Free Amazon Kindle Books

A screen shot of Owly on the Kindle. Copyright Andy Runton.

One of the things I’ve worked on for Top Shelf Productions is programming books onto the Amazon Kindle. So far all five Owly books are available (one, two, three, four, five) and more are on the way.

I’m a bit of a luddite, so I approached the Kindle as a reader with no small amount of trepidation. But over the past year I’ve been converted to a Kindle devotee.

There are all the obvious reasons for this: The Kindle is easy to carry, doesn’t cause eye strain and is simple to use (at least for the singular purpose of scrolling through book pages). I use public transportation on a daily basis and the Kindle has made the commute infinitely more bearable.

But, seeing as how I’m also a young writer with a wife in law school, there’s another lesser known benefit of the Kindle that pushes it over the top: free books.

With the advent of the Internet, various groups have posted online for free various books in the public domain. Project Gutenberg being the most notable.

Now with e-readers such as the Kindle becoming more common and affordable, there has been an influx of those public domain books onto the Kindle. I’ve been reading on the Kindle every day for most of this year and, amazingly, have yet to buy anything.

It’s been a perfect chance for me to catch up on all the greats of literature that I hadn’t gotten to over the years (Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, Taras Bulba, Sherlock Holmes, Gulliver’s Travels, The Wizard of Oz, etc.). If you’re looking for a list to start on, here’s a decent one.