Several years ago I happened to visit one of my favorite local used book stores and they had a table set up in the front of the store for a special sale – “buy a foot of books for a dollar.” Imagine what sort of books get sold by the foot! There were old Pulpit Commentaries and McClaren’s commentaries with the covers half off, and a fair amount of old Christian fiction. (I am not a fan of Christian fiction to start with, but Christian fiction form the 1950’s is particularly loathsome). I looked over the pile of books and would not have wanted to buy any of the books, even at a dollar a foot.
As I was browsing for something else on Amazon this morning, I ran across Luther’s Commentary on Galatians, free for Kindle. I do not have a physical copy of the book, only the Logos version. So I downloaded the book to my iPad. This version is public domain, and Amazon states that the “book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers,” indicating that these are mostly Project Gutenberg texts. This is the text that has been floating around the internet for some time, converted nicely to Kindle and made available for free. I looked at a few books, the formatting looks good, which is not always the case on converted books.
Amazon is always very good about suggesting more things for me to by, so across the bottom of the page is “other customers bought.” This amounts to many pages of other books which are free to Kindle users. Here are a few other highlights:
Luther, Galatians, Concerning Christian Liberty, and many others from Luther’s Works.
F. G. Smith, The Revelation Explained An Exposition
G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered, and just about everything else from Chesterton is there! Time to read The Wisdom of Father Brown.
Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, and many other of Tolstoy’s spiritual writings.
Marcus Dods, The Expositor’s Bible: The Gospel of St John
Alexander McClaren commentaries, many of which now include “real page numbers.”
Walter Rauschenbusch, The Social Principles of Jesus
James Stalker, Life of St. Paul
Poke around, see what else you can find. It is better than a “foot of books for a buck!”
This is perfect timing for me, as I just got a Kindle. Thanks for the tips!
They were running a special for a while there, too, where a whole-NT Gundry commentary was available for free, book-by-book, week-by-week.
Have you found anything good for learning/retaining/reading Biblical Greek and Hebrew on Kindle?