Kindle Buffet: Find and download the best free books, magazines and newspapers for your Kindle, iPhone, iPad or Android by Steve Weber

Kindle Buffet: Free books, all you can eat!  
    O ne of the best things about Amazon’s digital bookstore is that many of its most popular books are offered completely free of charge during brief promotional periods. If you manage to find and download a book while it’s offered free, it’s yours to keep—forever. It’s a great way to sample a new genre, or perhaps discover an author you hadn’t noticed before.
    This section of the book will describe a series of websites designed to help you locate free Kindle books. The first, KindleBuffet.com , is dear to my heart: I’m the founding publisher and update the site each day.
    Yes, I love downloading free books to my Kindles so much, I started the website and newsletter called KindleBuffet.com to help keep track of the very best books currently available free. (The free promotions usually last only a few days, but there’s a new crop every day). Take a look, and I’m sure you’ll be amazed at the wealth of great books—usually there are several hundred freebies in virtually every category of fiction and nonfiction, every day of the year. And these aren’t just the dogs that nobody wants, the selection includes bona-fide bestsellers from the most famous authors in the world. You may never have to pay for a book again! Heaven knows I’ve already downloaded more books than I’d be able to read in three lifetimes. But there’s two things I’ve never been able to refuse—free food and free books.
    Of the thousands of new books made available every day, I whittle the list down to highlight only the best on Kindle Buffet . For this, I use a two simple yardsticks: how many five-star reviews have Amazon customers posted about the book? Then, to skim the cream a bit more, I compare a book’s number of positive reviews versus negative reviews. Although individual reviewers frequently disagree about a given book—and Amazon certainly has its share of knuckleheads offering their two-cents’ worth—the bottom line is usually clear: the best, most widely enjoyed books attract the most (and best percentage of) positive reviews.
    Kindle Buffet also has bestseller lists, updated hourly, of free Kindle books for every Amazon category—fiction, romance, business, cookbooks—you name it. So if you’d like to load up your Kindle with plenty of great reading material without spending a dime, visit www. KindleBuffet.com .
    If you’re curious as to why authors and publishers sometimes offer their books free in Kindle format, the answer is pretty simple: it boosts overall sales, especially for authors who’ve written a series of books. Sure, a few sales are “lost” for a certain title while it’s free, but the word-of-mouth generated by the Kindle giveaway usually boosts sales of the author’s other titles.

    Figure 1. The home page at KindleBuffet.com. Visit the site and get the free newsletter showing Editor’s Picks of the highest quality Kindle books currently offered free.

No Kindle? No problem!
    R ecently Amazon’s line of Kindle devices have gotten so inexpensive it’s hard to resist buying at least one. But you don’t need any of Amazon’s hardware to enjoy Kindle books. Amazon offers free Kindle apps for nearly every brand of cellphone, tablet, and desktop computer. For that matter, you can read Kindle books in a Web browser.
    One footnote: In a coming section, we’ll discuss how to “borrow” Kindle books, and for that you’d need a Kindle device.

More sites for finding Kindle freebies
    A s I mentioned, I have a special interest in Kindle Buffet since it’s my baby. But there are several worthy competitors, and I’ll list them here. Each has a different focus that you might find useful. Kindle Buffet’s main attraction is that its “Editor’s Picks” section focuses on the very best Kindle books currently offered free, so if your reading time is limited, Kindle Buffet might be an effective time-saver. Some of the other sites, however, offer a more