Connecting Readers and Writers discussion

If you know of any websites to get free ebooks, please leave the link in the comment and let us know what your experience was with using the website.

Project Gutenberg (www.projectgutenberg.org) - books in public domain are offered for free
Smashwords (www.smashwords.com) - some books are free and you can search for the freebies. Download is easy, just pick the format you want. I've also bought books from them.
Both B&N and Amazon offer daily/weekly deals on ebooks. Kindleobsessed.com has a weekly blog that lists the free Kindles for that week. B&N usually follows suit to match the prices.

The Amazon Prime membership allows you to borrow a kindle-format book a month, with no due date, just return it for another borrow. There is a fee for the membership. Also, many authors of Kindle format books are participating in the Select program where they can make their books free for 5 days out of each 90 days they participate. Amazon does promote these free books so you should be able to find them on the site.

I put both my books into the Select program, mainly because this way Amazon allows me to do Kindle giveaways - as Mary said, for five days every three months. I was really pleased with the first five day offer, and hope to repeat the free offer, at least for one book, in March or April.

Unfortunately there isn't a special section for the free books, but it is reasonably easy to find them, I think, if you sort by "Price, lower to higher". When I checked, there were literally hundreds of authors taking advantage of the Select offer. Good luck!! It is definitely a good time to find free ebooks!

Good idea, Gillian. In the past I found it very difficult to search for free Kindle titles. Usually what came up were books with lists of free books, but the list itself was not even free. :-) Sounds like you have hit on a good search method.

I found another way here: http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-find-fr... where you can eaily get to see the top 100 free books in any particular genre :)

Mary wrote: "The Amazon Prime membership allows you to borrow a kindle-format book a month, with no due date, just return it for another borrow. There is a fee for the membership. Also, many authors of Kindle f..."

I think two of my books are on that. It's really a neat idea, and I hope it promotes more indie authors.

Gillian wrote: "I put both my books into the Select program, mainly because this way Amazon allows me to do Kindle giveaways - as Mary said, for five days every three months. I was really pleased with the first f..."

Would you be so kind as to explain how to do the giveaways?

+Jared. You just enrol your books in the Select program through kdp on Amazon, select the title you want to include in one of the five-day offers, in the actions tab select "manage promotions", and then you can select five days to offer the book for free.

Obviously you have to have the book available as a Kindle first, and one of the conditions of the Select Program is that the book is not on sale as an ebook anywhere else, I believe. For me this was not a problem, but I know a lot of authors don't like or agree with this condition.

Hope this answers the question?

I found fkb.me to be useful in finding free books listed on amazon. There are several different books. It is updated daily except Sunday.