SoCal Sandra Posted June 8, 2013 Share Posted June 8, 2013 I know there are many sites with free e-books for downloading, but Amazon has free or cheap versions in Kindle formatting for many books, so I usually get their e-books because it is faster and easier. The Kindle version of The Once And Future King is $11.99, however, so I'd prefer free but don't really know the best place to get it free. Do e-books at the free sites have the features I love, such as accessing the dictionary definition of a word by pressing on the word, and the ability to go to a chapter directly from the table of contents. What do most of you Kindle users do? Also, any other Kindle wisdom that you would like to pass on? Thanks a million! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
happypamama Posted June 8, 2013 Share Posted June 8, 2013 Does your library subscribe to e-books? A couple of ours do, and they use the Kindle books. They do have the free e-books (which aren't always formatted as nicely as actual Kindle books, IMO; I don't have a Kindle, just the Kindle app), but they often have actual Kindle books too. For instance, we were able to borrow a couple of the Percy Jackson books through our library; when we check them out, it takes us right to amazon, where it says "free" instead of $6.99 or whatever, and they download just like any purchased Kindle book. They just expire after three weeks. Can anyone get a Free Library of Philadelphia card (maybe for a small fee?)? I know we can, but we're PA residents; I'm not sure if it's open nationally or not, but you could check into it. Not sure what types of books they have, though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crazyforlatin Posted June 8, 2013 Share Posted June 8, 2013 We get most of our Kindle books through our library, and it appears that many more books were added within the last few months, as if the library sees the rapid trend towards e-books and is trying hard to please patrons. But if your library has not participated in Overdrive yet, the Philadelphia library charges $35 per year. http://libwww.freelibrary.org/register/getcard1.cfm There are other libraries that charge a fee to nonresidents, such Fairfax library which charges $27 (cheaper but look at the selections and the wait lists for popular books). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kiwik Posted June 8, 2013 Share Posted June 8, 2013 It is one of the problems. Our libraries don't use kindle and don't have much of a selection anyway. You end up reading a lot of classics/very old books. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
letsplaymath Posted June 9, 2013 Share Posted June 9, 2013 The definition thing is built in to the Kindle, so it will work on any book that is written in words. (Some pdf pages are scanned as images, and the Kindle can't find definitions for a picture.) As for the table of contents and other links, that depends on the formatting of the book. If it's properly formatted, then the table of contents should work, but not all books are properly formatted. For books that you read straight through, like a novel, this doesn't matter much, but if you know you will be skipping around in the text, you should try out the free sample (most places offer that) before paying for a book. Here's another idea: If you can get a text version of the book, and if you know how to insert bookmarks in Word, then you can make your own table of contents. Then use "Send to Kindle" (available free on the amazon site) to transfer the file. That has worked well for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
*Michelle* Posted June 9, 2013 Share Posted June 9, 2013 The definition thing is built in to the Kindle, so it will work on any book that is written in words. (Some pdf pages are scanned as images, and the Kindle can't find definitions for a picture.) As for the table of contents and other links, that depends on the formatting of the book. If it's properly formatted, then the table of contents should work, but not all books are properly formatted. For books that you read straight through, like a novel, this doesn't matter much, but if you know you will be skipping around in the text, you should try out the free sample (most places offer that) before paying for a book. Here's another idea: If you can get a text version of the book, and if you know how to insert bookmarks in Word, then you can make your own table of contents. Then use "Send to Kindle" (available free on the amazon site) to transfer the file. That has worked well for me. I found out the other day that if you email the PDF to your kindle address, you can put "convert" as the subject line and it will convert to a Kindle file so that you have all the normal functionality. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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