{"id":377,"date":"2011-12-10T16:22:43","date_gmt":"2011-12-10T22:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/?p=377"},"modified":"2011-12-10T16:22:43","modified_gmt":"2011-12-10T22:22:43","slug":"free-kindle-ebook-searches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/2011\/12\/free-kindle-ebook-searches\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Kindle eBook Searches"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love my Kindle<\/a>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Now I also have a Kindle Fire<\/a>.\u00a0 And I use Kindle Reader Apps <\/a>on Windows and iOS platforms.<\/p>\n

There are many free e-books available in Kindle format.\u00a0 Google will help find them.<\/p>\n

This post is about searching the Amazon Kindle Store to find temporarily free e-books.\u00a0 There are thousands.<\/p>\n

Many are junk by an incompetent writer that figured out how to self-publish via Amazon.<\/p>\n

Many are good, by a writer that hasn’t been “discovered” yet.<\/p>\n

Many are “loss leaders” by an established author, stirring up interest to benefit their most recent book.\u00a0 This is often the best kind of deal, getting the first book in a series when the latest comes out.\u00a0 Of course, then you’re tempted to spend money on the other books in the series…<\/p>\n

I’ve been following a couple of blogs that regularly post information about the free books available.\u00a0 Now that I have several hundred books queued up, of unknown quality, I’m going to take a different approach.\u00a0 This page has some links to customized searches of the Amazon Kindle eBook Store.\u00a0 I hope they’ll lead to interesting items of reasonable quality.\u00a0 Feel free to copy the URLs and play with them yourself.<\/p>\n

I’ve developed a few rules of thumb that tend to result in higher quality in my reading:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Don’t get anything that doesn’t have at least a few reviews.\u00a0 If there’s only one or two, they could be the author’s best friend or mother.\u00a0 (A corollary that I haven’t been good about is that I should write more reviews.)<\/li>\n
  2. Read, or at least skim, several reviews.\u00a0 If there are red flags raised, get something else.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The searches below already encapsulate the rule “only look at things that are highly rated”.<\/p>\n

    The Basic Search<\/a>: Published last 30 days, 4 or 5 stars, not public domain, ordered lowest price first.\u00a0 All the other searches are refinements of The Basic Search, trying to get to material I might really be interested in more quickly.<\/p>\n

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

    Fiction<\/a> (Many subcategories available that I’m not interested in, but I put the link here for easy reference)<\/p>\n

    Fiction \/ Mystery & Thrillers<\/a> (There are subcategories available, I’d rather not separate further.)<\/p>\n

    Fiction \/ Science Fiction<\/a> (There’s a separate category for Fantasy.)<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I love my Kindle.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Now I also have a Kindle Fire.\u00a0 And I use Kindle Reader Apps on Windows and iOS platforms. There are many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":381,"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions\/381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}