I have always enjoyed reading. Although with a busy family and professional life it is often a challenge to find time to read. That was until I got myself a tablet last August, a HP Touchpad at their fire sale. I was fortunate to be able to grab a 32GB Touchpad from Best Buy, after waiting in line for more than an hour and a half. That’s another story to tell, about my experience with the HP Touchpad.
Anyway the tablet together with the Kindle app has practically became my mobile library. Today I have about 150 books on my Touchpad, that I have the pleasure of carrying around with me for any period of free time I might find myself. Especially thankful to have that whenever I have to accompany my wife to the supermarket. While she shops, I take the opportunity to catch up with my reading.
Why carry around so many books? Do you even have the time to read them all? Well, that is not the question that I am interested with. I guess, I would probably ask why not. The main reason I have all these books with me is due to the fact that they are readily available for me to download…for FREE. Some of you might already be fully aware of this but for the benefits of those who aren’t, there are practically lots of kindle books on Amazon you can download for free. All the books I have on my Touchpad library were free books from Amazon. Don’t be fooled that those books are worthless books that nobody wants to buy. On the contrary some of those books I have downloaded were hot books.
To share a secret about these free books on the Amazon (well it is not really a secret but not everyone is aware of it just the same), everyday there are price movement on the kindle books on Amazon. And the best news is that they often temporary move to be free for a short period of time before returning to its regular price. I do not claim to understand why this is so. But I just enjoy this “secret” nevertheless of being able to download books that I wanted to read for free. Of course, it doesn’t mean you are able to download for free those best seller books that you heard about on the news and wanted to read. You may still get them if you are patient enough and willing to wait till they move temporarily to the free zone. The point I am getting at is that there are good books that are free… for a period of time.
So, how do I go about gathering my collection of books? A few times a week I would visit the Amazon site to view their free collection. To do that would be as simple as clicking a previously stored bookmark to the page for free kindle collection. And I would browse through the category that I am interested in and when I see any books that look interesting enough, I would not hesitate for a moment to download them. After all it cost you nothing but mere a clicking of the “Buy now with 1-Click” button. The act of browsing through the books is just like going to your local library except you do it from the comfort of your own home or wherever you might be. Consider those books that are not moved to the free category yet, as books that have been checked out by other people, in the local library scenario.
To summarize, to get free books on Amazon, you need first to have an account on Amazon. That should not be difficult to do. Once you have an account, you have the convenience to immediate start downloading books. Of course, to read the Kindle books, you will need either a kindle app on any of the available electronic devices. Personally I use a tablet but I would consider it a good investment to get an Amazon kindle. So if you do not have a tablet, it would be worthwhile to consider getting one, if you love to read. At the time of this writing, the tablets are getting cheaper by the months. Especially the 7″ tablets. I think it would not be long before they become one of those cheap everyday devices.
After you click the purchase button, the kindle book will be added to your collection, which is incidentally stored on Amazon computer. So regardless what devices you may be using, or even multiple devices, it can be automatically synch with every devices you have.
One extra note, when you are downloading the free books, make sure you are looking at the “Buy” price showing at $0.00, and not only the Prime Members price. Unless you are a Prime Member, of course. The reason I bring this up is because often these two prices do not necessarily match, and often the Prime Member price shows $0.00 the Buy price may be the regular price. So just beware of this so that you do not ended up with an invoice saying you will be charged for so and so price when you thought it was free.
Lastly for those of you for whom the kindle books experience is a totally new concept, to read kindle books you first need a kindle application/software. If you already have a tablet or mobile devices, you should be be able to download a kindle app available for your device. For those of you who do not have a mobile device, you probably own a PC. And there are also kindle app for PC too. Yo can download this kindle app for PC from the Amazon site for free.
Before you can begin to use your kindle app, you need to have downloaded kindle books to your device. And before you could download, you first need an Amazon account. So go ahead and create an Amazon account. Once you have done that you can link your kindle app to your amazon account. That way, Amazon will know which device to send your purchased books. Actually how it works is whenever you purchase a book (even for $0.00), it is “downloaded” to your Amazon account. And whenever you use your kindle app, it will do a sync to your Amazon account and download any new books that you purchased, to your mobile device. After that you can read the book without the need to connect to Amazon. Your kindle connects to Amazon only to sync your books.
Anyway enjoy reading…