Yesterday I mentioned
that I was looking for free ebooks. I've found some. Quite a few
actually. But, as is always the way in life, getting them isn't as
straight-forward as it might be. First off one needs to sign up with
the website which supplies the free ebooks. The website in question
is.... well, I'm not going to be daft enough to tell the world what
the website is. Not that I think it's illegal (it looks legal
enough). It just strikes me that if something like this gets too
well known it will get shut down. Which is usually what happens to
good things (he typed cynically).
And then there's the
problem that one is restricted to how many ebooks one can download.
It looks to have a limit of forty downloads per day. I suppose in the
fullness of time forty a day will be plenty, but for now I wanted to
download loads (before the website gets shut down).
But it didn't take long
to find another website that did free ebooks too. And this one didn't
restrict me to forty books a day. So I got jiggy with the download.
Imagine my frustration
when (with over a hundred downloaded ebooks) I found that not
one of them worked on my Kindle. It doesn't recognise the .epub
format that the books come in. But if you know
where to look there are free converters available.
So having spent an hour
downloading files I couldn't use, and finding myself with more ebooks
than sense, I set the converter running. You can convert files
individually, but it's as easy to download your books, set the
converter going, and clear off for a shower and a cuppa whilst the
computer works it's magic. And then all I had to do was download my
newly obtained .mobi files to my Kindle. I still had to do the
cataloguing on the Kindle itself, but I now have books by Isaac
Asimov and Arthur C Clarke that I've wanted on my Kindle for ages.
Stuff by Fred Pohl and Stephen King. James Bond books and Terry
Pratchett books. The Mote in God's Eye, The Death of Grass, loads of
stuff.
In the past I've blogged
about how free downloads are a bad thing. They probably are but in
these days of austerity, principles are not cheap. And, to be honest,
something for nothing is never a bad thing when I am the one getting
something for nothing.... Sorry...
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