Some of the books are honeypots from professional authors, hoping to lure you into their 23-part series that tells the life story of an amazing spy/explorer/dancer/footballer. There’s nothing wrong with this, just go into it with your eyes open.

Some are only briefly reduced to free as a promotion, before being shoved up to full price. You can keep an eye out for such promotions by entering your email address at www.ereaderiq.co.uk (this site also provides a slightly clumsy search mechanism for finding free books).

Then there are some that barely qualify for the terms “books” at all. O’Reilly, for instance, produces a number of very short publications about technology that feel more like extended articles.

So where do you go to find new books? First of all, naturally, you read this article. But after that you should head to www.amazon.co.uk and click on the Kindle Books link. To the right of the page you’ll see a Bestsellers box; click on the “Kindle Store : Books” link and you’ll see a straightforward listing on the right, plus a useful list of categories on the left. Click on the category you’re interested in – let’s say Science Fiction – and you’ll see the bestsellers, both paid for and free.

If using the Kindle itself then Amazon makes it a little trickier to find the free books, but it’s still possible to access the top 100. Select “Shop in Kindle Store”, then “Kindle Best Sellers” under Featured. You’ll find the link “Kindle Top 100 Free” on the top right hand of the screen.

Here’s our pick of the free books we’ve found – feel free to add your own suggestions in comments:

The Penal Colony

A gripping read from start to finish, this novel depicts an all-too-conceivable situation where Britain despatches its most dangerous prisoners to remote islands. Think of it as Lord of the Flies for adults. The Penal Colony is based on Sert, where The Village is the pinnacle of island culture: hot water, limited electricity and a direct link with the prison authorities make it the best place to live. But, as our arrogant protagonist Routledge discovers, you have to earn your place: when he arrives, insisting himself innocent of the murder of a young woman he met on a train, he’s told he can only be allowed in if he survives six days on the outside. But it doesn’t take him long to be captured by the biggest psychopath on the island…

Jane Eyre

The setting may be old fashioned and all too reminiscent of stuffy English Literature lessons, but the story is so strong – and your compassion with Jane Eyre so compelling – that you’ll likely rush through it if you haven’t done so before. As with A Christmas Carol (and for that matter all the Bronte sisters’ works), this book has been lovingly transcribed from the original and formatted for the Kindle by a community of literary do-gooders. If you haven’t read a classic for donkey’s years, let this one guide you back into the fold.

A Little Book of Christmas

Yes it’s twee and sentimental, but if A Christmas Carol wasn’t enough to get you into a festive mood then this book definitely will. It’s a collection of short stories tied together not only by the C word but also sheer niceness. Whether it’s the story of George W Hetherington, a Scrooge-like figure whose anti-Christmas sentiment is swept away when he becomes involved with a poverty-stricken family, or the way a New York Santa helps Little Billee find his way home, if you don’t have a tear in your eye at some point while reading this book your heart is made of flint.

A Little Bit of Everything for Dummies

There’s no getting away from the fact this is basically an advert for the For Dummies series, but it’s still packed with information. There’s a nostalgic chapter lifted from the first ever Dummies book – DOS for Dummies – plus another about networking in Windows 7, both written in a style you’ll either find chatty or enormously irritating. But it’s impressive by the sheer range of other topics covered: how to keep a relationship happy, enjoying an evening out in French, meditation tips, learning to play rock music on the guitar… and much more.

A Christmas Carol

Everyone knows the story of Scrooge, if only through the various movie tellings – prepare yourself to be shocked, but The Muppet’s Christmas Carol wasn’t the original. Like so many classic novels, it’s been converted to Kindle form by “the community”, and aside from the odd formatting error it has a very professional finish. Certainly you won’t be distracted from Dickens’ most accessible plot, with straightforward storytelling making this just as suitable a read for young children as it is for adults who may, just like Scrooge, have fallen under the magic spell of money.

What is HTML5?

We’re not massive fans of most of O’Reilly’s free books on the Kindle – as we mentioned above, they have a tendency to feel like extended web articles – but this one serves as an excellent introduction to HTML5. The opening pages focus on what it means for the end user, and it’s helped along by a friendly tone, but the target reader is always the aspiring web programmer and so there’s plenty of more meaty information to get your teeth into.

White Fang

There are plenty of children’s books available for free on the Kindle, and Jack London’s tale of survival is among the best. You follow the story of White Fang, half dog, half wolf, as he moves from one perilous situation to another. Most children will love the idea of being this close to the wild – he isn’t a gentle dog, to put it mildly, but most of the violence is hinted at rather than explicitly described – and unlike many such books it does its best to steer away too much from humanising wild animals. A deserved classic.

The Crew

Dougie Brimson was already considered an “expert” in football hooliganism before The Crew, his first novel, was published in the late 1990s, and he brings all that knowledge to bear in the plot. We follow two main characters: an under-pressure cop and a claustrophobic hooligan who’ll do anything to avoid being locked up in a cell. The police use this knowledge to persuade him to work with an undercover officer as they infiltrate an operation being run by the UK’s most notorious hooligan mastermind, with dramatic and unexpected consequences.

South: The Story of Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Expedition

If you’re hoping for a book with stylistic prose and beautiful descriptions of landscapes then look away now. Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton is a man who calls the killing of a seal a killing of a seal, and this journal features plenty of that. But while the prose is straightforward it’s also compelling, dragging you through the long months his ship spent locked in ice while they waited for summer to reappear. It’s a superb record, not only of that trip, but also a historical record to reflect the state of the world at the beginning of the First World War.

The brilliant book of calm

This is just one of the many self-help books that litter the Amazon freebie list, but it’s certainly one of the better ones. You’ll need to be in the mood for it – the one person we know who would benefit from The brilliant book of calm, PC Pro editor Barry Collins, probably wouldn’t make it through two pages before slamming it into the proverbial bin – but if you ignore the awkward humorous asides then it becomes a little more bearable. And actually, on occasion, thought-provoking. Please note this book is no longer free; since this article was written, its price has gone up to around £7.

I got an Amazon Kindle for Christmas. I charged it for only the third time yesterday, despite using it almost every day. In fact, my only problem with the Kindle is remembering where I left the charger several weeks ago.

Similarly, I can’t remember the last time I ran out of juice on my laptop. Until a couple of years ago, I could barely complete a train journey home without peering at the Windows battery meter and praying the laptop didn’t abruptly conk out mid-way through a match in Football Manager (I do work on the train sometimes, in case my publisher is reading).

Yet, with the extended battery pack on my Dell XPS M1330, the battery lasts about three or four hours – plenty long enough to get me to and from the office. And by today’s standards, that’s even starting to look pretty feeble. The 13in MacBook Pro lasted for in excess of 10 hours in our light-use battery tests, for example. Like the Kindle, it’s practically reached the point where you barely need to worry about the battery.

I wish I could say the same for my smartphone. I’m about to head up to the Lake District for a photography weekend with some of the PC Pro crew. I’ve charged my iPhone overnight, but with a Bluetooth connection to the satnav and a seven hour drive ahead of me, I’m genuinely concerned that the phone’s battery might not even last all the way to Cumbria. And the last thing you want on a long car journey is to worry about whether the phone will still be alive to call the AA if the exhaust falls off.

I love the iPhone, but part of me also longs for the day when I could sling my Nokia E71 in my pocket and know that I wouldn’t even need to take a charger away with me for the weekend, let alone before we even get to our destination.

So here’s a pledge for Apple, Nokia, HTC and all the other smartphone makers out there: make a modern smartphone that can ease my battery paranoia, and I’ll be the first in the queue for one when my current contract runs out in the summer.

That was my attitude until last night, when I took out my Kindle to discover the top two thirds of the screen had frozen, while the lower third of the screen worked perfectly. It was the Dolly Parton of eBook readers, and I rang Amazon fully expecting to be ushered onto the usual treadmill of pointless questions and obfuscation.

Instead I got Rose and Simon. Not together. They weren’t dueting support queries or anything – though that would be awesome.

Amazon plays constant reruns of Bambi’s mum dying in their call centres, and selects its staff by throwing rocks at kittens to see who breaks down first

After a few rings Rose picked up the phone and walked me through a hard reset of the Kindle, just to make sure that I wasn’t being thick, or holding it back-to-front or anything. Once she’d determined that I had an IQ over 12 (mistakenly in my case), she passed me onto Simon, who apologised for my Kindle being broken while managing to sound like he actually meant it. I swear there was a catch in his throat, like he’d just watched a puppy getting washed down the river. I can only assume that Amazon plays constant reruns of Bambi’s mum dying in their call centres, and selects its staff by throwing rocks at kittens to see who breaks down first.

Anyway, after wiping away his tears, Simon swiftly offered to replace my Kindle – just like that. No problems, no fuss, no drama. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to ship a new one to my home in Dubai, though he extended the return period to 60 days on the broken one, so I have plenty of time to get it back to them. He even sent out a free return postage label.

After filling me in on the West Ham vs Liverpool score – at which point we had another little cry together – he wished me the best and hung up. It seems odd to celebrate somebody doing their job, but I doubt there’s anybody reading this blog who doesn’t have a tech support horror to share. As a customer and a journalist, it’s occasionally nice to write a blog that’s not whinging about something being rubbish, or demanding a company stop being awful. This is that blog.

The Kindle is great, and Amazon customer service is excellent. That really shouldn’t be such a rare thing to hear, and I only wish I could say it more often.

Amazon has very excitedly shared a couple of stunning stats with the world. First, sales of eBooks overtook new paperbacks for the first time, after doing the same for hardcover books last year. Second, it rang up a whopping $13 billion in sales.

I find this fascinating, as my own book buying has mirrored this very trend, with eBooks overtaking paper titles of any kind since I bought a Kindle in November.

I’ve surveyed my book purchases in the months before my Kindle acquisition, and compared it to the titles I’ve picked up since. To make the stats easier to follow, I’ve rendered the results in handy chart form (with sincere apologies to the much funnier 27BSlash6).

Before my Kindle, I mostly borrowed books from friends (and the library, before I forgot to bring one back for six months) and bought used copies from second-hand shops. The only time I picked up new copies was in the airport before a flight. Still, all were made of paper:

And after I picked up my Kindle, this is what my purchasing looks like:

I haven’t bought a single paper book (aside from gifts) since November. While it makes for a nice clean pie chart, I don’t think the trend will continue quite so perfectly; Tim Danton just handed me a beautiful book — the paper kind — of infographics, and the full colour, incredibly detailed pages wouldn’t work so well on a Kindle.

That covers amazing Amazon stat number one. What about the double-digit billions in sales? I’ve another chart for that:

In the year before I bought my Kindle, I bought a spent a whopping £5.48 on new books from Amazon. Since November, I’ve spent £92.87. It’s easy to see where the sales jump comes from — and to see why I’m so desperate for the eBook lending system to actually work…

One of the major downsides of eBook readers is the price of books — they feel like they should be cheaper than they are. The Kindle’s portability means I take it everywhere, and am therefore tearing through twice as many words as I used to, but the costs are adding up as eBooks aren’t actually cheaper than the average paperback.

With standard paper books, that’s easy enough to get around: just borrow your friend’s copy. However, as with any DRM content, digital books can’t be easily shared — unless you’re happy handing over your Kindle to your friends, possibly not a smart move given the tendency for loaned books to never find their way back home.

With all this in mind, Amazon has offered up the ability to lend copies of eBooks to other Kindle owners. While it’s a step in the right direction, the system is still extremely limited: it’s only open to US users (although books can be loaned to the UK), and only on selected books, which can only be borrowed once for 14 days.

Still, it’s worth a look. Here’s how to do it for UK Kindle owners.

The first step is to flip your device to the US store. So far, I’ve done this several times with little trouble, but Amazon is bound to catch on and ban such abuse of the practice eventually.

To do this, go to Manage Your Kindle on the Amazon website and enter a new address with a US post code. Then, head over to the same management page on the Amazon.com website to start lending.

On that account page, scroll down to your list of books. Click the “+” next to titles you’ve bought, and it will let you know if your books are available to lend.

Some publishers aren’t allowing the feature, while UK versions of books also don’t seem to be available — so you might not have a wide selection to offer your friends anyway. Just one of the US books I’ve bought is available for loan, and it’s not one many people will want to borrow…

Click ‘Loan this Book’, drop in your friend’s email address, and a link will be sent to them. They’ll have seven days to start the loan, and 14 days to finish up reading. Meanwhile, you won’t be able to read the book, and it will show up as “on loan” on your device.

Is this enough to make up for high eBook prices? And does anyone have anything good they want to lend me?

While the Amazon Kindle is pretty handy at reading eBooks, it has a few other functions that help you kill the time between Christmas day and heading back to work after New Year’s. Here’s our top five: let us know any others in the comments below.

Playing games

If you really wanted a Kinect or a Wii instead of a Kindle, we can’t help you. However, if you’re a fan of word games or Sudoku, there are eBooks that let you play along. Amazon released a software development kit for the device earlier this year, and a few games have already popped up. The US store has a wider selection, so you may need to flip your country designation before you get downloading (you can easily flip back, you’ll just need a US post code — and yes, 90210 works).

However, the limited functionality of the Kindle makes gaming a pretty frustrating prospect, and for the most part you’ll be better off playing Hangman with paper and pencil by yourself. That said, a few are worth checking out, notably Blackjack, Shuffled Row and Mine Sweeper, all of which are free.

Browse the web

The Kindle 3 features an updated but still experimental browser. While on the home screen, click Menu and then scroll down to Experimental. The first option will let you browse the web.

As with games, it’s not the flashiest experience. Pages are slow to load, but the E-Ink renders images surprisingly crisply. If you’re desperate for internet access, and don’t have a smartphone handy, you can still stay up-to-date with Twitter, Facebook and your email, and it’s handy for when you desperately need to Wikipedia something to understand the Will Self novel you’re attempting to read.

If slowly tapping the cursor to the address bar and carefully typing URLs is driving you up the wall — and it will — try out Kinstant. Just direct the browser to Kinstant.com, and you’ll get one-click access to popular pages, with your favourites saved. Use Kinstant to access any page, and it will reformat it, stripping out photos and formatting to make it easier to read. That’s right folks, pcpro.co.uk is now on your Kindle.

Instapaper

Using the handy site Instapaper, you can collect articles to read as you wander the web, then send them for free to your Kindle to read later on in a nicely laid-out format. When you set up an account at Instapaper, use your @free.kindle.com email address — that means the package of web writing will only be sent by Wi-Fi, but it will save you Amazon’s delivery charges.

Listen up

Not only can the Kindle play MP3s, but it will also read to you. While in an eBook, click the text key — that’s the one that looks like Aa — and scroll down to Text-to-Speech. It’s not the nicest sounding voice you’ll hear, but it can be flipped between female and male voices, with faster or slower speaking rates. A note to lazy parents: sorry, but your kids won’t put up with the Kindle voice instead of a proper story-time, but it makes a decent audio book in a pinch.

Share your thoughts

Find a passage in a book — or Instapaper’d article — that you just must share, and it’s surprisingly easy to do so, so long as you’re connected via 3G or Wi-Fi. Simply highlight the text, then click alt and the arrow key together, and the quote will be posted to your Twitter or Facebook feed, along with any comment. It’s pretty handy when you want to show off how much you appreciate Will Self novels. Or simply the fact that you have a Kindle…

So when Amazon opened the doors on its UK Kindle Store earlier today, the first section I headed for was the newspapers.

The choice isn’t fantastic: my two favourite newspapers, The Times and The Guardian, aren’t available, but I could happily compromise on the Financial Times or The Independent.

The pricing doesn’t seem too outrageous, either.  £14 a month for The Independent and £18 for the Financial Times represents a healthy discount on the £1 and £2 per day cover price. Admittedly, you only get the plain text – no pictures, graphics or any of the fluff such as the crosswords, but I could live with that.

But just as I was preparing to unleash the credit card, I started reading the newspaper description pages. The Independent’s page says: “For your convenience, issues are automatically delivered wirelessly to your Kindle starting at 7:15am London local time.”  Ditto The Daily Telegraph. The Daily Mail, meanwhile, won’t start arriving until 8:30am (although it’s best not to read that before the pubs open, anyway). Only the FT gets out of bed at a reasonable hour, with its deliveries starting at 5am.

Why are the Kindle editions of the newspapers so tardy? I’m starting my commute by 7am most mornings. If The Independent and The Daily Mail can manage to write, sub, produce, print and distribute the physical newspapers to my local newsagent by 7am every morning, why on Earth can’t they strip out the text and send it to the Kindle by that hour?

 Well I’ve finally managed to wrench it from his cold dead hands after some surprisingly challenging gladitorial comabt and will be writing up a review in the next couple of days. But almost to the second I laid the killing blow on Jon, my wandering eye caught sight of a potential rival, the Plastic Logic reading device, and I’ll be honest I’m already worried for my lovely little Sony.

 It’s worth checking out the video here, as Plastic Logic’s effort really is worth seeing, and if it lives up to its early promise we could already be looking at a Kindle Killer, too. The Plastic Logic reader is 7mm thin and the same size as an 8.5 x 11in piece of paper, almost all of which is dedicated to the display. A touchscreen swipe moves pages and allows you to mark up documents, underline paragraphs, ring important words or just add thick fingered comment. There’s also a touchscreen keyboard reminiscent of that on the iPhone, allowing you to type in docs and add notes.

In the demo the Plastic Logic chief exec spins us through an eBook page, a magazine cover, a peice of sheet music and a couple of Power Point slides, all beautifully rendered and far more impressive for the additional screen real estate available.

The range of support really is startling, with Office docs, Powerpoint slides, PDFs, text files and other eBook formats all accomodated and transferable over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Micro-USB, seance, prayer and general wafting near the device. All of this lovliness comes courtesy of its flexible plastic technology, which allows the sheets to bend and flex, hopefully making them far more robust than current readers. A durability the company rather bizarrely demonstrates by beating a laptop to death with a shoe, and then repeating the experiment on its reader, which turns out to be surprisingly shoe resistant – though there’s always the possibility that the shoe was tired after its initial epic battle with the laptop and so wasn’t giving it’s all against the reader. We wouldn’t want to rule that out.

The fact that he used a laptop in the demo also shouldn’t be overlooked. Throughout the exec seems to be positioning the device not against other readers but laptops. He compares its battery life, screen and weight against the MacBook Air, which could suggest a potential price point – or that he simply envisions a greater world of applications for his device than are traditionally associated with eBook readers.

There’s no price or release date yet, but I’ll be hassling Zombie Jon (resurrected through the magic of Voodoo) to get one in my sweaty palms at the earliest possible convenience, but in the meantime I will sate my longing by writing adoring poetry and reading it on the lovely Sony.

And it’s not just that the entire eBook market is beset with ridiculous proprietary formats, clunky readers and expensive texts being pushed by companies whose only knowledge of books is a hazy memory of drawing moustaches on sperms in science class. Even Amazon, which built an empire on the blighters, seems to have forgotten why we love them – digital texts cost more than paperbacks, you can’t share them and its reader looks as if it were built in 1893 and runs on steam. Amazon, quite contrary to its claims, doesn’t have an eBook strategy so much as a series of really bad ideas all lined up in a row.

But even then, when all these problems are eventually solved – and they will be, because even a blind squirrel finds an acorn eventually – it still won’t make a damn bit of difference to my feelings. Yes, you can rabbit on about convenience, and having every single book on the planet in the palm of your hand. But a book is about more than just the words on the page. A book is the entire experience, from walking into the bookstore itself, to reading it and passing it onto a friend.

For proof, just look at the enraptured expressions of shoppers next time you walk into Waterstones or the Oxfam book shop. Shopping for books is a pleasure, people dawdle over them, they roll them around in their hands. They read the blurb on the back, flick through the pages, linger on random sentences. They smile. A book is an event, but eBooks dilute this event to mere words. They strip out the feeling, the sensation, the experience that surrounds a novel. They make it – soulless – machine like.

I think eBooks probably have their place. Manuals, technical books, maybe even schoolbooks would undoubtedly benefit from a technological overhaul. As I remember, the sheer weight of textbooks that accompanied me during my A Levels made every day purgatory and I’m sure more than a few teenagers would be delighted to have that weight replaced by a reader jangling in their pocket.

But not me. I love books. I love technology. But in this case, I’m convinced the two are better off apart.