Quote:
Originally Posted by bartveld
So is there a system to finding these free books on Amazon or do all of you just happen to bump into them?
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The posts by others, responding to your query, were great. I learned several things helpful things that I didn't know.
Well, you can't bump into an ebook because it is not a physical object. You can bump into a paper book, yes, but ebooks, no. haha
I'll give you now several select websites that I have used in the past and/or use now to find ebook markdowns and other ebook deals. If you don't have much time to allocate for looking for ebook bargains, these would be among those which would let you make the most efficient use of your time, I think. I almost exclusively am interested in nonfiction ebooks, and my choice of the following websites will reflect that.
Full disclosure: I have no financial connection nor
quid pro quo with any of the following websites, their owners, etc., etc.
- There may be a thread in some forum on
Mobileread which is devoted to this subject. I have never visited it, and don't know where it is, if there is one. It might be a good idea to check for that.
- I've used
this Amazon webpage quite a bit in the past. Be sure to notice the short menu on the left hand side, near the top, which has "top 100 paid" and "top 100 free." You will definitely want to use at least the "top 100 free" if you're hunting for freebie bargains. If I had more time, I still would be checking this one daily, myself.
- I check
EReaderIQ daily now. Supposedly you can find all markdowns of all ebooks on the Site. They don't say it anywhere, or at least anywhere that I've seen it, but it has markdowns of
Amazon ebooks only. Start off by selecting from the menu, in the center near the top of the homepage, which one of the options that you like to use. Subsequent pages will have a menu on the lefthand side on the top of the page, which by using you can limit the search results based on your preferences. You
will want to limit your search results quite a bit, or the amount of search results will be unmanageably large. EReaderIQ has a few other tools, also, that you might find helpful.
Here are a few odds & ends that I have found helpful, and I think that you would, also. Some of the websites will post only Amazon ebooks:
- There is a huge number of aggregator websites which daily list, or have one or more lists of, ebook markdowns, some more in the number of deals that they give, some less. I have run across a few which always seem to have one or more ebooks every day which I didn't find anywhere else, and I check these daily. This forum on
Mobileread is one of them. Another one is that of "Koland's." You may recognize Koland as being a member of Mobileread; she posts on it from time to time.
Her homepage always has some bargains, but I've found the best bargains to be found on a
page of hers dedicated to free books.
Those are websites which have ebooks of miscellaneous subjects. There are also many websites which are subject-specific, for example Christianity, which I check daily. I've found some of them to be treasure-troves of great ebook deals. You'll want to find some sites like this dealing with your specific subject interests.
- When I learn the name of a publisher that I didn't know of before, I Google the publisher's name for their website, go there, and sign up for any newsletter that they offer which seems to have promise of telling about markdowns and promotions. Almost all of them do have one or more newsletters that they send out. Sometimes publishers will bury the link to sign up for a newsletter deep in the website, however. It's beyond me why they would let that happen. It takes some pretty extensive looking sometimes to ferret the link out.
Here's a little trick, too. Sometimes publishers' websites will hide freebies that they have on a webpage, which freebies they also don't tell everyone about. Sometimes I'll ferret them out by doing a specific type of Google search. It is in the format of "<search word(s)> site:<website URL>" without the quotation marks. Here's an example to try to find some free downloads on a particular publisher's website: "free download site:simonandschuster.com" without the quotation marks.
- There are other websites which I check sometimes, like
Dealighted, which list great deals that visitors to their websites submit. Sometimes these deals are on websites of companies, and sometimes they are on websites which themselves list deals submitted by visitors to their own websites. I have to try different search terms at Dealighted, because the way their search engine works. Search terms that I make sure to try are "book," "books" (it won't find "books" when you search for "book"), "ebook."
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That is information which quickly comes to mind, and they're the biggies. If I think of some other places that I deem important enough, I'll try to post a followup to this post to add them.