Getting Project Gutenberg books on your Kindle

Posted on January 18, 2008 by switch11

A lot of the books available at Project Gutenberg are already available in Kindle .azw format at ManyBooks (if you’re using your laptop). There are 19,505 eBooks available at ManyBooks and they’re all free! When you get to the page for an individual book, just click on the dropdown at the top right that says ‘Free Download’ + ‘ Select Format’ and the FIRST option is Kindle.

Note: You can browse and download Manybooks on the Kindle. @ mnybks.net

For Project Gutenberg books that are not available at ManyBooks, you can go to the Project Gutenberg Website. You can download EVERY book on Gutenberg to your Kindle for Free. No conversion required. This is a good page to start at Project Gutenberg to get Free Kindle eBooks.

  1. Method 1: Go to Project Gutenberg on your Kindle browser and download. You can download directly from the Kindle in two ways:
    1. Using the Basic Web browser on the Kindle and finding a link to a compatible file (e.g. .txt or .prc). When you click on such a link it will ask if you want to download it to your Kindle and it will put it in the right directory and make it available on your home screen.
    2. The other way is to put a book on your Kindle that has links to other books. For instance, the Feedbooks Download Guide. You can read more about it here: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17465
      Once you have this ‘book’ on your Kindle, you can browse the Feedbooks books and download easily (from the Kindle). All you need is to have the wireless on and be in a region covered by whispernet.
  2. Method 2: You download the file to your Computer, copy it to the Kindle over the USB cable. In this case you need to know to put it in the ‘documents’ directory.
  3. Method 3: (For a charge of 10 cents) – You email the txt file to your kindle mailbox and they convert it and allow you to download via wireless into the kindle.
  4. Method 4: (For FREE) – You email the txt file to a kindle mailbox, they convert it and email it back to you. You then use the USB cable/connection to copy it onto the Kindle.

Note: The Kindle does support TXT files directly. According to Amazon “The Kindle natively supports mobipocket (unencrypted), plain text, Audible files, MP3, and of course its own AZW. Additionally Amazon has a converter for Word, HTML, PDF, and various image formats. (the converter itself is free to use. It only 10 cents to deliver the files wirelessly)”.

Note: If you’re thinking of buying a Kindle here’s a link to order an Amazon Kindle.

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12 Responses

  1. R Baker, on February 8th, 2009 at 6:40 pm Said:

    Just ordered the Kindle. My concern is the availability of books that I need in my graduate studies. Besides Gutenberg can I download books from any other book source supplying ebooks

    Reply
    • L Martin, on May 31st, 2009 at 11:18 pm Said:

      The amount of scholarly material being published via Amazon is increasing greatly. I have had my Kindle 1 for going on 2 years now and find it to be one of the most productive parts of my studies. I, too, am a graduate student and even without the availability of texts for the Kindle, the ability to email your PDF’s to the Kindle will be priceless. I find myself being able to carry around all my journal articles and more without the hassle of printing them all out and lugging around unnecessary weight. The one option I wish I had is being able to make notes within the PDF’s themselves, but at least you can do it in actual books! Good luck on your research.

      Reply
  2. switch11, on February 8th, 2009 at 9:24 pm Said:

    R Baker – please check out the free kindle books post at http://ireaderreview.com/2008/01/19/free-books-for-the-amazon-kindle/

    That has a pretty extensive list of sources for free books.
    I’m not sure if there are sites focused on graduate level texts. Flat World textbooks are one website i’d check.

    Reply
  3. matt, on March 7th, 2009 at 4:10 am Said:

    What you say here is NOT exactly true. Gutenberg has every line end with a hard return, thus causing some horrific line breaks on t he Kindle. Those have to be taken care of before you have some readable text.

    Reply
    • Jerry ODell, on July 2nd, 2009 at 3:56 am Said:

      I read books on a Palm 2E, which is an ideal size for me.

      But as you noted, to end a paragraph, Gutenberg
      uses two cr/lf’s at the end of a line.

      So I wrote me a little program that takes out one of
      them. It leaves one in at the end of a paragraph. I wrote it in visual basic, simply because that’s the only language I have here.

      I can’t provide it to anyone, because it’s a really
      primitive program, essentially in old fashioned BASIC.

      Again, my little Palm is just the right size for me.

      Good luck

      JerryO

      Reply
  4. James, on March 14th, 2009 at 9:19 am Said:

    As noted above, just dropping the .txt file directly into your Kindle’s documents folder will probably result in bizarre formatting. I’d highly recommend spending the dime and letting Amazon convert the file for you.

    Reply
  5. More free books than lazy days to read them @ Sharearchy, on March 17th, 2009 at 2:37 am Said:

    [...] for direct download. If they don’t have the title you’re looking for, there’s more complicated options. books, Creative Commons, ebooks, public domain, Read, [...]

    Reply
  6. Adam Schorr, on April 27th, 2009 at 3:54 pm Said:

    Thanks for the very helpful post! I think I am going to download the files and have Amazon convert them for me. Quick question: The Gutenberg files have all sorts of “junk” in them – info on Project Gutenberg… that I don’t want in my Kindle book. Will Amazon strip that out and just leave the book or should I edit the text file?

    Thanks again,
    Adam

    Reply
  7. Mark, on April 29th, 2009 at 9:48 pm Said:

    I don’t believe Amazon will strip out the hard returns. I’ve argued with a Project Gutenberg member about their use of hard returns, and would like to see enough public pressure to convince them their formatting is misguided, and to change it, at least going forward. (The person I corresponded with got defensive and angry, suggesting that wiser people than I decided that it was important, for concordances or whatever, to be able to refer to concrete line numbers, as if we were referring to a line of Aeschylus.) There are search and replace routines for stripping out hard returns and replacing them with spaces, but in my experience can’t be done blindly, as paragraph breaks need to be left. Doing an intelligent search and replace for a long file takes a lot of work. If anyone disagrees, I’d love to be proved wrong.

    Reply
    • Jerry ODell, on July 2nd, 2009 at 4:02 am Said:

      To repeat what I’ve said above, it’s about a
      10 minute task to strip out the extra cr/lf using
      Visual Basic. When you have the program written, it’s about a 1 minute job. Been doing it for 10 years. That way
      I can read Gutenberg on my old palm, which is thoroughly satisfactory for me.

      Not giving you a hard time

      Jerry O’Dell

      Reply
  8. LIz, on June 23rd, 2009 at 4:56 pm Said:

    Now if I could just figure out how to get that to work with the iPod Kindle app, life would be awesome!

    Reply

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