Can I Get Free Books For The Amazon Kindle Without Prime?

Does this work for audiobooks too? Is that a whole different ball of wax when it comes to Audible subscriptions, or could we make this work for that too? Sorry for the detour, I am curious though.

One thing I have found necessary to keep track of free Kindle books is a mix of different strategies as Amazon does not always promote their free Kindle books. The first thing I recommend is to sign up to use CamelCamelCamel to send you price drop emails for Kindle books. You can then choose to receive an email when the price drops to zero. The Fussy Librarian also provides tailored book recommendations based on your particular writing genres, and often e-mails news of free books and discounted books too. Searching international Amazon stores (such as Amazon UK or DE) for free eBooks that may not be listed on your local version of Amazon. Note that you can change the Amazon store that you are viewing by changing the country/region that you are viewing as within your Amazon account. Prime members can also access the ‘Kindle Owners’ Lending Library’ where you can download and read tons of eBooks for free if you have a Kindle device – a little known but great added benefit of Kindle ownership.

The most practical way to access Free Kindle Books is through your existing Amazon account. Go to the Kindle Store on your computer browser (not through the Kindle app on your devices – the restrictions around platforms don’t currently allow this). In the search box at the top of the screen of the Kindle Store, type ‘free kindle books’ and press Enter. Then on the left of the screen, click on the word Filter by; in the drop-down menu that appears, click on Departments and select the relevant genre. Next, click on one of the Featured Categories on the left, such as Kindle eBooks, and finally click on the word Price in the panel on the left and select $0.00 to $0.00. This will display a long list of ALL currently free Kindle books in that genre. Note that there are thousands of Free Kindle Books in the most popular genres, so you will have to scroll through page after page. However, the books are listed in order of newest publications, and by average customer review. So, while not as easy to access as some of the other methods to find Free Kindle Books, it’s the most direct way to access ALL the currently available Free Kindle Books of any genre.

The core transaction is a sale. You pay for a permanent license to a digital book. The act of downloading a book is simply how you get the book onto your reading device, e.g. your eReader, your computer, your Kindle app on your tablet etc. Note that we are not talking about a stream – a stream requires you to have an active internet connection and for you to subscribe to a service. But once downloaded, you can read the book offline, so for example, you could purchase and download a bunch of books before a flight, turn off your phone in airplane mode and then read the books offline on your phone or tablet.

It’s all really confusing – Prime, Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, Prime Reading – lots of things to choose from and I just get confused. I don’t really know what the difference is, but when I search for a book I click on it and it tells me whether I can read it for free as part of Prime or not. If it doesn’t say ‘Read for Free with Prime’ or something along those lines then I know I’ll have to pay for it to read it. But I don’t know the limits of Prime and what’s included and what’s not – I just search for what I want to read and it tells me whether it’s free or not.

A book to recommend to the members of my book club has to be shared, too. Kindle sharing is a topic which I always come back to. No, Amazon Prime is not needed to share Kindle books. How the sharing of Kindle books is possible, I explain in this post. Lending books to your friends and family is a bit of an oddity as well. As I mentioned above, not all books can be lent, and you can only lend each book once. I have found it generally works best to email them a DRM-free EPUB copy of the book and then send it to their Kindle via email. It’s not perfect, but it works quite well for me and I’ve managed to recommend a large number of books to friends and family without having to get them a Prime subscription.

I’ve given up on trying to figure out the Amazon freebies and go straight to library apps. The interface for Libby is much cleaner and it really is free to borrow books and not cost me a thing. And I avoid clicking on the ‘buy now’ one-click buttons that surround every free book listing on Amazon. My wallet and my TBR pile thank me.

Most of the people here seem to answer “yes” to the question above. But then there's the perceived pressure to sign up for KU. Even with the latest Kindles, the home screen now shows an ad for KU. The stores are full of KU-related banners. Even when you are viewing your own library, KU books that you have “borrowed” are intermixed with your own. Non-tech-savvy readers may feel that the Kindle store is a subscription-first business, requiring them to sign up for KU in order to use their Kindle. This would be an unfortunate misperception, and one that is sure to annoy many readers. To be able to feel in control of your own content, you have to manage your view of your books to deliberately avoid seeing ads for KU.

For those curious about the ten-title limit on lends, it's worth noting that we track a "cart" of the ten titles you've currently got checked out, but that's more akin to a virtual bookshelf that holds 10 books at any given time (which you can then immediately return, of course, to make room for another book to add). Many of our users read very fast (20+ books in a given month), which I suppose is the biggest constraint here, but that's all located in the catalog we've chosen to offer (which is NOT the entire Kindle store). A given catalog will have maybe a few thousand titles, which we periodically refresh, so your "monthly haul" of titles to read is essentially determined by which of those curated choices you actually want to read – if you're a big fan of romance or thriller titles, for example, you could easily have a long list, while if you're reading lots of more obscure non-fiction titles, your choices might be rather constrained. In theory, all books are available to you to lend unlimitedy, but in practice, that's determined by your personal tastes and the size of the catalog we've chosen for your use.

Much confusion surrounds the term “Kindle” in relation to books but believe me it’s just a tag given to books in e-format. When checking out a book you will see the option to ‘Deliver to:’ and here you can select from any of your Kindle apps that you have registered on your amazon account i.e. ‘John’s iPhone’ or simply select the default Kindle app and the book will be sent to the ‘cloud’ to be downloaded at a later date by opening the relevant Kindle app on the chosen device. Very easy to do once you have done it.