Amazon’s Kindle has changed the ereader and ebook experience completely. If you’ve got a Kindle, you can level up that experience with a few choice sites and apps, delivering RSS feeds, tracking book sales, and even giving you free ebooks.
This isn’t the first time we’re doing one of these lists and it won’t be the last. As with all things books, there are innovations and new discoveries all the time, and they only make your reading time better.
Kindle Lite (Android): Official Lightweight App
You can get the full Kindle experience without buying an ereader if you just use the free app. Granted, it’s a completely different type of screen, but you can still buy ebooks. Plus, it’s not one or the other, the app is an excellent way to pick up where you stopped on your ereader.
Android users would know well that the current Kindle app is bloated and clunky. That’s why Amazon quietly launched Kindle Lite, a lightweight version for Android, which takes less storage space and doesn’t hog other resources either. The Kindle Lite app, in fact, is akin to the web-based Kindle Cloud Reader for desktops.
It lets you read ebooks, get recommendations to buy other books, but not much else. You can change the font and background, as well as add highlights and notes. Kindle Lite also has a handy screen to show how much data or storage the app is using.
Kindle Lite launched in India and is slowly expanding to other countries. Indian users can download it off the Play Store directly, while other users would need to manually install the APK linked below.
Download: Kindle Lite for Android | APK from APK Pure (Free)
Just Kindle Books (Web): Free and Discounted Kindle eBook Deals
On the internet, good content is free (and legally free, at that). But you need to know where to look for it. Just Kindle Books is the place to get updates on free and discounted Kindle ebooks.
The site doesn’t bother with other ebook formats or stores. It’s all about the Kindle, and that’s a boon for anyone who has looked at some of the best ebook sites in the past only to find a plethora of titles from other stores.
Just Kindle Books mostly has selections from small or independent authors, so it’s not always that you’ll find a winner here. But once in a while, you’ll get a doozy. I’d recommend subscribing to their newsletter so you don’t miss out on any new deals, or following them on social media if that’s your thing.
Global Grey (Web): Free eBook Series and Collections
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books are famous. But did you know that Doyle also wrote another character called Professor Challenger, who has five science-fiction/fantasy books? This is why you need Aisha of Global Grey. She’s going to tell you how to download all those books for free.
You probably know that classic books are available for free on sites like Project Gutenberg. But Aisha goes the extra mile. She collects some of the best book series in collections that you’ll find easy to download and read. Go to “Series” section on Global Grey and you’ll get an endless reading of free ebooks in collections.
Even apart from the series, quality is a big consideration at Global Grey, so you can get completely free ebooks that don’t suck. What you’ll find here are classics or highly recommended scholarly books.
eReaderIQ (Web): Advanced Kindle Search Engine and Price Watch
Some sites are excellent but go under the reader. eReaderIQ is among the best Kindle tools I’ve ever seen and I didn’t know about it till this week. The site does everything that a Kindle user could possibly want.
The best feature is book tracking. You can set alerts for books you are interested in, so that you know when they are available for Kindle, or have hit a certain price, or are on sale.
eReaderIQ has an advanced search engine and browsing option that is far better than Amazon’s own. You can filter lists by genre, check if the book is also available in paperback, set a length for the book, and check discounts. Categories like New On Kindle, Freebies, Price Drops, and Under $ 1 will make sure you never miss a good deal.
The site’s only restriction so far is that it works with the USA, Canada, and UK Amazon stores. If you’re outside of these three countries, your local Kindle store won’t work.
Keendly (Web): Send Perfectly Formatted RSS Feeds to Kindle
Keendly isn’t the first app to send RSS feeds to your Kindle, but it’s the easiest to use. Setting it up takes about two minutes, as you can see in the above video. Then it’s all about selecting what you want and sending it.
Keendly does the heavy lifting of taking any web article and formatting it for Kindle-based reading. But I loved that Keendly actually let me choose whether to grab images as well and if it should load the full article or only the excerpt. Plus, whenever it sends those articles to your Kindle, it will mark them as read in your RSS feed, which is a persistent problem with most other RSS-to-Kindle apps.
The only issue with Keendly is that its scheduled auto-delivery is a paid feature, which costs 3 euros per month. But for free, you can manually visit the sit and send updates to yourself when you want.
If you don’t mind the bad formatting, you can use IFTTT to schedule articles to your Kindle for free. I’d also recommend checking out Reabble, a web-based RSS reader made for the Kindle browser.
12 More Sites for Kindle Owners
If you already knew about these sites and apps, or wanted something more, we’ve still got you covered. In our other article on the 12 sites every Kindle owner should know about, you’ll find other ebook search engines, book-lending solutions, and even communities to discuss all things Kindle.
Read the full article: Kindle Users Shouldn’t Miss These 5 Sites and Apps
