Free Amazon Kindle Book Listing?

August 12, 2014 3:37 PM

Is there a way to get a plain text list of the free books available for Kindle on Amazon.com?

Recently I got my 89 year old mother a Kindle. I'd like to be able to print out (hard copy) a list of free titles available on Amazon.

Except for actually being able to read eBooks, she is generally very intimidated by the whole eBook thing.

posted by imjustsaying to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

Pronoiac made this thing which will point to free stuff that is on Project Gutenberg (also some top lists from them here which you can copy/paste and/or print. good list of popular books on Open Culture). Not exactly what you were looking for but there are a few other links and there was a MeFi thread about it.

Does she do email? Sometimes alert services like this are useful. It may be that you want to skip the whole Amazon thing and just go for some free classic books if those interest her. I don't do a lot of ebook purchasing through Amazon but the feeling that I get is that they're not that motivated to make getting at free stuff much easier.
posted by jessamyn at 3:49 PM on August 12, 2014

There are some good free kindle ebooks. There are a LOT of really, really bad free kindle ebooks. I would not really feel comfortable pointing out a full list containing forty-nine different 50 Shades of Grey rip-offs and Centaur porn to any of my 89 year old relatives. YMMV. If it were me, I'd maybe pre-vet and email her a list of pretty good free-or-cheap ebooks once a week or so.

Source: I signed up for several free/cheap kindle book Facebook pages. I have never, ever, uttered the phrase "that's four hours I'll never get back" as many times in my life as during the two weeks I tried it out. Nowadays, I work the other way around: look for a favorite author, especially a prolific one, and see if s/he is promoting anything from a back catalog for free as a hook. Or I use Overdrive on iOS to get ebooks from my library.

Actually, for a non-technical relative, what I would do is hook her kindle up and periodically buy books on her behalf and have them automatically sent to her kindle directly.
posted by instamatic at 4:00 PM on August 12, 2014 [3 favorites]

Oh, wait. I have one more possibility. This is hard to gauge without knowing her tastes, but I might consider a subscription to Kindle Unlimited, which is $10/mo, for a limited set of (way better than free, but not necessarily awesome) kindle books. I've been investigating myself, and from what I've been told, it's not as good as a library card and overdrive account, but it's way better than picking through the ocean of awful free kindle books. (Why, why are the worst kindle books 4.5 stars just because they are free? Argh! Totally missing the point of a rating system.)
posted by instamatic at 8:03 PM on August 12, 2014

There are at least a couple of reddits that might be useful to you:

Free eBooks

eBook Deals

Although, I have to agree with instamatic - the stuff listed under free has a very large percentage of duds in it...
posted by The Blue Olly at 5:16 AM on August 13, 2014