By Stephen Windwalker, Kindle Nation Daily
The process of sending any of tens of thousands of free classic books directly to your Kindle just got easier and more seamless than ever thanks to a terrific new collaboration between Amazon and the Internet Archive’s “Open Library” project. As Kindle Nation readers know from this post last year, we were already able to download about two million Internet Archives titles to our computers for transfer via USB connection.
Now you can find any of tens of thousands of free ebooks on the “Open Library” website and send them directly and wirelessly to your Kindle. (Thanks to Len Edgerly for tweeting a heads up.) There are nearly half a million ebooks in the Open Library archive, but not all are available free).
The process is simple:
- Search for a title at Open Library. You can search by author or subject, click on the “More search options” link near the upper right corner of the page, or use the very cool Publishing History tool to see all the accessible ebooks published in any year in the past two millennia.
Click on any title that is accompanied by a “Read” icon like the one shown at the right, and on the next page click on the “Send to Kindle” link for any edition of the title, as seen at the right of the screen shot below for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early novel This Side of Paradise:
That click will take you directly to Amazon where, after you sign into your account (if necessary), Amazon will show you a screen like the one below to inform you about its Whispernet personal document policies and fees and prompt you to select the Kindle to which you want to send the title. Once you click “continue,” the free book should be visible on your Kindle home screen within 60 seconds.
If you’d like to peruse the kind of great selections that are available in this free archive, here are a couple of hundred titles that came up first when I typed “Scribners” into the search field. Click on a title or cover image to get to the “Send to Kindle” link, on an author’s name to see other works by the author, or on the “Read” link to begin reading the text right on your computer. Scroll down to the bottom or click on this link to make a donation to Open Library.
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Don Quixote
966 editions (62 ebooks) – first published in 1600 Read
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Odyssey
825 editions (71 ebooks) – first published in 1535 Read
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Iliad
725 editions (87 ebooks) – first published in 1505 Read
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Pride and prejudice
700 editions (23 ebooks) – first published in 1813 Read
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Metaphysics
644 editions (42 ebooks) – first published in 1479 Read
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Alice in Wonderland
616 editions (16 ebooks) – first published in 1865 Read
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The Vision or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri
512 editions (67 ebooks) – first published in 1484 Read
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Robinson Crusoe
489 editions (34 ebooks) – first published in 1719 Read
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Tragedies
478 editions (60 ebooks) – first published in 1623 Read
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Fairy tales
412 editions (23 ebooks) – first published in 1846 Read
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Aeneis
352 editions (70 ebooks) – first published in 1518 Read
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Paradise lost
344 editions (24 ebooks) – first published in 1667 Read
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Henry IV
322 editions (15 ebooks) – first published in 1613 Read
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Pilgrim’s progress
307 editions (77 ebooks) – first published in 1678 Read
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Dialogues
276 editions (21 ebooks) – first published in 1701 Read
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Othello
271 editions (10 ebooks) – first published in 1622 Read
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Poems
254 editions (43 ebooks) – first published in 1786 Read
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Short stories
247 editions (20 ebooks) – first published in 1914 Read
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Scarlet letter
242 editions (15 ebooks) – first published in 1850 Read
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Republic
240 editions (24 ebooks) – first published in 1554 Read
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Aeneid
236 editions (4 ebooks) – first published in 1517 Read
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Poems
232 editions (36 ebooks) – first published in 1605 Read
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Madame Bovary
232 editions (3 ebooks) – first published in 1886 Read
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Life of Samuel Johnson
221 editions (27 ebooks) – first published in 1776 Read
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American notes
220 editions (26 ebooks) – first published in 1800 Read
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Oliver Twist
218 editions (10 ebooks) – first published in 1800 Read
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David Copperfield
210 editions (21 ebooks) – first published in 1800 Read
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Poems
204 editions (35 ebooks) – first published in 1827 Read
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Poems
200 editions (20 ebooks) – first published in 1831 Read
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Poems
187 editions (22 ebooks) – first published in 1800 Read
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Les misérables
187 editions (16 ebooks) – first published in 1800 Read
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Treasure Island
184 editions (11 ebooks) – first published in 1883 Read
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The Leopold Shakspere
178 editions (60 ebooks) – first published in 1748 Read
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Essays
168 editions (38 ebooks) – first published in 1618 Read
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Le rouge et le noir
167 editions (4 ebooks) – first published in 1800 Read
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Tale of two cities
166 editions (3 ebooks) – first published in 1859 Read
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Great expectations
165 editions (2 ebooks) – first published in 1800 Read
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The Forsyte Saga
162 editions (7 ebooks) – first published in 1898 Read
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Joseph Andrews
159 editions (8 ebooks) – first published in 1742 Read
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Poems
158 editions (27 ebooks) – first published in 1849 Read
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Le comte de Monte-Cristo
158 editions (4 ebooks) – first published in 1830 Read
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Essays of Elia
156 editions (37 ebooks) – first published in 1823 Read
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Vingt mille lieues sous les mers
155 editions (6 ebooks) – first published in 1871 Read
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Anna Karenina
151 editions (10 ebooks) – first published in 1886 Read
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Novels
150 editions (25 ebooks) – first published in 1800 Read
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Pickwick papers
149 editions (21 ebooks) – first published in 1800 Read
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Poems
140 editions (11 ebooks) – first published in 1783 Read
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Taming of the shrew
132 editions (5 ebooks) – first published in 1671 Read
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Winter’s tale
128 editions (7 ebooks) – first published in 1735 Read
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Love’s labour’s lost
127 editions (10 ebooks) – first published in 1631 Read
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Poems
125 editions (10 ebooks) – first published in 1633 Read
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Heidi