):

Please, give me your feedback!  I’d like to share this feedback with the folks who offer these services, in the hope that they’ll become more useful for a wider audience.

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