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Massive Boom of Ebooks and reading apps as a result of lockdown
The events of recent months have had a devastating impact on lives and businesses across the world, and a global recession seems certain to follow. But there are always positives that come from even the darkest times, and one such ray of light has been a surge in reading during lockdown.,,,,,.... https://amzn.to/33JHV1E
We all have a mental shortlist of books we intend to read “when we get a chance.” With literally billions confined to their homes for weeks on end, that chance arrived in the first half of 2020. Lockdown has provided an opportunity for the general populace to fall back in love with reading, and a survey by Nielsen Book reported that people have spent on average twice as much time reading as they did before lockdown. This in turn means the book industry, especially where ebooks are concerned, is one of the few sectors that has not been crippled by the global pandemic.
Surging sales figures
Who would want to have been a retailer in recent months? High streets and shopping malls have been deserted with enforced closure of stores, and although things are slowly returning to some kind of normal, the global economic storm clouds of recession are gathering, as reported from this infographic. But one lesson learned has been the vital lifeline that cyberspace can offer in a pandemic.
This is not just in terms of staying in touch through Zoom and the like. Retailers also learned that with a solid online presence, the closure of stores did not have to mean sales grinding to a halt. This report from Sky News demonstrated the dichotomy perfectly, with Waterstones reporting a 400 percent increase in online sales, while small independent bookstores without an ecommerce platform could only look on helplessly.
But it is ebooks , https://amzn.to/33JHV1E, that proved the biggest winners. Here, there was no need for human interaction at all. No warehouse picking, no deliveries left at a safe distance, just a click, an online payment and you can start reading.
What have people been reading?
Many surveyed by Nielsen revealed that their reading tastes changed after lockdown. Specifically, there was an increased appetite for crime fiction and thrillers. Dystopian novels were less popular, a trend quite different to that in the movie streaming sector, where titles like Contagion topped the ratings.
A key factor here was the reason for reading. Naturally, more than 50 percent said it was because they had more time available. But over a third said books provided “an escape” from what was happening in the real world. Thriller writer Louise Doughty said that at times like this, people don’t necessarily want a “feel good” book to cheer them up. What they really need is to “be absorbed” by a book that will suck them into its world and hold their attention.
Among younger readers, the closure of schools was likely instrumental in the US seeing a 66 percent increase in children’s non-fiction titles, while study aids soared by well over 200 percent.
An uncertain future
The medium-term future is still unclear, and tough times are ahead for writers, publishers and sellers. But the book industry has survived many challenges, and the International Publishers Association is confident that it will face the challenges of the coming months head-on. https://amzn.to/33JHV1E
Markus lives in San Francisco, California and is the video game and audio expert on Good e-Reader! He has a huge interest in new e-readers and tablets, and gaming.
How to put free e-books on your Amazon Kindle
The Amazon Kindle is a great e-book reader, https://amzn.to/33JHV1E, but it's tightly tied to Amazon's ecosystem. If you have a Fire tablet or a smartphone, you can download other e-reading apps to beef up your library, but with the E Ink Kindles (including the Paperwhite and Oasis) you're pretty much tied to getting your content directly from Amazon.
Well, sort of. Using a bit of free software, you can take e-books in the EPUB, Mobi, and PDF formats and zap them over to your Kindle lickety-split. Here's how to do it.
Find your Kindle emailThe easiest way to put books on your Kindle is to do it via email. To get your Kindle's email address, go to amazon.com/myk using your PC's web browser. Up top, click the Devices tab. In the list below, find the relevant Kindle device and click the three dots on the left. In the pop-up window, you'll see an @kindle.com email address. (It's set to a default address, but you can change it by clicking Edit.)
Back up top, click the Preferences tab and scroll down to Personal Document Settings. Click the down arrow on the right and scroll to Approved Personal Document E-mail List. The email attached to your Amazon account should be listed here. If that's the email address you'll be using to send e-books to your Kindle, you're all set. To use a different email, click Add a new approved e-mail address and enter the address you want to use.
Remember, your Kindle needs to be attached to a Wi-Fi or 3G network for this to work. It doesn't have to be your home network, of course; you can go to a coffee shop or a public library, for instance.
Choose your e-book formatNow you know how to email an e-book to your Kindle, the next step is to figure out your e-book's format, which will determine how best to send it.
Mobi Format,,,, https://amzn.to/33JHV1EGood news: If your books are in the Mobi format, they're already readable by the Kindle. Attach the file to an email, send it to your Kindle's email address (with any subject, and nothing in the body of the email), and it should appear on your Kindle shortly. You can also drag and drop the file onto your Kindle if you attach the device to your PC with a USB cable.
PDF FormatAmazon can automatically convert PDFs into the Kindle format, but you get two formatting choices. If you want your Kindle to display every page in the PDF as if it were a graphic, just email the .pdf file to your Kindle's address without a subject line.
That will maintain the formatting and graphics, but the font size may be too small to read. If you're okay with this kind of formatting, you can also drag and drop the file onto your Kindle if you attach the device to your PC with a USB cable.
Your other option is to attach the PDF file to an email, and make the subject line "Convert"—just that word. Send it to your Kindle email address and your PDF will be converted into a Mobi file, where you can control the font size and formatting. The graphics will still be in there as well, but you'll lose the layout of the original PDF.
EPUB FormatEPUB is a common e-book format around the web, but the Kindle can't read it natively. That's okay; you can convert .epub files to Mobi files for the Kindle to read.
The key is a free piece of software called Calibre. Available for Windows and Macs, it can reformat almost any kind of e-book for most e-book readers, although cracking the copy protection on books purchased from Amazon or certain other stores is forbidden. When you set up the software, it asks you for your model of e-book reader, and a pop-up suggests sending the books by email. Fill in the email address for your Kindle and the authorized email address with which you've set to send documents to your Kindle.,,, https://amzn.to/33JHV1E
Once you set up Calibre, click on Add Books and pick out any free e-book files you've downloaded. They'll appear in the Calibre library. Now click on an entry in your Calibre library and choose Convert Books from the top bar.
In the upper right-hand corner, make sure to set the Output Format to Mobi. Click OK, and wait until the Jobs number at the lower-right of the main screen goes from 1 down to 0. Now select the title again and click Save to Disk.
Pick the folder you want to save it in. It'll create a subfolder with the name of the author. In Explorer or Finder, drill into that folder until you find the Mobi file within, which you can email to your Kindle or drag and drop onto it using a USB cable.
Also, remember, text files, blog posts, Word documents, and more can be emailed to your Kindle, too. Just send them to your Kindle's email address and enjoy.
So where do I get free e-books?There are lots of places to get free e-books. https://amzn.to/33JHV1E, Calibre actually has a good metasearch function, and you can click Get Books to search by title or author. It's not the friendliest for browsing, though, so it's best if you know exactly what you're looking for.
If you belong to a US public library, try downloading OverDrive. Available for Windows and macOS, it hooks into public library catalogs and lets you download Kindle books through Amazon. You can find your local library and OverDrive has send-to-Kindle instructions for every type of device. Libby and Hoopla offer similar services.
If you want classics, a great place to start is Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, which has been around basically as long as the internet, has nearly 60,000 copyright-free e-books. Here's how to get e-books from there.
Open Library has even more downloadable books. The classics are available to download as PDFs, which you can then email to your Kindle using the PDF method above.
https://amzn.to/33JHV1E, For historical and academic texts, check out archive.org.
ManyBooks.net mixes classics and self-published titles, with over 50,000 in its library.
You'll find more classics and self-published works at FeedBooks.
Free-E-books.net has a large collection of self-published e-books, but also a good amount of classics too.
If you like science fiction, the publisher Baen also has a set of free e-books.
BookBub has a free e-book section filled with romance novels and other casual reads.
Some bookstores use copy protection that doesn't work with Kindles. Unfortunately, that's the case for Google Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.
This article originally published at PCMag here
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