Friday, March 29, 2024

A library at your fingertips: The best free Kindle books

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It’s often tough to fathom that Amazon’s Kindle, the predominant ebook reader of the decade thus far, has been around for nearly a decade. Even though Amazon has since made proper tablets, such as Amazon Fire HD 7 Kids Edition the Amazon Fire HD 8, the Kindle remains overwhelmingly popular. The ebook marketplace is more than just robust, however, and there is a myriad of titles available via Amazon, Google Play, and an array of other sources. To help you sort through the masses, we’ve rounded up some of the best free Kindle books, including public domain works and self-published titles. Never before has it been so easy to become a master of literature without trekking to the library.

Are you a book-loving, literature aficionado? If so, take a glance at the best sites for downloading free audiobooks.

A note before you begin…

Google Play does not offer books using Kindle’s proprietary format in the way Amazon and Project Gutenberg do. Instead of AZW and KF8 files, users are going to want to directly download Google Play books as PDF files, thus rendering the books compatible with Kindle. To do so, navigate to your Google Play Book library, click the three squares in the upper-right corner of any title and select “Download PDF” from the resulting drop-down list. Afterward, select your desired save location and drag and drop the resulting file from your computer to your device once finished downloading.

Children’s Books

Peter Pan and Wendy by J.M. Barrie

Inspired by Barrie’s friendship with Llewelyn Davies family, Peter Pan Wendy is essentially the classic tale of Peter Pan, a boy who can fly and whisks a group of young children away to Neverland. All the usual suspects make their debut (Tiger Lily, Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys, Captain Hook, etc.), but it might not seem as blatantly offensive to Native Americans as the 1953 Disney film.

Download now from:

Amazon Google

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

There are very few people who are oblivious to Dorothy’s cyclone-fueled romps in Oz with Wicked Witch of the West, yet revisiting the Kansas native’s harrowing quest for the Emerald City is always somehow reassuring. The Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow all add to Baum’s descriptive and vivid world. Victor Fleming’s music doesn’t quite do the novel the justice it deserves.

Download now from:

Amazon Google

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

A touchstone in the realm of children’s literature, Burnett’s classic has been adapted time and time again for both the stage and the big screen. It revolves around heroine Mary Lenno, an orphan who’s shipped off from her colonial India to live on a dingy county estate in Yorkshire. There she learns the healing power of friendship through plant cultivation in her, ahem, secret garden. So heartwarming, yet insightful.

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Amazon Google

Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm

The brothers Grimm wrote fairy tales that were aptly, rather grim, but many of the beloved tales have undergone edits and numerous alterations to the point where they’ve become suitable for children rather than the grotesque, violence-laden stories they once were. You know the tales — Rapunzel, Cinderella, Hansel, and Gretel — but there are also plenty of great standouts that weren’t made into animated films.

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Amazon Google

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Swift’s classic tale is both a satire on human nature and simply one man’s fantastical voyages to uncharted lands. Among the many journeys along the way, Lemuel Gulliver meets a race of horses, an island inhabited by 6-inch people and the Emperor of Japan. It’s teeming with political undercurrents, albeit fictional, and has never gone out of print since making its initial debut in 1726. Talk about enduring.

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Amazon Google

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Rudyard Kipling

It should go without saying, kids love animals. Kipling’s tale, culled as a standalone story from The Jungle Book, follows a valiant mongoose who works to defend his adopted family of British colonials from a menacing pair of cobras upon their arrival in India. Sure, you may need to explain some of the subtle Victorianisms to younger audiences, but the harrowing story exhibits some of the most vibrant and sharp personification of any novel in existence.

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Amazon

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

As one of my favorite childhood books, it makes me all warm-and-fuzzy inside knowing Grahame’s classic is readily available free of charge. It’s about four anthropomorphised animals — Toad, Mole, Rat, and Badger — and their various escapades in the English countryside. It’s chalk-full of adventure, companionship, and moral reasoning, written by the former secretary of the Bank of England as bedtime stories for his son Alistair.

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Google

The Ghost Files by Apryl Baker

Mattie Hathaway is a 16-year-old girl with a terrible secret. Ever since her mother tried to kill her when she was five, she’s been able to see dead people of the spectral variety. When the ghost of her foster sister turns up, Mattie enlists the help of a young policeman to investigate her disappearance, but they better tread carefully because there’s a serial killer at work. This is smart teen fiction with plenty of twists and turns.

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Amazon

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