Today I saw this post on : The Kindle Best Sellers that are currently Free
Quote
...This list is generated using Amazon’s sales data itself. Amazon offers a best sellers list of Kindle titles though the list is split across five pages. The tool uses web scraping to download the entire list, filters out ebooks which are no longer free (the prices on Amazon can change every hour) and then puts everything in one Pinterest style page.
(The rest of the post and the links are worth a read too.)So I went to the link he gave http://ctrlq.org/amazon/ebooks/, and after a bit of messing about I figured out:
- (a) that the link is related as some kind of a click-through for labnol.org.
- (b) that the links from there seemed broken and did not end properly, and I had to go directly to the Amazon Kindle search and type in the book names to start to order them for my account.
- (c) that you could speed up the search by putting "$0.00" into the Amazon Kindle search, and all the free books would be listed (though interspersed by non-free ones for some reason).
- (d) that you needed to have a registered Kindle device (there are apparently 3) before you could download anything, so after some experimentation I settled for Kindle for PC and downloaded that and installed it. I could have used the web-based Kindle Cloud, so I tried that out but didn't like it. I don't have a Kindle tablet.
Quite a lot of mouse-clickiness RSI later, I had downloaded 51 books. They went into the C:\Users\[User ID]\Documents\My Kindle Content folder, where I discovered that I already had a forgotten book (Aesop's Fables) that I recall but not how I came by it.
This was almost as good as rummaging in a free books or cheap books jumble sale. I was as happy as the proverbial pig in sh**. I may even get a Kindle - which is presumably the marketing idea behind it, but I warily noticed that my RIAA/MAFIAA Radar went off on just about every book downloaded.
Quote
Note: from http://bhtooefr.org/blog/2012/03/21/proposal-lets-create-a-successor-to-riaa-radar/
For those unaware, RIAA Radar was a tool that Ben Tesch wrote, that made it very easy to determine whether a certain piece of media was released by a RIAA member label, to assist with boycotting the RIAA. It worked by searching Amazon for the search term in question, and returning all CDs that met that search term, along with the label that published that CD, and a simple “safe”, “unknown”, or “warning” image based on whether the label was a RIAA member or not. Unfortunately, due to maintenance and hosting issues, he took it down.
For those unaware, RIAA Radar was a tool that Ben Tesch wrote, that made it very easy to determine whether a certain piece of media was released by a RIAA member label, to assist with boycotting the RIAA. It worked by searching Amazon for the search term in question, and returning all CDs that met that search term, along with the label that published that CD, and a simple “safe”, “unknown”, or “warning” image based on whether the label was a RIAA member or not. Unfortunately, due to maintenance and hosting issues, he took it down.
Logged
