Tuesday, July 16, 2013

A Month Goes By

A month goes by, and the free ebooks just keep pouring in—a lot faster than i can read them!

My "new add to kindle" folder has 59 books in it at the moment (everything from Lonely Planet travel guides—for fiction research—to the third Cormac McCarthy novel in the All The Pretty Horses series and seven Iris Murdoch novels and three Simon Winchester non-fiction books and Advanced Programming In The UNIX Environment, 2nd edition).  What a motley collection of interests!  I'll get to them all, eventually.

Read more, that's the solution.

[  Plus, i almost forgot to mention:  i'm converting, for my own personal use, a regular book into an ebook—mainly because there's no ebook commercially available.  It's a pain, but worth it in the end.  Each page has to be scanned, and then i save each chapter as a PDF; from those PDFs, i'm copying the text into an MS Word file (using the built-in OCR now in Mac OS X); the Figures i add in from the individual page scans, as the quality is higher.  It's an interesting endeavor, and i consider the ebook conversion to be Fair Use since i own a copy of the book (and can't purchase an ebook version of it).  If MIT Press disagrees, i'm happy to see them in court.  ;-)  ]

Happy day, all.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Free Ebook *Talk*, Not Listings

OK, i did it—switched the URL to FreeEbookTalk.blogspot.com (from FreeEbookListings.blogspot.com) and changed the title & description, etc.

"Listings" sounds less legitimate than "Talk" to my ears.  :-D

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yesterday i faced a probably-common problem—i had some ebook files (.MOBI in this case) of books i wanted to read, and i put them on my Kindle; but when i went to pull them up, it denied me access.  damned!  (and they had worked fine on my computer's Kindle reader!)

the solution?  i used Calibre and converted the troublesome .MOBI files into .AZW3 files, and then loaded those files onto the Kindle.  did they work on my Kindle then?  they sure did!  SUCCESS!!!

why did it work?  my Kindle is an older one, and the .AZW3 file format is a newer one; so i figured my old Kindle might be less able to recognize a (perhaps subtle) problem with a new format.

who knows if that's really why it worked; but it doesn't really matter, as long as it *did* work!


Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Ebook Adventures, Instead of Listings

OK, so maybe this is becoming more of a blog than a "Listings" site; so be it.

Heh, had to laugh:  got an odd email from Amazon that i would have to send them verification of my Canadian citizenship to continue getting books from their Canadian site.  (I had only borrowed one book from that site, through Lendle, and i'd switched my address to Canada to do so.)  But i had already switched my address back to the U.S. — their internal data coördination obviosly leaves something to be desired — so i switched my country-setting (somewhere within the Kindle settings) back.

And have been having more fun converting another Amazon Topaz ( .TPZ ) book to a .AZW3 (and perhaps to a .MOBI if i feel like it).  The TOC (Table of Contents) conversion has a little trouble; but Calibre allows a final tweaking of the TOC before the .AZW3 file is written, and i was able to add Glossary, Bibliography, & Index to the TOC.

By the way, keep an eye out for Russian sites (like http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/zelda/waltz.html ) — there are some nice texts stored online!

Monday, June 3, 2013

Move To Canada — Temporarily!!!

Recently, a Lendle user lent me a copy of The Illustrated Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft; but when i went to download it from Amazon, the site told me i was not allowed to—due to copyright restrictions, or some such crap—because i lived in the United States.  What nonsense!

Maybe if i lived in Canada (where Lendle is based), i could download it OK.  So i pulled up Google maps and found a good place to stay:  Les Suites Hotel, 130 Besserer Street, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 9M9, Canada (complete with a telephone number, 613-232-2000).

So i took a virtual trip to Ottawa, changed my address at Amazon, and Voila! i successfully downloaded the book moments later.  A little while later, i decided to end my Canada jaunt and changed my address back to the United States.  A short trip to far away!

(At first i was going to use the Ottawa address of an evil ex- of mine; but i couldn't remember it exactly, and an ad popped up on the map page for Les Suites Hotel just down the road—perfect!  And i extend my thanks to them for the brief stay.)

Solving problems can be fun!

Friday, May 31, 2013

Another Five Books

Ah, the joys of having access to multiple library networks ... i very much recommend it!  (One of the pirks of moving from one county to another.)

Five more books:  a couple of .AZWs (which de-DRM directly into .MOBIs) and three .AZW3s (which de-DRM back into .AZW3s — have to test whether my Kindle will be happy with them; if not, i'll have to convert them into MOBIs too).

Never delete your originals!  Convert them, yes; but then save them, untouched.  If by chance you get something in a format you can't handle currently, hold on to it with the hope that you'll be able to handle it in the future (that is, your software will be able to handle it).

Know what titles you're looking for.  Be systematic and organized (and don't be afraid to interrupt a search to check what you've already found — no use in downloading something twice!).

And do check out BookGorilla (in the LINKS thingy to the right of the blog posts); lots of notifications of free books from Amazon every single day, just waiting to be 100% legitimately downloaded.  Don't miss out!  And get some just to have for Lendle, so you have something (free, for you) to lend!

Don't buy stuff unless you have to!

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Another Day in Ebook Land

Mmmm, borrowed another seven books from the library.  And gained some experience in converting an obnoxious format, Topaz ( .TPZ ), into Mobi ( .mobi ); fortunately Calibre (that free life-saver of a program) can deal better with Topaz now, after a recent update.  Calibre also lets you tweak a Table Of Contents when it's making a .AZW3 file, but not without the occasional problem.  (And there's now a link to Calibre in the list to the right.)

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Also, a recent public domain collection (as a .azw3 file):
[from the Amazon description:]

Fitzgerald Collection [Kindle Edition]

F. Scott Fitzgerald , Zelda Fitzgerald , Mary Evans

Includes 7 Classic Books in One!  (And it's worth it just for THE GREAT GATSBY alone!)

-- Novels --
- This Side of Paradise, 1920 (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- The Beautiful and Damned, 1922 (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- The Great Gatsby, 1925 (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Save Me the Waltz, 1932 (Zelda Fitzgerald)
- Tender Is the Night, 1933 (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

--Stories--
- Flappers and Philosophers, 1921 (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Tales of the Jazz Age, 1922 (F. Scott Fitzgerald) — including stories like 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

• Assembled from various public domain sources on the internet and formatted for Kindle.

• Each book has a working Table of Contents


http://www60.zippyshare.com/v/38809754/file.html

[Just click on the "Download Now" button, and ignore any advertisements or pop-up windows]

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Happy reading!

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Welcome!

Hello, ebook seeker.  Do you own books on paper and wish you had them on your computer or ebook reader too (without having to pay for something you already own)?  Don't you think you're entitled to that?  This is a community that thinks you are.

So here we'll post URL listings as we find them.  If you know of any not mentioned here, please feel free to mention them in a comment to a post.

• here's a lovely site with various PDF, Epub, Kindle,  & HTML:  http://floatingworldweb.com/@EBOOKS/

• try Lendle for lending & borrowing Kindle books:  http://lendle.me/

And don't forget your local library system for borrowing ebooks!

Enjoy!