I have been spending my hobby time on building this site the past few weeks:
The purpose of the site is help find new free Kindle books (fiction and nonfiction) to read. The data is identical to those on Amazon’s “Best Sellers in Kindle eBooks” list (here). The difference (and benefit) is that I can organize the information in certain ways, and accessed the list by RSS and email notification – since these are features that Blogger provides. If a book appears on the top 100 list, the quality should be at least so-so. Other benefits of web scrapping the information and put the data on a separate blog are:
- Highlight the review and rating count so I can quickly see which book has at least 10 reviews and a rating of 3, thus increasing the likelihood that the book’s quality is decent.
- Put emphasis on books that are relatively new on the list. (I defined it to be “not appearing in the data I retrieved within the past 7 days and I put them on the top of the list first.)
- Separate out fiction and nonfiction – since I am interested mostly in non-fiction.
Having said that, there are other ways to look for free books. The ways I have been doing this include:
- Go to the Kindle bookstore from your Kindle and look at the top 100 list.
- Go to the Amazon website’s Kindle store and look at the same top 100 list (again, here).
- Browse various blogs that has lists of free books. My favorite is “A Kindle World blog” (here), which has a daily list of free books (and a lot of other Kindle/eReader information.)
- Use Yahoo pipes to get the data from various sources, like this one (here) from Chris. RSS: (here)
The computer code I wrote to generate the blog postings seems relatively stable now. Though I am sure it is still buggy as the html parsing logic isn’t as clean as I would like. Nonetheless, if you have a Kindle and have a tendency to look for free books, you might find the site useful.