[maxreason]

I've seen kindle copies of books on amazon for years, but don't have electronic gizmos like ipads, iphones, kindle readers and so forth. I only have my PC running a recent 64-bit Linux Mint operating system.

I finally broke down and decided to read what appear to be free kindle versions of books on the amazon.com website. I found my way to the calibre website, entered the line of text from the website to install on my computer, and the installation process apparently completed with no problems.

I figured I could now download and view ebooks ... sorta like downloading PDF files and reading with the PDF viewer application. Right? I mean ... I figured "isn't an ebook more-or-less just a PDF file"?

Uh, maybe not?

When I executed calibre in a terminal window displayed a dialog that says "welcome to caliber" and says "the one stop solution to all your e-book needs". Sounds great!

But then the dialog asks me to "choose your e-book device". My e-book device? What is an e-book device? I mean, isn't calibre "my one stop solution to my e-book needs"? Isn't my linux computer my e-book device? If not, what is?

And how do I download the free ($0.00) books from amazon that I was looking at? For example, like this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Mike-Busch-Ai..._encoding=UTF8

I started reading various documents but just got more and more confused about what this whole ebook/calibre process is. Maybe because I expected something simple and obvious like a PDF viewer + PDF files + some kind of library mechanism to display available/saved books I have my head screwed on backwards or inside-out. But what I figured had to be simple seems anything but simple or obvious.

Is there some super-brief, super-concise explanation of everything somewhere? Or can someone write an answer that is essentially a 2, 3, 5, 8 paragraph "reading ebooks with calibre on linux computer for absolute, complete, utter morons" to explain how I can download ebooks and view them on my 64-bit linux mint computer with calibre?

Oh, and don't forget to tell me what is my "device" so I can get past the first step in the calibre welcome wizard. And also the answers to all the rest of the steps that might follow that I haven't seen yet.

Thanks much.

And if something like this exists, feel free to just point me there. But it really must be written for someone who has ZERO context and knows ZERO of the established lingo (like what is a "device"). Otherwise I'll just throw up my hands in frustration and forget ebooks exist for yet another decade.

Oh, one final note. I have no interest in this entire ebook universe if I can't read supposedly free ebooks without paying (for the ebook and/or reader and/or anything else). If "free" doesn't mean "free", then I'd rather just continue to buy physical printed books and forget I ever heard terms like ebooks and kindle. So if that's the case, just say "free ain't free" and no need to explain calibre and so forth.