Blog Kindle (unofficial) has an article on Bookyards. I must admit I had never heard of them. They have about 17,000 free ebooks in Kindle PDF format, says the blog. This free e-book library is mostly education oriented. So, a student, or a researcher, or just a curious erudite might find this resource a very useful one. If you were looking for an electronic version of C. Bresciani Turroni’s Economic Policy For The Thinking Man, or perhaps the Marquis de Nadaillac’s Manners And Monuments Of Prehistoric Peoples, or Charles Marquis Smith’s Electric and...

From the Threepress Consulting blog: Thanks to Hatgirl on MobileRead for this great tip on integrating Ibis Reader with Baen free books: If you use Ibis Reader, you will have seen the “Get Books” link. This allows you to view OPDS catalogs (lists of web-accessible ebooks). The Feedbooks catalogs are pre-installed, and some of you may have set up a Calibre/Dropbox OPDS catalog of your own library. On a whim, I used the “Add Your Own Catalog” link to add the WebScription Stanza link, Code: http://www.webscription.net/stanza.aspx?feed=free It worked! I can access the Baen Free Library directly from Ibis Reader! In “Get Books” I click “Baen” (or...

From the press release: To help the multitude of new owners with eBook reading devices, Kaplan Publishing is offering more than 130 Free eBooks in a promotion that runs from January 4 -10th. Owners of the Nook, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and Sony eReader can find select Kaplan titles absolutely free by visiting: www.FreeKaplaneBooks.com. Starting today, high school students; college students; those wanting GRE, GMAT or SAT practice tests; future doctors, lawyers, MBA's and nurses and many more will find a variety of valuable Kaplan test prep guides, practice tests, practice questions, study aids, and related titles that would normally cost hundreds...

From the site: Broadway, the main street that runs through Robert Pinsky’s home town of Long Branch, New Jersey, was once like thousands of other main streets in small towns across the country. But for Pinsky, one of America’s most admired poets and its former Poet Laureate, this Broadway is the point of departure for a lively journey through the small towns of the American imagination. “Pinsky offers a provocative take on the relationship between artists and small-town America. He explicates quotations from Cather, Faulkner and Twain, as well as scenes from filmmakers like Hitchcock and Sturges, and reminiscences about his own...

This is a bit different so I thought I'd post it in full - and its free.  It should be of special interest to our European readers: My Cybook Opus Ebook Reader - Adventures of a New User is a free digital reading ebook by Paolo Amoroso of Nostromics. You are encouraged to freely download, use, distribute and share the book under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license.About the bookThe book tells the author's experience in selecting, buying and using a Cybook Opus ebook reading device. The Opus is a popular digital reader manufactured by BOOKEEN. These devices are...

CNET has an article with this title. They discuss Jungle-search.com. After they discuss free ebooks they go on to say: ... But what if you want to see more granular lists--say, separating the public domain titles from the modern freebies? (Publishers occasionally give away older books in a series to hook readers on newer ones, for example.) Or what if you want to see only books in a certain price range--only those that are 99 cents, or $2 to $3? That's where Jungle-search.com comes in. The search engine is designed to scour Amazon for all sorts of deals across a...

Stephen Windwalker of Kindle Nation Daily has just published Kindle Free For All. It's available at the Kindle store for $0.99 during the holiday season. Thanks to some great help from talented editor and author April Hamilton, we have worked hard to hit the sweet spot in making this book the most complete and easy-to-use resource yet for finding all kinds of free content for your Kindle and other Kindle-compatible devices, with useful information on millions of free ebooks, free audio books, and free periodical, blog, and research content for Kindle. If any of you are giving a Kindle for...

From Open Culture: In the summer of 1955, Frederick Baldwin, a college student at Columbia University, set out on a pilgrimage of sorts, hoping to meet Pablo Picasso. Baldwin traveled first to Le Havre (presumably by boat), then headed south, down to Vallauris and Cannes, until he eventually reached Picasso’s home on the Riviera, known as Villa la Californie. It took a little craftiness and moxie, but the young American gained entrance into Picasso’s studio. And there he was, the great painter himself, wearing shorts, sandals and not much else. More than five decades later, Baldwin has produced an elegant e-book (available...

Author Jeffrey Carver has decided to end his policy of giving free downloads. Here's what he says: I've been running the free-downloads experiment for more than two years now. Here's my conclusion: The free downloads have significantly expanded my audience, and enabled me to meet some very nice people electronically. But they haven't done much in terms of pay. Yes, some people have been generous with Paypal donations, and some who liked the books have gone out and bought my other ebooks—and I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. But the theory that free downloads drive sales...

We’ve mentioned Starbucks’s web portal, and its plan to offer free e-books through LibreDigital’s SkyShelf reader. GalleyCat is noting that US Starbucks customers can now access a free e-book of Greg Bear’s new SF novel, Hull Zero Three, from the Starbucks wifi network while within the store. Of course, this will only be offered for online reading on “laptops, tablets, and many smart phones.” Much as with Barnes & Noble’s in-store reading program for the Nook, you can’t download and take it with you—though I don’t doubt there will be options available to purchase it if you decide you...

From an email I just received from the University of Chicago: Influential economist Deirdre N. McCloskey is in the midst of a multi-volume revisionist history of the whole of Western economics. In the first volume of the project she returns to Adam Smith and his largely overlooked discussion of moral sentiments. What is the moral code of capitalism? Is the free market moral? What are the virtues of the bourgeoisie? McCloskey takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge, affirming capitalism without ignoring its faults. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce is...

The Black Library, the publisher of tie-in novels and audiobooks for Games Workshop’s Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 role-playing game settings, is going digital. To promote the event, the publisher has been giving away some free digital content every Friday for the last four weeks, with something more to go up on the site this coming Friday. Available thus far are the novels First & Only and Nightbringer, the first issue of Hammer and Bolter magazine, and an mp3 of the first disc of the Horus Rising audiobook. The e-books are downloadable in MobiPocket or EPUB format, and are...