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Either if you are evaluating the purchase of an ebook reader or you got yours already, you are very likely wondering, where do I get ebooks from? Are there electronic versions of all books? Do I have to buy them from a specific store, such as Amazon or Barnes&Noble? Are ebooks expensive?
Some of the big online bookstores make their own electronic book reader and one may get the impression that if you buy one of them, you’ll have to stick to that particular bookstore to get new books to read, especially when we hear that different devices are capable of reading different ebook file formats. However, compatibility is not a problem if our ebook reader is able to load and read PDF files. PDF, which stands for “Portable Document Format”, is nowadays the universal standard for electronic publishing. If your reader takes PDF files, then you have virtually millions of books, magazines, articles and newspapers at your disposal.
Free ebooks, and paid ebooks
In the world of conventional books (your know, those printed on paper that we carry under the arm), there is no such thinks as free books. Very cheap, could be, but we rarely have a chance to acquire a real book for nothing. However, electronic books are virtual stuff, and as such there is no material value. The value of an ebook is given by the royalties (copyright) and production (the cost of the computers and the personnel needed to generate the book). As you may imagine, authors, editors and bookstores won’t be very happy if people stopped buying the paper versions of the books if they could get an electronic version for free, so they devised methods to prevent the free distribution of electronic books. When a new book is released, both the printed and electronic versions are produced, but because of the way they are protected, the ebook version can only be read with the electronic reader where they are downloaded.
So? where are my free Kindle ebooks?
As we said, new books, especially bestsellers and all those published within the mainstream (commercial) publishing world, are subject to copyright royalties and therefore, they cost money (although usually less than print versions). But, older books and works by independent or young authors are usually published royalty-free. In the old-fashioned way this means just production and distribution costs, hence you can buy a classic by Jack London for five bucks. But in the e-world, copies can be massively reproduced and freely distributed. So, if an author wants to promote himself by giving away his work, the writing is put under a standard file format such as PDF and released into the web. Now the copies can be reproduced by the million and at a zero cost. As I mentioned, if your ebook reader can take PDFs, you are good to load the book and read it for free. Same case with the classic. After a certain period of time, copyright expires and nobody can claim duties, so the book is now public domain, meaning that it can be legally “printed” into a PDF file and set free.
So keep in touch, I’ll be posting links and resources where you can browse, search and download freely (or not if they are new) many many books for your Kindle.
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