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.
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Method 1: Go to Project Gutenberg on your Kindle browser and download. You can download directly from the Kindle in two ways:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Filed under: content, free books, kindle Tagged: | amazon kindle project gutenberg, free books for kindle, free ebooks for kindle, kindle free books, pg books kindle, project gutenberg kindle
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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
Adam, you’ll have to strip out the junk yourself.
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.
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
Jerry — do you have that Visual Basic program available for download? I’m sure there are others (including me) that would love to use it. And if you posted the source code, it would be interesting to programmers that want to see the algorithm you’re using.
Regards,
Tim
Oh, I now have a Kindle 2.
The little program that removes the extra cr/lf’s
works fine on the Kindle. I will try to figure out some way to ship it off to you, but it probably only works with Visual Basic 6.
All in all, the Kindle is interesting. Criticisms: screen hard to read for old man, seemingly no way to tell how much memory is left, and there are times when you get stuck, and have to restart it.
I will try to get my little program in decent shape. I am jwodell@comcast.net (so I’ll have your address)
Jerry O
Now if I could just figure out how to get that to work with the iPod Kindle app, life would be awesome!
It’s actually also possible to strip out the hard line breaks just using a word processor’s search and replace if you don’t know how to write a VB script (which, admittedly, is faster and can be stored, etc.). I’ve done it a lot with Gutenberg stuff. They key is doing a clever search and replace. Look at the text so you can see the formatting characters (line breaks, paragraph marks). Replace what you don’t want to be there. It is easy to sometimes screw things up, so maybe a dime is reasonable to pay. As long as the service does a good job.
Free texts like Gutenberg’s are the one reason I’m remotely considering a Kindle. I’m certain I’ll never buy a DRMd version of a book or one that Amazon can just decide to wipe from my device. So I guess I’ll have to spend some time learning whether they can wipe anything on the device, or just things bought through them.
I’m well familiar with various search and replace routines; I’ve used them in publishing for 25+ years. My point is inadvertently made by Ber above: “The key is doing a clever search and replace. Look at the text so you can see the formatting characters …” which is to say the search and replace has to be monitored, since there’s no consistent standard used by Gutenberg regarding single return vs. double return. In general, a double return is used for paragraphing, but verse, notably, isn’t, presenting a problem. It’s commonplace for novels, for instance, to have insets of verse, or even exchanges of dialog, presented in single return format. In historical or sociological or technical literature it’s even more common. Monitoring search and replace routines is onerous with large texts. I don’t want to monitor each line return in a long novel, which I believe could be in the 20,000-30,000 range. Combined with some of the clumsy multiple spaceband formatting for indents and even “centering” and Gutenberg texts can be a real can of worms.
The Project Gutenberg process is a lot better than expressed above; possibly it’s improved since those earlier downloads. For one thing, all books have the Mobi format, which is what you should use unless you have some special reason to use another. I have had zero problems with bad formatting with the Mobi format, and I have gotten quite a few files from that site.
Something I didn’t seem mentioned above is that there is a very good program called Calibre, easily found by Googling, for converting virtually any text file into Mobi format, so the student who was asking if he (or she) could add textbooks to the Kindle probablty can, if there is a text file.
If I DID have problems with hard returns for some reason, I would then immediately start trying other sites such as the manybooks site to see if they have the problem — that would be much easier than stripping out the hard returns, which would also be easy, but kind of a hassle anyway.
[...] Kindle’s Project Gutenberg [...]
I’ve had this problem recently and have created a simple web-based tool to convert line endings from the project gutenberg format to one better suited for ebook readers:
http://www.duncanjauncey.com/gutenberg.html
Hope that helps,
Duncan.
It’s very simple…. Copy the TXT file into word, delete the Gutenberg intro if you don’t want it.
Replace double paragraph marks (which mark the actual paragraphs) with a marker (something that doesn’t occur like *X*X*X*). Then search and replace all the paragraph marks (which are the hard line breaks you don’t want). Then search and replace your marker (*X*X*X*) with one or two paragraph marks (as you prefer); this puts the paragraphs back into the text. Save as an HTML and voilà, all clean.
[...] Amazon offers quite a few free titles. There are also a lot of Web sites and blogs that specialize in connecting Kindle users with free content. My favorite is the Gutenberg Project. [...]
[...] to the Gutenberg Project page. I don’t have a Kindle, so I don’t know for certain, but this site seems to suggest that it’s [...]