My brain is always idling into weird corners of places. More by accident than by design, I wound up collecting some sources of cheap and sometimes free electronic e-books.
This comes up from time to time with friends.
Amazon Deals. Most of the best deals strike for a day then vanish. Sometimes a monthly deal will hide a good book, too. Neuromancer was a $1.99 for a while. Amazon does allow you to sign up for numerous email lists – daily deals, recent books in your chosen genres are good places to start. Or, just get in the habit of checking every day.
Bookperk. Harper Collins also sends out daily emails that highlight books of theirs on sale. These often overlap with the daily and weekly deals at Amazon. They also show deals specific to their own site, or highlight sales at other book stores.
Humble Book Bundle. A few dollars can net you a big cluster of books. There’s a one dollar minimum, if memory serves. Second and third tiers for larger donations. Some, or all, of the funds go to charity. Books are DRM free and sometimes require finessing to end up on a straight-up Kindle device. Humble is also very helpful in this regard. Most of these books will be speculative fiction or comic books.
Storybundle. Similar to Humble Bundle. Bundles vary in theme, from nonfiction to fiction to speculative fiction. The minimum is typically three dollars, and the tiers are generally more expensive.
Smashwords: If you need something quirky and cheap, Smashwords has a lot of books that are quirky and cheap. I have made use of its quirks in the past to dig up some odd reference materials. There is also a great deal of fiction from self-published authors. I even have a short story collection there.
Public Domain books:
Project Gutenberg – The original. It still feels like navigating a site from 1995, too.. That’s okay. You pay tribute to your elders.
Wikisource – Wikisource gets special love because of “collections.” Add several files to a collection, then output the entire collection to an ebook. I did this to the Randolph Carter series of stories by HP Lovecraft.
Google Play, Amazon, Kobo store, and Nook store also keep large libraries of public domain books. Sometimes other people sell the same books with formatting fixes or embedded images. You can usually find the free version by digging through a page or two of results.
He has worked as a level designer for a small online video game, as the grim reaper in a haunted house, and traded web design for concert tickets and tattoos.In years past, he could be found performing improvised comedy or stage magic in the south side of Austin, Texas.
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