How to get free eBooks for your e-reader (iPad, iPhone, Kindle)

The e-readers have forever reshaped the way we read books. They still can’t beat the charm of good old paper books. The sound of rustling papers, the feeling of holding a book in your hands, and the smell of papers – all of these are traits of a traditional paper book you won’t be able to get with e-readers.

But then e-readers will give you the convenience and access to virtually unlimited number of books in your palms. With the expansion of storage space on e-readers and average size of an eBook, you can store at least a few thousands books on your Kindle, iPad or iPhone, three of the most popular e-reader devices.

With that much storage and convenient access to eBooks, the cost for book purchases can add up to a huge amount. Individual books on Apple iBooks store and Amazon Kindle Store doesn’t cost much. The prices are almost negligible. Before you know it, the purchases will burn your wallet. It is common to see an e-reader like Kindle loaded with more than 100 books, but that’s already about $1,000 if you paid $9.99 per book. Fortunately, there are ways to get more than 2 millions eBooks for free. And yes, all methods are legit and no piracy involved.

Here’s a list of sources for free eBooks for your e-reader:

1. Kindle Lending Club. Amazon has recently launched the Kindle Lending Club which basically lets Kindle owners lend books to each other. All you have to do is list the books you have and the ones you want to read. The website will match you with others in the club. After you lend a book, the system will automatically return you the rights of book back to you in 2 weeks. Only caveat is that you can only lend each book once.

2. Free books on Kindle Store. If you have enough patient to search for it and sort through price list, then you will be amazed that Amazon offers a huge selection of free Kindle downloads. Some books are even from New York Times Bestsellers list!

3. ePubBooks. This is one website where you can find books from many different genres and titles. You can read ePub books on iOS devices and Kindle, although the latter will need conversion into MOBI format using a free open-source software called Calibre.

4. Project Gutenberg. This was the first site that provides free eBooks with the help of many volunteers, working to make available books that are already in public domain. Many golden nuggets can be found here.

5. The iBooks Store. This one is only for iOS users and the iBooks Store offers over 30,0000 free books, mostly from Project Gutenberg. Many of them have surprisingly decent formatting.

6. ManyBooks. This website offers nearly 30,000 free eBooks, and you can find a list of the most popular titles within its collection. There is a neat genre filter to easily search the kind of book you want to read.

7. Open Library. This is a wiki-style website and provides you with access to around 1.7 million book titles through scanned copies. You can find many classic literature works from different genres, including non-fictions.

There you go. Seven solid ways to get free eBooks for your e-reader. Some of them are Kindle or iOS specific, but the rest are good sources to ease your hunger for more books to read on your favorite devices.

5 Good Reasons To Own The Amazon Kindle Fire

The Amazon Kindle Fire is a new ‘Fire’ in town, packing a lot more than the basic Kindle e-book reader that we have come to know. Being a full-featured multimedia tablet designed to compete with the top guns like the Apple iPad, does the Kindle Fire have what it takes to succeed as a tablet? Our take says yes it does, and here are 5 good reasons to own Kindle Fire.

The 1st of the 5 good reasons to own Amazon Kindle Fire would be its strongest point, price and value for money. For only $199, the Kindle Fire comes with a 7-inch touchscreen, 1024 x 600 resolution, 8GB Flash memory, powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor running a modified Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS. Compared to $499-$829 for Apple’s iPad 2, the Kindle Fire is much more affordable to a larger market, yet still packed with decent specs. Although not as strong as the iPad 2 in a head-on clash of sheer brute power, the overall value package for just $199 is unbeaten to date.

The 2nd of the 5 good reasons to own Kindle Fire would be access to Amazon’s massive content. While Apple might be the king of apps with its App Store, we dub Amazon the king of content. Leveraging the sheer infrastructure that Amazon already has as the world’s largest online book retailer, the Kindle Fire allows you access to over 18 million books, e-books, magazines, movies, music and TV shows that are available on Amazon’s online storefronts. No other manufacturer has this competitive advantage, which gives the Kindle Fire its unique edge in providing you easy access to such vast content online via Amazon’s user-friendly interface.

The 3rd of the 5 good reasons to own Kindle Fire would be Amazon’s cloud storage, which certainly helps to cover the 8GB internal storage of the Kindle Fire that is only half of the typical 16GB minimum of its rivals. Amazon’s cloud literally allows you to store all Amazon purchased content online, which not only saves storage space, but provides the true convenience of accessing your content anywhere by just retrieving it from the online ‘cloud’. For non-Amazon content, there is an additional 6GB of free storage that comes in handy.

The 4th of the 5 good reasons to own Kindle Fire would be the Amazon App Store. While Apple has the most apps on its App Store, it is very much a ‘closed’ system, with stricter guidelines for approved apps. Some genuinely good apps get declined if they don’t meet Apple’s guidelines. On the other hand, the Android Marketplace is an ‘open’ marketplace, in fact being way too open that it suffers from an overload of low-quality apps. So the Amazon App Store gives us the best of both worlds, by being ‘open’ since it runs a modified Android, but only selectively publishing the best and most popular apps. Hence, there is a balanced mix of quality apps in favor of sheer quantity in the Kindle Fire.

Finally, the 5th of the 5 good reasons to own Kindle Fire would be its blend of power and portability. The 7-inch size of the Kindle Fire is more portable than the 9.7-inch iPad 2, or the 10.1-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab. Although the debate of readable size vs. portability is subjective, the 7-inch size does provide a good mix of decent readability, while being lighter and more portable for one-handed use as well. Add to the fact that the display of the Kindle Fire is bright, vibrant, and as responsive as its competitors, the Kindle Fire certainly packs a fiery punch in Amazon’s arsenal in the tablet market, an ideal choice as the best possible tablet you could buy at that price.