Free Books Available for Kindle and Kindle for PC Users

MP3, website, iPod, blog, apps, Google. The digital age hit years ago, but the book publishing world stayed the same. Despite half-hearted attempts at launching e-books and wireless reading devices, the public still demanded hardcovers and trade paperbacks - till Kindle came along.

Kindle is Amazon.com's answer to books in a digital world. Thus far, it's been wildly successful. While Amazon is keeping mum on Kindle sales, some news organization speculate that the Kindles outsold iPods in 2009.

Amazon offers hundreds of thousands of book titles in Kindle form and currently has dozens available for absolutely free. It's great news for Kindle owners and, surprisingly, great news for non-Kindle owners too. Recently, Amazon launched Kindle on PC. Kindle on PC is free software that allows anyone on a PC to download Kindle titles, both the free ones and paid ones. Kindle on PC also allows Kindle users to access their Kindle virtually.

For January, free Kindle titles available through Amazon include a variety of self-help and diet books, including The Good Mood Diet: Feel Good While You Lose Weight, Leslie Sansone's Eat Right, Walk Strong, and New Day, New You: 366 Devotions for Enjoying Everyday Life. Novels available include classics like Jane Eyre, Crime and Punishment, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. New fiction includes Mossy Creek by Deborah Smith, The Shunning by Beverly Lewis, and Summer of the Midnight Sun by Tracie Peterson.

iReaderReview.com keeps up an excellent list of free titles for the Kindle or Kindle on PC. The blogger, switch11, maintains a summary of available titles and sorts them by category and is much easier to maneuver than the Amazon Kindle site itself if you're looking for a specific genre such as Science Fiction .

Kindle fans can also download e-books from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) and Feedbooks.com.

Project Gutenberg maintains an online library of more than 30,000 public domain titles like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, and Great Expectations. Project Gutenberg's library is available within the United States for free, due to copyright expirations. While the site offers up the library of e-books for free, Project Gutenberg accepts donations and seeks volunteers to help maintain and expand its library.

"Literacy will not go the way of the dinosaur," wrote Andrea Kobeskzo, newletter editor for Project Gutenberg. "Classic works of literature can, and have, taken a contemporary form, in an era of technology capable of delivering the wonderful stuff of books to nearly anyone on the globe in the blink of an eye, or the push of a button."

Feedbooks offers both public domain and original works. Feedbooks also features a publishing platform that allows aspiring writings to break into digital self-publishing. From novels to comic books to short stories, authors can upload their work to Feedbooks and make it available for free download.