Free Kindle eBook Searches

I love my Kindle.  I had a Kindle 2 until it died, and Amazon’s customer support was great about trying to fix it, and then giving me a good deal on a Kindle 3.  Now I also have a Kindle Fire.  And I use Kindle Reader Apps on Windows and iOS platforms.

There are many free e-books available in Kindle format.  Google will help find them.

This post is about searching the Amazon Kindle Store to find temporarily free e-books.  There are thousands.

Many are junk by an incompetent writer that figured out how to self-publish via Amazon.

Many are good, by a writer that hasn’t been “discovered” yet.

Many are “loss leaders” by an established author, stirring up interest to benefit their most recent book.  This is often the best kind of deal, getting the first book in a series when the latest comes out.  Of course, then you’re tempted to spend money on the other books in the series…

I’ve been following a couple of blogs that regularly post information about the free books available.  Now that I have several hundred books queued up, of unknown quality, I’m going to take a different approach.  This page has some links to customized searches of the Amazon Kindle eBook Store.  I hope they’ll lead to interesting items of reasonable quality.  Feel free to copy the URLs and play with them yourself.

I’ve developed a few rules of thumb that tend to result in higher quality in my reading:

  1. Don’t get anything that doesn’t have at least a few reviews.  If there’s only one or two, they could be the author’s best friend or mother.  (A corollary that I haven’t been good about is that I should write more reviews.)
  2. Read, or at least skim, several reviews.  If there are red flags raised, get something else.

The searches below already encapsulate the rule “only look at things that are highly rated”.

The Basic Search: Published last 30 days, 4 or 5 stars, not public domain, ordered lowest price first.  All the other searches are refinements of The Basic Search, trying to get to material I might really be interested in more quickly.

NonFiction / Business / Management & Leadership (This category doesn’t have a lot of free material that’s any good, but every once in a while…)

Fiction (Many subcategories available that I’m not interested in, but I put the link here for easy reference)

Fiction / Mystery & Thrillers (There are subcategories available, I’d rather not separate further.)

Fiction / Science Fiction (There’s a separate category for Fantasy.)