Thursday, January 29, 2009

Amazon Adds Over 7,300 Free Public Domain Books to the Kindle Store

Just 11 days before its February 9 press conference on the Kindle at New York's Morgan Library, Amazon has just added over 7,300 free public domain books to its Kindle Store catalog.

To access these titles and download them to your Kindle within seconds at no charge, just go to the Kindle Store and type or paste "Public Domain Books" (with the quotation marks) into the search field. Not to put too fine a point on this, but these are not junk titles -- just type the name of one of your favorite classic authors into your search and you will likely be pleased with the return.

Just a sign of big things to come -- the one promise, from the original Kindle launch, on which Amazon has delivered the least is Kindle access to "every book ever printed."

That will take a long while, but I would be surprised if, from the library, there is not an announcement about deal(s) through which Amazon participates in such ventures as Google Reader, Creative Commons, Project Gutenberg to bring about a dramatic increase in access to titles. In Amazon's customer-experience business model, such deals need not even be significantly monetized: a dime here and a dime there would work just fine, since it would all build the primacy of the Kindle Store destination.

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