ebooks, where to find?

[lucian]

http://www.baen.com/

I'm a big fan of the Honor Harrington series, but there's ton's of others. Vorkosigan saga is pretty awesome, and not at all your typical space opera. They have a lot of older works too, from people like Andre Norton or Larry Niven. Basically, it's a huge publishing house that focuses on the fun parts of the genre, and offers it's works directly for very reasonable ebook prices. Most books are five or six dollars...they also allow readers to buy advance copies of works for $15 months before they're released to the general public.

[Sponk]

I like how you can generally read the first half of the book for free on their web site.

[Jolin]

This disease is terminal I'm afraid. Apparently every single one of the dozen or so books I am looking for are not available from the Kindle store, lucky me! I guess this leaves me with just finding them in an alternate format and then converting. Still downloading calibre btw. 40mb is a relatively huge file for the connection I am. It would almost be faster to walk to the website I swear. Thanks for the help FHC!

Ask someone on here for the books you want, then ask them nicely to host said files somewhere - profit?

If you give me the names of the books you want, I'll look at my library and throw it up on dropbox if I have it.

[Aramendel]

Try searching for ebooks that are not in that list of 8 and tell me what you get.

That "list" has well over a million books for me. If you get only 8 there is something seriously wrong with your amazon account.

And, yes, the available books can be limited depending on your location. But not your physical (or PCs) location, but the location you have in your amazon account. Meaning if your amazon account has an address in the US you have the US selection, even if you are in Towelheadistan.

If you buy books with the kindle wifi or over the amazon website makes no difference whatsoever there, the selection for both are based on your accounts location. If you have only 8 books available when you look at the website you would also only have 8 books available if you connected to amazon with the Kindle.

Did you change your accounts billing address to another country recently?

I always liked baen. You can buy ebook editions of their work for less than than Amazon is charging, downloads are available in every ebook format or in zip files, and they also have a huge free library with several books from each of their authors. If you like sci-fi or fantasy, it's a great publisher to patronize.

The "problem" with Bean is that it has largely "trash" sci-fi and fantasy. You won't find books from Iain M. Banks, Brandon Sanderson or similar Authors there.

Not saying that there aren't bad books there, using Bean myself now and then. But the majority of the sci-fi and fantasy authors I prefer arn't available there.

[Amantus]

Are you in International waters or something? Maybe Amazon is like "welp you're not in a country so I can't show you books which vary by region and there are only 8 books which are the same internationally.

Just torrent them mate. It's not like you'd be breaking any laws anyway.

edot: derp I only just read the post above.

[Aramendel]

What I am doing to circumvent country restrictions.

- Make amazon.com account with fake US Adress ("fake" as in "you do not live there", not as in "it does not exist"; one in Alaska is preferred since they will not try to send you physical mail there)
- Buy a giftcard on amazon.com with your normal account.
- Use gift card code on fake US account to get money on that account
- get Kindle for PC
- buy ebook on fake US account and download it with Kindle for PC

Works fine, doing that for years to get ebooks cheaper and in a larger selection (in germany myself).

Now the book is in your "my kindle books" directory in your documents folder. You could now connect your Kindle reader with the USB cable and simply transfer the books to it. Except you will not find it on the kindle afterwards. This is because the DRM. There is no way I know of to get the DRM for new books on the kindle *without* the WIFI connection. So you have to remove it first before oyu can read them on your Kindle reader. Thankfully that isn't hard to do.

- get Calibre
- get the DRM removal plugins for calibre (google "apprentice alf")
- just follow the instructions to "install" and configure it (for Amazon ebooks that mainly boils down to copy the plugin in the right directory) -> now whenever you import books to your calibre library their DRM is automatically removed
- import the ebooks oyu bought from your "my kindle books" directory into your calibre library
- use calibre to transfer ebooks to kindle

[Popelmon]

Try this site: http://epub-mobi.blogspot.com/

[kopf]

Currently looking for Asimov's Foundation and Earth, JV Jones's Watcher of the Dead. I've managed to find most of the rest of the books I was looking for, but I cannot find readable versions of these two. Several of the sites google leads me to are blocked by the firewall out here

Thanks for all the advice guys. The only games I have installed on my laptop have stopped working as they are also blocked by the firewall. No tanks, no Eve, no SC2. This leaves me with just books and music to kill time with, and I go through books pretty quickly when there's nothing else to do but read, eat and sleep.

[Norwest]

I may be a bit late here, but Baen also had a bunch of it's back list books up online for free here: http://www.baen.com/library/books.asp

DRM free, full versions, all that.

There's some great Astounding era short story collections in there, like Howard L. Myers 'The Creatures of Man' collection. http://www.baenebooks.com/p-90-the-c...es-of-man.aspx

Another great collection is 'Med Ship' by Murray Leinster http://www.baenebooks.com/p-275-med-ship.aspx

[arian snow]

Gotta love kindle prices vs paperback...

[pr0lurker]

Get Usenet, search for kindle, profit. Not much else to be said...

[Bombcrater]

Some publishers are completely retarded about ebook prices. One book I've been waiting months for came out recently at £8.99 for the Kindle ebook and £8.49 for the fucking hardback.

[Liare]

What I am doing to circumvent country restrictions.

- Make amazon.com account with fake US Adress ("fake" as in "you do not live there", not as in "it does not exist"; one in Alaska is preferred since they will not try to send you physical mail there)
- Buy a giftcard on amazon.com with your normal account.
- Use gift card code on fake US account to get money on that account
- get Kindle for PC
- buy ebook on fake US account and download it with Kindle for PC

Works fine, doing that for years to get ebooks cheaper and in a larger selection (in germany myself).

Now the book is in your "my kindle books" directory in your documents folder. You could now connect your Kindle reader with the USB cable and simply transfer the books to it. Except you will not find it on the kindle afterwards. This is because the DRM. There is no way I know of to get the DRM for new books on the kindle *without* the WIFI connection. So you have to remove it first before oyu can read them on your Kindle reader. Thankfully that isn't hard to do.

- get Calibre
- get the DRM removal plugins for calibre (google "apprentice alf")
- just follow the instructions to "install" and configure it (for Amazon ebooks that mainly boils down to copy the plugin in the right directory) -> now whenever you import books to your calibre library their DRM is automatically removed
- import the ebooks oyu bought from your "my kindle books" directory into your calibre library
- use calibre to transfer ebooks to kindle

that is a lot of hoops to go trough compared to dropping by a torrent site, clicking a link, wait less than a minute and just upload it to the reader tbh.

[Aramendel]

Cannot find everything on torrents, especially ebooks. *Specific* ebooks, I mean. I.e. try finding "Count to a Trillion" by John C. Wright. Out since 3 months. Unable to find that one so far.
Also, if you are on a company internet connection (like kopf seems to be) torrents can be a bit of a russian roulette thing.

In the end torrents aren't really faster. Once you have set that thing up (which takes like 10 Minutes) you can get ebooks faster than with torrents. The calibre part (adding book to calibre, uploading to reader) you have to do regardless, so the total of the surplus effort is to buy a giftcard for your fake US amazon account every blue moon. And in exchange you find them faster and got a more complete selection.

And pay money, of course. Most of my ebooks are "cheap" too, but if money would be no factor for me I would just buy all from amazon. It is FAR less hassle, even with the DRM stripping.

[Chrien]

I use the same method as Aramdendel. I used to download the book for PC first then use a USB to transfer it to my kindle to save international transfer fees but now I don't even bother with that. Just have to remember to top up my account with a gift card every now an then. I wonder if theres a school in Maine thats getting letters from amazon thanks to me as a I used their address

[lucian]

Torrents aren't great for specific ebooks...but iptorrents has tons of massive batch files that contain thousands of books from a variety of authors and genres. Who knows, maybe it will expose you to something new.

[super7]

http://www.gutenberg.org/ - Over 38,000 ebooks, all legitimately free (free because there is no copyright, or copyright has expired. Don't expect to see the latest big selling authors books here)
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top - A good place to start

[Winged Nazgul]

Cannot find everything on torrents, especially ebooks. *Specific* ebooks, I mean. I.e. try finding "Count to a Trillion" by John C. Wright. Out since 3 months. Unable to find that one so far.
Also, if you are on a company internet connection (like kopf seems to be) torrents can be a bit of a russian roulette thing.

In the end torrents aren't really faster. Once you have set that thing up (which takes like 10 Minutes) you can get ebooks faster than with torrents. The calibre part (adding book to calibre, uploading to reader) you have to do regardless, so the total of the surplus effort is to buy a giftcard for your fake US amazon account every blue moon. And in exchange you find them faster and got a more complete selection.

And pay money, of course. Most of my ebooks are "cheap" too, but if money would be no factor for me I would just buy all from amazon. It is FAR less hassle, even with the DRM stripping.

Aye, like Gabe Newell always says, the best way to fight piracy is by providing a better service than the pirates.

[super7]

Cannot find everything on torrents, especially ebooks. *Specific* ebooks, I mean. I.e. try finding "Count to a Trillion" by John C. Wright. Out since 3 months. Unable to find that one so far.
Also, if you are on a company internet connection (like kopf seems to be) torrents can be a bit of a russian roulette thing.

In the end torrents aren't really faster. Once you have set that thing up (which takes like 10 Minutes) you can get ebooks faster than with torrents. The calibre part (adding book to calibre, uploading to reader) you have to do regardless, so the total of the surplus effort is to buy a giftcard for your fake US amazon account every blue moon. And in exchange you find them faster and got a more complete selection.

And pay money, of course. Most of my ebooks are "cheap" too, but if money would be no factor for me I would just buy all from amazon. It is FAR less hassle, even with the DRM stripping.

Aye, like Gabe Newell always says, the best way to fight piracy is by providing a better service than the pirates.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

[Joe Appleby]

Yeah, make a list and we'll see what we have. Furthermore get Calibre installed, the DRM removal tool is only needed if you do the US Kindle store route. I don't do that, so I don't have that plugin installed, installing Calibre itself is a no brainer. The ebooks themselves are tiny enough to just upload on dropbox or host somewhere else altogether. Torrent sites tend to have 5gb collections of every 5 star book on Amazon and the like, not quite a good idea if you are on an offshore platform sharing the satellite connection with the rest of the plattform. Not to mention the company might frown upon such shenanigans.