Greetings all and thank you for a lovely forum,
I've just taken my Kindle out of the box and was curious how I might go about getting public domain texts for cheap or free downloaded onto the Kindle. It isn't that I am resistant to buying Dickens again but would prefer NOT to.
Is there a good (legal) way to go about getting Dickens, Shakespeare, Dante... on my Kindle? My English Prof salary only goes so far and the Kindle itself was a major bite.

Thanks in advance and thanks for having me,

Click on E-Books in the blue bar on this page ..... select MOBI type books instead of ALL. You then click on a message title to open the msg, and click on the FILENAME.PRC part below the description of the book. After you download a bunch of them to your computer, put them on an SD card and put it in the Kindle.

(mine hasn't arrived yet, so I can't be of further help!)

Greetings all and thank you for a lovely forum,
I've just taken my Kindle out of the box and was curious how I might go about getting public domain texts for cheap or free downloaded onto the Kindle. It isn't that I am resistant to buying Dickens again but would prefer NOT to.
Is there a good (legal) way to go about getting Dickens, Shakespeare, Dante... on my Kindle? My English Prof salary only goes so far and the Kindle itself was a major bite.

Thanks in advance and thanks for having me,

Hello mpiafsky,

Of course there's an easy way to get all those books. Get the Feedbooks download guide: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/kindle
Or open the browser on your Kindle and go to the mobile edition: http://feedbooks.mobi

You'll also find plenty of books in the E-books section of this website, you can take any Mobipocket version and transfer it through USB.

Yeah, that's a much better answer! He's prepared a list of books that you just select from your Kindle .... and they ship them to you!

If copying them to your computer and putting them on an SD card, I think one wants a /Documents folder at the top level of the card. Then your book files go in there. Does /Documents want to be capitalized, or un ? Can some expert chime in here? (so I'll know too, when mine arrives!)

I agree. The Feedbooks setup is incredibly easy and every book I've downloaded from them has been well-formatted.

Feedbooks work wonderfully. I shudder to ask this but are the downloads free? It seems too good to be true!

Feedbooks work wonderfully. I shudder to ask this but are the downloads free? It seems too good to be true!

Of course they're free :)

Of course they're free :)

You've made my year! Thanks to anyone involved on any level.

I haven't looked at the Feedbooks editions of Dickens' books so I can't really compare, but before you load all of Dickens on your Kindle, you owe it to yourself to look at Harry T's editions on this site. The formatting is outstanding, and they're especially attractive with the old illustrations.

Jim

Now for Dante and a lot of the others that you may not find at first in the MobileRead E-Book download section, a lot of them are contained in the Complete Harvard Classics at MobileRead. (http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Harvard_Classics_Available_at_MobileRead) All 49 volumes. The link in the prior passage is to a page in the Wiki that lists the volumes and their contents along with links to the thread where each volume is posted. Again, all free of charge.

I agree that this forum and feedbooks are the best places to start, but if they don't have the book you want then a site like ManyBooks.net (http://manybooks.net/) will automatically produce a Kindle/MobiPocket version from the original on-line source. Quality isn't consistent, because there is no human in the loop, but these may be good enough. Note that, so far as I know, Kindle and MobiPocket formats from ManyBooks really are identical. Combining the two, this is now the 2nd most popular format at ManyBooks (2008 format stats here (http://manybooks.net/format_stats.php)).

For $19.99, I bought from
http://www.mobilereference.com/index.htm#literature
a Classics collection that includes complete works of 31 authors. Here is the list:

1. Louisa May Alcott
2. Jane Austen
3. Charlotte Brontë
4. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
5. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
6. James Fenimore Cooper
7. Agatha Christie
8. Charles Dickens
9. Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. Arthur Conan Doyle
11. Alexandre Dumas
12. Nathaniel Hawthorne
13. Elbert Hubbard
14. Washington Irving
15. Jack London
16. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
17. Herman Melville
18. Lucy Maud Montgomery
19. Edgar Allan Poe
20. Sir Walter Scott
21. William Shakespeare
22. Robert Louis Stevenson
23. Harriet Beecher Stowe
24. Alfred Lord Tennyson
25. William Makepeace Thackeray
26. Leo Tolstoy
27. Mark Twain
28. Jules Verne
29. Lewis Wallace
30. Oscar Wilde
31. Émile Zola

All of these are .prc files and work with the Kindle without any conversion. You can perhaps find many of these free somewhere but for $20 you can these all and put it on your Kindle in a few minutes.

I hope I am not being too stupid by asking ....

Is there a Word format that the Kindle can read? When using my Mother's Windows machine, I saved a mess of stuff using "UTF-8" format. That worked. Now I am home with my Apple. My choices (in "Save as") seem to be:

Word Document (will not work)
Text Only (That ought to work, but I had no luck)
Text Only with Line Break (No workee)
Text Only with Line Breaks (MS DOS) (No Workee)
Rich Text Format (Very common, why won't that work?)
Unicode Text (UTF-16) (Does not work)
Word Document Stationary (I did not try this one)
Some other odd stuff

When I save onto the Document Folder of the Kindle, the device does not even see the documents.

A little help using simple words, please?

Paul, you may want to make sure the text files has extension ending in .txt. For example, OS X TextEdit often does not put in the .txt extension for you. When you save the file, make sure you type in .txt at the end of your filename.

Greetings all and thank you for a lovely forum,
I've just taken my Kindle out of the box and was curious how I might go about getting public domain texts for cheap or free downloaded onto the Kindle. It isn't that I am resistant to buying Dickens again but would prefer NOT to.
Is there a good (legal) way to go about getting Dickens, Shakespeare, Dante... on my Kindle? My English Prof salary only goes so far and the Kindle itself was a major bite.

Thanks in advance and thanks for having me,

Hi there, because most of the books you've mentioned are out of copyright they are free to download of a number of legal websites on the internet. The gutenburg library was specifically built to allow you to download the classics for free. And they come in most formats. Enjoy:thumbsup:

Paul, you may want to make sure the text files has extension ending in .txt. For example, OS X TextEdit often does not put in the .txt extension for you. When you save the file, make sure you type in .txt at the end of your filename.

Thank you, lemme try that.

==Edited to Add==

Oh yeah! That worked. Now we are in business! Thanks!

For files that are in the .DOC format, you mail them to <youracctname>@free.kindle.com and in a minute or two Amazon's automatron mails you a link to the converted document. Same for .PDF files.