I received a Kindle form Santa (Justine). I fired it up Christmas Eve, along with millions of other lucky people and discovered that there was nothing on it to read. It comes with an instruction manual and a dictionary or two and that’s it.
I decided to use the internet in order to load the 3 gigs of space on the thing with books, but it only takes PDF files or MOBI files. The PDF files are useless because the font is so small and you can’t read anything unless you zoom in. MOBI files are rare.
How I loaded up my Kindle with about 500 books, free.
1) Download uTorrent from www.utorrent.com/downloads and install it.
2) Go to thePirateBay.org. This is a site that lists torrents. Many of these are illegal, so if you are concerned with this, stop now. It is, however, easy to find things that are not pirated.
3) Search for ebooks on Pirate Bay.
4) Click the torrent download link of any ebooks that you want.
I discovered several collections of Science Fiction ebooks that were legally downloaded and included in an archive. These books are usually free giveaways, and in some cases public domain books. Many of them I had not read.
Torrents take hours or even days to download, so leave your computer on and be patient. If you click on the uTorrent icon you can see the progress. Some torrents are no longer being shared and will never download. Some are bogus and contain ads or even viruses. Make sure your virus software is up to date before you start downloading. (Don’t click on anything that the torrent downloads. Use the Clibre software to convert it first.)
Most of the ebooks that you will download will be in PDF format. Many are zipped or RAR’ed. You may have to download WinRar to open the .RAR files. (PDF files can contain viruses so don’t try to view these.)
5) Download and install Calibre from calibre-ebook.com
6) Use Caliber to convert the PDF files to MOBI format. Start Calibre and add files to the library. Use the automatic conversion to convert entire directories of books. Make sure that you select MOBI as the target for conversion.
7) Plug the Kindle into the USB port of your computer and copy the MOBI files to the documents directory of your Kindle.
The conversion process may need tweaking. I find that Calibre is constantly confusing the author with the book’s title. There are all kinds of options for handling this “meta data”. There are mysterious line breaks in the books from time to time, but this does not bother me, as it is infrequent.
Calibre can convert almost anything to anything. You can download text files or ePub or any of a dozen or so formats and convert them to MOBI for the kindle.
Keep checking back at Pirate Bay for new ebooks.