Whether your district is investing in iPads, Kindles, Chromebooks, Nexus 7’s, Nooks, netbooks, laptops, or BYOT, students still need access to good literature in both print and digital formats. Your campus probably already has a good print library (thank you, librarians!). But how can you enhance that with digital offerings?
The easiest way is with free books from Amazon. Amazon offers lots of great reads daily that are free, and they also offer good pricing on sale ebooks, too. You’ll need a free Amazon account to take advantage of these, if you don’t already have one.
Once you have an Amazon account, you’ll need some type of program that will allow you to read the ebooks. Amazon provides the free Kindle app for the following devices:
- Any computer browser
- Mac computer
- Windows 8 computer
- Windows 7, XP, and Vista computer
- iPad
- Android tablet
- Windows 8 tablet
- iPhone or iPod
- Android phone
- Windows phone 7
- Blackberry
Whatever your device, the Kindle app will let you read ebooks on it. You can buy a Kindle book once, and read it on any device with the Kindle app installed that uses the same Amazon account. You can read the first chapter of a book free before you decide whether to buy it. You can also adjust a book’s text size to your desired comfort level for easier reading. You can automatically save and synchronize your furthest page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights across all your devices. That means students can start reading a book on one device, and pick up where they left off on another device.
Now that you have an account and the app, how do you find books? Start at Amazon in their Kindle section. You can look at best sellers, as well as a large variety of books in different categories such as Children’s Books, books for teens, textbooks, and even books in Spanish. Be sure to check out the Kindle Daily Deal, which features a great price on both an adult and a children’s/teen’s book each day.
To find free books, go to the Amazon Best Sellers list of free books. Again, you can look at different categories of books to find ones you are interested in. It’s important to note here that Amazon changes prices throughout the day based on how customers are responding to sales. So a book that is free in the morning may not be free in the afternoon. You should also remember that if you “purchase” a book while it is free and then delete it from your device, you still own the book and can reload it with no cost at any time, even if it is no longer free.
You can also get classic ebooks from Open Culture. This alphabetical list of 375 classics is a gold mine for avid readers. Some notable titles on the list include Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Davide Thoreau’s “Walden,” Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” (required readings for most U.S. high school students), and Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights.”
To easily load these books on multiple devices, you can download the free Send to app from Amazon on your computer (Mac or PC). Select a book online there and have it wirelessly sent to any of your devices running the Kindle app and using the same account. This is good if you have lots of devices on your campus and want to load the same books to them all at once. The Send to app also works with documents from any program, sending them to the device in PDF format automatically. This allows you then to send PDF ebooks,such as those found in Project Gutenberg, to multiple devices as well.
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Donny 🙂
Technology for K12 