The quickest way to find free Kindle books with an iPhone or iPad

There are several services that list free Kindle books, but it doesn’t mean that each day you’ll spot the free book you’d actually want to read. An option to find a book that is interesting for me and at the same time is free was always something that I wanted to achieve. Searching for free ebooks instead of receiving free ebooks – it’s a huge difference.

The tool that turns you from a passive user to active searcher is a fantastic note-taking app for iPhone and iPad, called Drafts. You can quickly check the free (and interesting) Kindle ebooks on the go, having a couple of spare minutes waiting for a bus or eating lunch.

Recently I wrote a post about how to turn Drafts into a powerful search engine tool. Using this app to find free content for Kindle is working like a charm. You can get a list of free Kindle books in few taps. It will save you a couple of more taps if you wanted to do the same only with Safari or Google Chrome.

What’s more, you can customize search by a category or a specific term. All you have to do is to set up a URL scheme that limits search results on Amazon to free Kindle titles.

Here’s what to do.

How to find free Kindle books with Drafts app

1. Open Drafts app, tap on Share icon, select Settings, and tap on URL Actions. Add a new action by tapping on “+” icon in the top right corner.

2. Name the new action. I recommend using “Free Kindle Books”. Later in a post I’ll explain why. In the URL field paste the line from below, and save the action

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo?ie=UTF8&node=1286228011&field-keywords=[[draft]]

If you prefer to open the link in Google Chrome, instead of Safari, paste this line:

googlechrome://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo?ie=UTF8&node=1286228011&field-keywords=[[draft]]

3. Now, in the Drafts’ text field write down “free kindle books” and from a list of available options select the action that you’ve just set up (see screenshot below – picture on the right).

Drafts - finding free Kindle books - screenshot 1

The whole beauty is that the phrase “free kindle books” is treated by Amazon search engine in a very special way. It automatically redirects to a section of Kindle Store that lists only free titles. That’s why, if you forget the right wording, you’ll have the reminder in the name of the URL action.

On the other hand, all notes are stored in Drafts app, so there is no need to write down the phrase every time. Just pick it up from the list of saved notes.

That’s not the end. There are two ways to further customize the search.

First one is to sort search results, after you open them in a browser. By default you’ll have them sorted by “relevance”, but you can get much more interesting titles if you pick up “new and popular”.

Drafts - finding free Kindle books - screenshot 2

The other way will let you narrow the search results by any term you want. All you have to do is to add new word/words in the text field.

For example, using “free kindle books romance” will list free books from Kindle Store in a romance category. Just make sure to keep “free kindle books” at the beginning of the note.

Examples of search terms:

  • free kindle books zombie
  • free kindle books post apocalyptic
  • free kindle books Seth Godin

More to come on how to use Drafts app to explore the book world. Stay tuned! To get more posts like this, please subscribe by RSS or email. Let’s also connect on Facebook and Twitter.

Drafts for iPhoneDrafts for iPhone

Drafts is the quick, easy way to capture and share text. In Drafts, text comes first – open the app and get a new, blank draft – ready to type. Don’t get bogged down in a timeline just to tweet or post to Facebook. Don’t tap your way through multiple screens to get down an email or SMS. Don’t navigate folders, create files and name them just to jot down a note or create a todo.

In Drafts you can get that text down quickly and decide what to do with it later. Extensive output options let you send text to Twitter, Facebook, App.net, email, SMS, a Calendar event, quickly save it to Dropbox or Evernote – or forward it to a growing list of other Apps such as OmniFocus, Things, Fantastical, Byword, Sparrow and more.

Features

Quick entry
App opens to a new blank draft to quickly jot down ideas.

Save, search, sync
Not sure what to do with that text? Just type it in and leave drafts – no saving, it’ll be there when you get back. Recent drafts are always one tap away, and full-text searching is available. Optionally enable Drafts lightning fast sync between Drafts, Drafts for iPad (sold separately) on multiple devices.

Send to… anything?
Extensive output options let you do almost anything you might want with your text. Output options include: Twitter, Facebook, Email, SMS messages, Events, Clipboard, “Open in…” export, Print.

Custom email actions
Configure your own email actions with preconfigured recipients that can be sent in the background to integration with services like Evernote, Toodledo, IFTTT and more.

Custom Dropbox actions
Create actions to create/append/prepend to any file in your Dropbox.

Custom URL actions
Create actions with URL schemes to integrate with other apps and websites.

Import/export/share actions
Drafts support sharing of custom actions via URLs.

Forward drafts to other apps
Including Tweetbot, Twitter, OmniFocus, Things, Simplenote, Sparrow, The Hit List, Echofon, Due, Byword, WriteUp, Buffer, Bang On, Agenda, Day One, Appigo Todo, Writing Kit and more.

Customize actions
Arrange and enabled/disabled actions to avoid clutter. Also, each action has settings to configure whether the action requires confirmation before launch, and if it should automatically create a new draft after completion.

Link mode
Capture phone’s, addresses and URLs and link mode makes them tappable links.

Evernote
Link an Evernote account and a single tap create a new note based on your draft in the default notebook.

Markdown support
Use markdown to format text, and Drafts can convert it to HTML. Preview the HTML in Drafts, create a HTML email, or copy it to the clipboard for use in other apps.

Terminology support
Drafts integrates with Terminology Ph, a top ranked dictionary-thesaurus app. With Terminology Ph installed, lookup selected words Terminology – or browse for replacement words and have them inserted back into Drafts without cut and paste.

Themes and fonts
Customize the writing environment. Drafts ships with a selection of color themes, including a “Night” mode. Choose from over a dozen fonts.

Text tools
Text expander support,landscape typing, live word and character counts

iTunes AppStore $2.99
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