On January 1, 2019 for the first time in more than 20 years, copyrighted works will enter the public domain. Here is how to use your send to kindle email address to add free ebooks from Project Gutenberg (or elsewhere) to your kindle library
Local Link | Content link | Reddit Link
r/booksu/Chtorrr (15409)

The good news here is you only have to set this up one time - it is rather confusing and many many people miss the step of whitelisting the email they will be using to send books to their kindle.

If you want to find more free ebooks or see what is uploaded to public domain sources over the next few days subscribe to r/FreeEBOOKS.

Here is an article about the release of works to the public domain

Project Gutenberg is one of the main sources for free public domain ebooks.

Ebooks added this way will sync across devices like any ebook you get from Amazon.

Please ask questions in the comments below if you are having trouble figuring this out - I plan to edit the instructions as I find where folks are confused.

1 - Find your send to kindle email address

First you need to find your send to kindle email address. There are two ways to do this on your kindle or on the Amazon website, it’s way easier to find on your kindle.

Easy way: On your kindle: Click the gear icon -> All Settings -> Your Account -> your send to kindle email will be listed on this page.

Harder way: Go to Amazon.com then click Accounts & lists->

https://i.redd.it/up315qw13h721.jpg

under “Digital content and devices” click “Content and Devices” ->

https://i.redd.it/bfxxh6a53h721.png

Click “Devices” in the menu near the top ->

https://i.redd.it/94bpbnx63h721.png

click the “…” next to you kindle in the device list you see on that page. Your send to kindle email will be listed in the small box that appears. If you are on mobile you will see a gallery of images of kindles and app icons - click a kindle and you will see your send to kindle email address displayed below.

https://i.redd.it/id3hyxh83h721.png

(Do not be alarmed if you see a shitload of devices listed, every time you download the kindle app on something it counts as a device - I have “devices” going back for many years of phones)

Your send to kindle email address will be some variation on your name + @kindle.com

2 - Make sure the email you will be sending emails from to your send to kindle email address is whitelisted. If the email you send books from to your kindle is not white listed you will never get the books.

On Amazon.com click “Account & Lists” ->

https://i.redd.it/6uzd07wj3h721.jpg

under “Digital content and devices” click “Content and Devices” ->

https://i.redd.it/0sbp037l3h721.png

click “Preferences" in the top bar of that page ->

https://i.redd.it/33gegntn3h721.png

Click “Personal Document Settings” ->

https://i.redd.it/xv33a2eq3h721.png

find “Approved Personal Document E-mail List” on that page -> make sure the email you will be using to send books to your kindle is listed there.

https://i.redd.it/cyzhtkor3h721.png

3 - Let’s send a book.

Go to a book on Project Gutenberg -> click either Kindle (with images) or Kindle (no images) to download the version of the ebook you would like to send to your kindle.

https://i.redd.it/8r8zroxw3h721.png

Now open a new email message - fill in your send to kindle email address in the to field, then drag the book file into the email. Click send.

Go to your kindle library and sync to make sure the book downloaded.

I typically send ebooks to my kindle from my phone or iPad - you will follow the same process but often when you download a file your device will ask you what you want to do with the file - just choose email and send away.

Here are some lists of free ebooks by topic:

100 free mythology books

250 free kids and YA books

200 free sci-fi books

100 free classics

100 free Christmas ebooks

100 free history ebooks

100 free poetry books

100 free memoirs and autobiographies

Comments (186)

[deleted]

Just wait until 2023 rolls around. That is the copyright expiration date of a certain 1928 black and white cartoon. Somehow I don’t think Disney is quite ready to release that one into the public domain...

They keep all trademarks, so Mickey wouldn't be able to be freely used.

Note how they've been using their Steamboat Willie logo. This definitely plays into the trademark continuing.

They have done more than that

note that the registration states that “[c]olor is not a claimed feature of the mark,” reinforcing that this registration is for the black and white version of Mickey, not the modern Mickey with his signature red shorts and yellow shoes. Also note the date the registration was filed: April 11, 2004. This would have been the year that Steamboat Willie would have entered the public domain, but for the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

Lol. They’re copywriting everything they can on that cartoon.

Trademarking.

Which makes sense it's their mascot and would cause confusion. If someone had a mickey's kitchen with mouse logo the public would likely believe it was a Disney sponsored themed restaurant. I think the best compromise would to let companies have control of trademarked entities derivative works but the actual work becomes public domain. So you can distribute steam boat willie without issue but can't use mickey as a dvd cover. I would also push for copyrights to be reduced to 20 years.

If Mickey Mouse logos were to start appearing everywhere, people would catch on quickly that most were not sanctioned by Disney because they didn't have to be. It would be on the news and people would talk about it. Within a week or so, there would not be much confusion about the trademark status of the Mickey Mouse logo.

Walt Disney is long dead, and Disney has made its fair share of profit from Mickey Mouse. After a certain time, it is for the best that cultural icons officially become the property of the culture they have always belonged to.

Which doesn’t really matter. This would just allow people to distribute copies of the original film. It’s not like Disney is making a bunch of blu Ray sales of that anyway.

It'd actually be huge! It could also allow people to create derivative work (create art based on Steamboat Willie, sell t-shirts, etc). This will likely be contested in court in the US and it'll be interesting to watch. For example, the Conan Doyle state tried to claim that since not every work about Sherlock Holmes was in the public domain, then they still own the likeness of the character, which means that stuff like Sherlock or Elemental would've had to get a license. See https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sherlock-holmes-now-officially-copyright-and-open-business-180951794/

They actually still couldn’t sell T-shirts or products with Willie, because Disney still maintains the trademark on the character.

IANAL and a lot of this is probably going to be decided in the courts. But my understanding is that you could either take a frame from Steamboat Willie or create a drawing in a new pose and distribute/sell that, as long as you don't call it Steamboat Willie(tm).

People are so casual about this event, but it means that Congress can’t cooperate, even for corruption. Disney has little hope...

Nah. no way it goes public domain.

Your average congressperson has to raise about $8K a day to support their extended staff. Who is going to pay that money? Disney is going to pay that money and they are going to say that they want that legislation passed.

No way this doesn't get done. The public isn't clamoring for public domain exposure. There's plenty of money in this to go to both parties to get it through the relevant chambers.

Only way this happens is if Disney goes bankrupt and some later entity can't coordinate the needed payments. Then it'll probably lapse until it gets to some other key property.

Steamboat Willie enters the public domain in 5 years. If you think Congress can get its act together by then, you have more hope than I for our country.

Congress moves pretty damn quick when it comes to helping ~~corporations~~ sorry, people

Wait they didnt? Are you absolutely sure about this?

None of there stuff is currently due so the keyword is yet

They registered Mickey as a trademark to prevent unauthorized use. Those generally don't expire. Steamboat Willie will be out of copyright, but I don't think they really care about that.

Oh, I missed some of the lists of ebooks, thanks for listing them!

Also, I believe I saw someone mention that Calibre can sync your ebook library on your computer with your ereader, so you wouldn't have to do all of the emailing if you prefer to go that route (if, like me, you want ALL THE BOOKS). But I don't know the specifics, I haven't done it.

With Calibre I believe you need to plug your ebook reader in and the books are not synced to the cloud. Still a good option for adding a ton of books at one time but for one off downloads I like to email.

No, you can email without connecting your device too. You have to set it up for the first time and then it's dead easy every time.

That's still just emailing individual books - calibre just allows you to choose a book in your calibre library to email to your kindle. Same thing as emailing it yourself.

If you plug a reader in you can load hundreds or thousands of books quickly.

You're probably right. I haven't tried it, but perhaps you can select multiple books and click on connect/share to shoot off multiple emails.

You can but by default it's rate limited. For a lot of books, better off plugging in

You can batch e-mail books too.

Depending on the device you can sync over wifi too

Ah ok, that's good to know - thanks!

For android based e-readers, you can sync wirelessly using calibre companion.

You're also able to link it to your wifi connection and transfer ebooks that way in bulk.

Calibre synqs to a directory on your filesystem that you can easily synq to Dropbox or whatever. I have mine in Apple Cloud and it works fine.

Google Books is on top of it.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that Google Books stands ready. Its software is already set up so that on January 1 of each year, the material from 95 years earlier that’s currently digitized but only available for searching suddenly switches to full text.

Not sure if this was mentioned anywhere, but Amazon will convert PDF to Kindle format (.AZW) if you set your email subject to 'convert'.

amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email

You may be better off converting manually than letting Amazon do it, but it's usually better than leaving it as PDF (variable font size, annotations, and Whispersync).

Native supported file types:

Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)

HTML (.HTML, .HTM)

RTF (.RTF)

JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG)

Kindle Format (.MOBI, .AZW)

GIF (.GIF)

PNG (.PNG)

BMP (.BMP)

PDF (.PDF)

To second this, I've found the subject line "convert" e-mail to be the best PDF converter out there.

Oh, dang. I had no idea and spent a ton of time manually converting all my pdf files for the past few years.

Thanks!

Oops I am a little late with my comment about this :) Thanks for pointing this out!

[deleted]

AZW is basically the same as MOBI, although AZW is proprietary. AZW3/KF8 though allows for more advanced formatted, embedding fonts, etc. but I don't believe there's a benefit to converting.

Here's a little more info on the different formats: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/ebook-formats-explained/

At least on the Kindle Paperwhite .azw has the cover page when browsing, while any other format (.mobi or .pdf) just has a generated cover with only title and author as text.

Philip K Dick, Fredrick Pohl, the Lensman series, Andre Norton’s Solar Queen series... those are some straight-up classics

Does anybody have an actual list of books that are newly added to the public domain?

Here is a list of 1923 books sorted by popularity. it's on Goodreads so you can bookmark the titles you want to read.

Thank you for this link. Your doing good work here.

So if I wanted to create my own publishing company, i could call it Original Gronkie's Books, and release these books under my own imprint, without having to have permission from the author or their estate, or the original publisher, and without paying any royalties?

[deleted]

Things that make you go Hmmm...

Ideas being released into the public domain after a period of exclusivity that may benefit everyone, and allow rich reimaginings of these tales, like Shakespeare to the Lion King, all the Sherlock Holmes series, stories, shows, etc, and a huge number of other examples?

Yeah, it's pretty interesting.

Its outrageous that we had a gap of twenty years. I'm all for allowing an artist to make money off of his work and even for his family to cash in after he's gone but to wait almost 90 years for works to go into the public domain is ridiculous. More so due to Disney pushing this when Walt Disney made his empire largely off of public domain stories. Could you imagine if we'd had to wait until the 60s to adapt some of Charles Dickens's novels without asking his great grandchildren for the okay and paying them for the privilege?

It's more like a gap of 40 years when you work in the 1976 extension, also paid for by Disney. Works from 1922 entered the public domain in 1998, but that and a few edge cases (like stuff old enough to need renewal that didn't get renewed) has been it for the last forty years.

To put it in perspective, that's only eight years less than it would have taken something published in 1976 to enter the public domain if not for that first extension, and that's if it was renewed. And the pre-'76 rule was itself the result of an extension from a few decades earlier. For over a hundred years copyrights lasted a max of 28 years, and you had to renew after the first 14.

Yup. You'd need 12 original illustrations per piece however. That was the rule last time I checked anyway.

Geeze. That's a pretty low bar. You could easily set up a commission for that and if you decide to forego publishing in print you could theoretically just push out e-books right?

Might be difficult to sell ebooks that are already free though

Supply vs demand my friend

Fuck it, I'm doing stick figures

But who would sue you if you didn't put in the illustrations? Its in the public domain, nobody owns copyright.

Also, I'm pretty sure Project Gutenberg, Google Books etc. just upload straight up scans of the original book, along with just a text version. I don't think they put in anything original.

I don't think you would get sued, amazon would just remove the book as it doesn't fit to their terms. I imagine they introduced the rule as a spam barrier, it cuts down on ten thousand people submitting the same book to make a quick dollar.

OP wanted their own publishing company... That doesn't require Amazon.

Amazon have 90% of the market share. They're required if you want to make money.

You don't require approval from Amazon to make a publishing company, regardless of their market share.

I never said you did need permission. The fact of the matter is that an indie imprint is going to go through Amazon, so their rules are worth knowing.

Actually you did say that.

You replied to someone asking if they can create a publishing company and release public domain books without paying royalties etc. with this:

You'd need 12 original illustrations per piece however. That was the rule last time I checked anyway.

Nobody had mentioned Amazon anywhere.

How does that work for audio books?

That's the rule for KDP. It wouldn't apply for audio. You'd have to check with a platform like ACX. I don't venture into audio much so I'm not as familiar with the rules!

Yo I'll do it

Help! How do I open an email and then drag a book into it on my phone? I can see the Gutenberg files on the Reddit app from the link you provided and then can open my email but how do I navigate between them?

Thanks so much for this!

When you download a file on your phone it usually asks you what you want to do with it - you'd choose to email the file.

I had to go to Guttenberg through my browser- not the reddit link- and it worked! Thanks for the tech support!

Will it show as a document or as an ebook? A few years ago I used Calibre to transfer a bunch of books to my Kindle, but it read them as documents instead of Kindle ebooks, which completely destroyed any chances of decent organization

And if you have the kindle app on your phone you can skip sending the email altogether and choose to “open with kindle” and it will automatically download into the kindle app.

You sure about that? Most of Lovecraft's works should have entered the public domain less than 20 years ago.

Disney worked very hard to get the length of time for copyrights extended.

Yeah, I'd love to hear some clarity on the "first time in more than 20 years" bit.

Lovecrafts works were one of the rare examples of someone failing to renew a copyright after a copyright extension was filed. Nobody was really sure who had the rights to a large number of his stories, so no extension was filed on them. Anything written before 1923 was of course public domain for much longer, but anything after that is still risky. Some of it is copyrighted, most of it isn't.

Now we are starting to get works that were properly extended to their full legal limit.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/first-time-20-years-copyrighted-works-enter-public-domain-180971016/

Before you read them you will need to hire a phrenologist to have you skull measured. It not our rule, it's just Lovecraft's will.

I live in you.

If you have a Kindle with experimental browser (for example "paperwhite"), then you can just download the ebook in kindle format directly on the gutenberg website on your Kindle

Oh wow that I didn't know

I won’t suggest ppl store lots lots of books in the library. Just get one, read one and then start the next iteration.

TIL there is a book titled ‘Ham Sandwich’

There's also a pretty decent band called 'Ham Sandwich' too.

Even better, there are signposts in Kent (UK) with "Ham Sandwich" on.

Can you provide instructions for a Nook?

Came here to figure out if there's an equivalent process for Nook

I was curious as well. If someone responds, will you please leave me comment so I will know it's posted?

Nooks didn't do wireless syncs did they? You had to sync a nook by plugging it into a computer.

If that's true, Calibre.

Nooks do sync wirelessly, and they sync across devices

[deleted]

I have only purchased books. When you purchase a book it is automatically linked to my Nook account and appears on all my devices. If there is an email address in use I do not know how to find it. I believe that is what the original post was about how to find the email address for Kindle and my question is how to do that for a Nook

Are you able to successfully send more than one file at a time?

Gotta do it one at a time - if you want to transfer a lot you can use Calibre.

You can send up to 25 files at a time. Quoting from Amazon:

To be delivered successfully, an email can contain up to 25 attachments and can be sent to up to 15 distinct Send to Kindle email addresses. The total size of your documents should be 50 MB or less.

Huh I will have to try again - I haven't had success sending multiple items. Maybe a file size issue though?

Possibly. I've emailed ~10 .mobi books an year back and it worked.

I send multiple .pdf research articles to kindle all the time, never had problems with that. I have the 7th generation or whatever one.

But the 50MB is probably the email size which is ~37% larger than size on HDD because of base64 encoding.

About that: don't get too excited. (More details)

It sounds like it’s too late for the 2019 copyrights at least. It passed the house but that bill dies at the start of the new Congress

Shhhhhh don’t tell them until it’s official!

You can also send a PDF book to your Kindle email address and put CONVERT in the subject line and it will convert that PDF into ebook format!! Happy New Year and happy reading everyone!

I’m Still in 2018

Will documents sent this way sync read location between devices?

Just make sure you have Whispersync enabled, and it will sync your latest positions between devices.

Yes.

Hi, me again! Are you sure? I don't know about sync of progress but I know for a fact that notes and highlights of these personal docs are not synced across devices (any file that's emailed to Kindle is called a personal doc).

It does sync your last read location across devices - it's the main reason I like to add books this way.

Ok. Thanks.

I requested Amazon to sync notes/highlights too long back. It's a shame they're not going to bring that feature.

Thanks for the well written step-by-step. Nicely done.

[deleted]

I use it every time and never had any problem. If you think there's something wrong, reproduce the issue with just one book and get back to Amazon or someone here for help.

For web page articles, try the fivefilters.org Chrome extension (not the best link, I'm on my phone, sorry). Their Android app is also great for web pages, but I think it's not free.

I have the entire Gutenburg collection and I use Calibre. It's massive. There are filters where it can be downloaded to an original Ipad or Kindle. The original Kindle can be on for months and never even worry about battery power. The original Ipad, maybe a few weeks.

[deleted]

Mine is darn near 200 gigs compressed heavily. You could keep on getting DVD's or just download the entire catalog. What Calibre is good for is on-the-fly conversion, I used windows as a front end for organization and front end, NFS, and Debian for running the back end storage.

How many books is that?

I'm not trying to sound bad, but all of them. It's a network, I guess over 100k works in total if you take into account the formats. This number includes educational books, volumes. etc. Gutenberg cites for their own library 57k but I know it's way more than that. There are editions to consider, then some were converted to a format, someone else converted it to a different format, etc.

You never take the main source as a central place, but sometimes you have to.

What sucks is that the books I had as a kid, way well within the restraints don't exist in the library. You can find out a lot about the library if you want.

https://www.gutenberg.org/

Anyone who runs a real Calibre mirror can easily take up to over $100/hr just to run a VM instance for converting.

Can someone ELI5?

Project Gutenberg lets you download ebook files to your computer, but if you use a Kindle, you have to get them on to your Kindle from your computer. You can do this by emailing the file to an email address provided by Amazon, from which it will automatically be added to your Kindle library.

To do which:

Find out your Kindle email address, which you can do either via your kindle or from Amazon.com, following the steps OP listed.

Make sure your Kindle doesn't think that your regular email address is spam by 'whitelisting' it, following the steps OP listed.

Download the Kindle version of the ebook you want from Project Gutenberg to your computer.

Go to your regular email, attach the ebook from your computer to a new message, and send it to your Kindle email address.

Does that help?

Oh perfectly awesome explanation thank you, I knew the Kindle part. Not the project part. Thanks again

One of the books was too big, so it sent it to Google Drive & now it's stuck there cause I have no idea how to move it from there.

I’m not 100% sure if I understand this either.

Go to your local public library get a library card and you can download the libby and hoopla app to get free audio and ebooks. Saved me tons of money and a great alternative to audible and services that charge a monthly fee.

Cool, I will check this out!

Very helpful. Thanks!

Awesome!

The Prophet

I'm so excited!!!

You are a national treasure for sharing this. Thanks!

It's hard for me to engage with a book in English, even when most of my daily readings like articles and comic/manga are. But for a book I still prefer Spanish, not sure why, but I'm taking good note of this, thank you.

[deleted]

Thanks a lot, I'm starting "El Lazarillo de Tormes" again now.

You can use the following site to email epubs directly to your Kindle:

sendepubtokindle.com

Edit: formatting.

I do not see how to get the book’s Kindle link to an email. When I click the Kindle with images file, nothing happens. I’m on an iPhone.

What am I missing?

Another way I have found is to download the ebook to a PC, then email it to my Kindle-mail-to address. Still more roundabout than emailing from Project Gutenberg. Maybe I just misunderstand the top post.

No, this process is correct. What my comment states is an even simpler way to send a specific format ebook (EPUB) to your Kindle.

If your ebook is in EPUB format, you can use the site I posted to send it to your Kindle without any conversion.

I apologize, I meant for my posts to go under the main topic.

The files I'm working with are .mobi

So, I can use the link from Project Gutenberg to Google Drive, run Google Drive on my device, and tell it to "Open in" Kindle Reader. This works, but seems roundabout.

The problem is, I think, that I am not getting an option in Project Gutenberg to email it to my Kindle email ID. I tried emailing a link to the Project Gutenberg file, then syncing my Kindle reader, but the book did not show up on the Kindle reader.

You are the savior. Thanks a lot.

I have been using calibre and connecting my kindle to my pc for transfers.

You're a champ! Saving for later

[deleted]

In most countries, yes. But in America they haven’t.

I highly recommend everyone check Standard Ebooks BEFORE going to project Gutenberg. If they don't have it then Gutenberg certainly will.

Why? What's better about them?

Why should I care at this point when I'm being downvoted? Can't make any recommendations anymore on this fucking sub that's not project Gutenberg without people acting like it's an advertisement despite it all being free. I'm so sick of reddit.

Mate, I was just wondering what features it had that led you to suggest checking it before Project Gutenberg.

Yeah and I kinda lost all motivation for that when people are messaging me for "advertising" and mods saying if I do it again I'll be banned.

Read it for yourself

https://standardebooks.org/about/

!remindme 6 days

Great news... on the day my kindle screen breaks :(

How do I get the books to show up in my library on my kindle? They are sending and I can pull them up through the docs app on my kindle but they do not show up in my books library. It would be nice to have them with all my other books so I can look at all the titles at once. It's okay if I cant fix it because I can still access the books. Thank you for doing this!

You can but you need to edit them on your computer first. You have to edit the metadata with something like Calibre and change the PDOC designation to EBOK.

Books sent via email are considered "personal documents" and thus show up in the Docs section. Even if you side load MOBI files with Calibre they'll show up in Docs.

EDIT: I checked on my Fire that if you sideload an AZW3 then it will show up in the main Books listing.

Thanks for sharing!

!remind me 5 hours

!remindme 6 hours

Is there a way to use project Gutenberg from Germany? Or if not, is there any good alternative?

This pleases me. Thank you

thanks op!!!! :)

​

Project Gutenberg is awesome! Thanks for the link.

Is there a way to add them to IBooks?

This is fantastic. Thank you so much.

Ty steve

Thanks ... This is great!

Thank you! Great information.

Thanks for this!

Thank you!

Thank you, OP! I appreciate the information and your time!

Is this just for Kindle or can you use it with other services like IBooks?

Saved for later!

Laughs in Library Genesis

@garbledyOthakgook

Holy fuck, 70 platinum?

I tried to do this but I forgot my pudding! When I went to get it I found a six foot long Italian restaurant, good place but no noodles! Pudding went bad, I left it out too long.

You doing okay there buddy?

/r/lostredditors

Someone's having a really good time on new year's Eve

Wow. Get home safely bud.

Why would an Italian place serve noodles anywhere? 🤔

I remember the Adam Ruins Everything episode where he said Disney lobbied to make it longer and would probably do it again.

Thanks for sharing!

Fuck you Disney.

Well damn, I wish an admin would take over and shill /r/ebook for me.