seeking books in Spanish on Amazon Kindle
March 7, 2015 2:14 PM   Subscribe

Please help me find books on Amazon Kindle that are free, or part of the unlimited program, or are less than $2. Duolingo says I can understand 75%-80% of Spanish newspaper articles. I would self report that I am a minimally competent Spanish speaker/reader, with English as my first language.

I think I want YA, but maybe I want something a step before YA? Maybe I want bodice rippers? Maybe I want science fiction?

In English I read a lot of non-fiction, so non-fiction aimed at the high school crowd might be good.

I definitely want things that are originally written in Spanish, and would prefer books written by women and/or people of color. Books written by Anglo dudes and translated into Spanish are right out.

What books in Spanish are on your Kindle?
posted by bilabial to Society & Culture (7 answers total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
This comes up from time to time with my wife who speaks/reads mainly in Spanish. She searches Kindle books using Spanish words. Since you are not fluent, I recommend you search out the key words / title words in English, place those in a language translator and then use the Spanish term to search for the books you may be interested in. For example, place "arte" to search "art" books. Then you can order the findings in price low to high.

Since you mentioned science fiction, you can try ciencia ficcion. Ranked low to high price, I got these results (1565 selections)

http://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_st_price-asc-rank?keywords=ciencia+ficcion&qid=1425770059&rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Aciencia+ficcion&sort=price-asc-rank

They also have a section called Selección Kindle.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 3:16 PM on March 7, 2015


My Kindle has just one book in Spanish, meeting only a couple of your criteria--I had real trouble reading even the bits I did but it was very interesting. The guy behind OF blog reviews a lot of work in Spanish, including SF/F (the main topic), so you might ask him for suggestions.

You probably know this and only want specific recommendations, but Amazon's advanced search supports searching by genre on Kindle in Spanish and sorting by price. One page of free SF/F results has a fair number of reviews, and they mostly aren't translations. Since you're not sure what will work for you, you might try a bunch that way. At amazon.es, I can only get decent results by browsing the Kindle store directly, and I don't know if this trick for buying from it still works.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 3:18 PM on March 7, 2015


Oh, there are a TON of trashy romance novels in Spanish available for the kindle, and once you buy one, your amazon recs will now believe you want nothing but Spanish-language trashy romance novels.

Spanish-language storefront: Kindle Books en español. Categories down the left to optimize a bit.

"Kindle Flash" is the Kindle Daily Deal in Spanish, I believe. Isabel Allende was recommended to me as accessible to anglophone Americans reading in Spanish, especially the YA "El Ciudad de las Bestias."

Seriously once you buy one Spanish-language book, amazon CANNOT BE HELPFUL ENOUGH in suggesting a billion more for you. Once you even put a toe in that rabbit hole, you will discover there is like this whole enormous Spanish-language Amazon.com serving the US that you have never had a hint existed but exists entirely in parallel with its English-language counterpart, and is nearly as enormous, and would love to feed your pop fiction needs for TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PAGES AT A TIME.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:18 PM on March 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


See here if Amazon lets you access the Spanish language ebook shop. Kobobooks and Google Play have lots of titles, too.

An alternative is to try Lektu (smallish publisher of DRM-free ebooks tending towards SF/F) or any other Spanish retailer like La Casa del Libro (DRM-laden ebooks).
posted by sukeban at 11:25 PM on March 7, 2015


If you want free Spanish ebooks I have seen a ton on my local library's online catalogue. If you find an Amazon book you want and don't want to pay for you can always try there.
posted by chaiminda at 7:40 AM on March 8, 2015


I hate to say it. Please don't judge me (*in a Scottish brogue* in South America everybody does it)but there are a ton of sites out there to get books in Spanish for free. I used to use them all the time before many books were available. They come and they go.

Now I use instapaper to save Spanish articles to read later and download to my Kindle.
posted by Che boludo! at 9:13 AM on March 8, 2015


Response by poster: Che, could you give me some more information about getting Spanish language articles on Instapaper?

My googlefu is not strong, and the information isn't on their FAQ.
posted by bilabial at 7:31 AM on March 9, 2015


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