is the biggest source of free downloads. There's a lot of free stuff on the Amazon site as well.

Also check out Many Books.

Once you've received your Kindle if you go the Kindle Store you'll find a tab for Free Books. You can download some "bargains", primarily classics but you can often get complete works (e.g. Dickens, Shakespeare) for nowt. It's worth reading the User Reviews as they often explain how good the transfers are to the e-book format (e.g. few typos, navigable contents page etc.) as sometimes certain out of copyright authors have been formatted by more than one organisation and quality of format can vary. Often for <£5 or even <£2 you can also buy book collections in genres (e.g. sci-fi) so it really depends on what your reading bag is.

There are also a number of websites that help on this such as this one:

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

and this helped me buy stuff

http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/best-novel-read-last-year

Read One Day by David Nicholls, good easy read and bang on for a mid-40 summat

But particularly enjoyed Snowdrop by AD Miller - fascinating depiction of expat lawyer in corrupt modern Russia

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Snowdrops-D-Miller/dp/1848874529

The complete works of Henry James - got it for 70p the other day. Bloody bargain.

One thing that surprised me is the price of Kindle editions. Some are more expensive than the hardcover or are the same price. Many show little saving on the paperback price.

My first book was Peter Doggett's You Never Give Me Your Money about the end of the Beatles and the years of litigation and bad vibes that followed.

I've recently purchased Karl Marlantes Matterhorn. This seems like a book that is perfect for the Kindle. It's doorstop size and is priced very competitively at £3:99. If you don't know of it, it's a highly praised book about an American marine company in the Vietnam war. I'll be starting it very soon.

...The End Of The Party by Andrew Rawnsley. Regardless of bias issues - it's very clear that he's a Blair admirer, despite large reservations - it's a rollicking page turner. And there's no denying that he's the best-connected political correspondent in Westminster, and simply everyone has talked to him, either on or off the record. It's fascinating.

I've been devouring the post-New Labour autos and biogs actually - done Mandelson, Blair and Rawnsley. Now onto Seldon's biog of Brown.

Whatever your opinion of New Labour and its personalities, one thing comes out of these books in a huge way: Gordon Brown is a piece of work. Blair and Mandelson softpedal that stuff quite a lot, but Rawnsley lets rip and Seldon - who's the more balanced biographer - is merciless too. Really, really interesting to see the dynamic which ruled us for 13 years unpicked.

Now admittedly, the pricing of eBooks is still a bit all over the shop; it's a new market and there are inconsistencies between different publishers (with several books not available electronically). And, of course, wary of their lucrative hardback sales, electronic versions don't appear until the paperbacks do. However, with the growing popularity of the Kindle, I don't know whether publishers will be able to hold out on this practice.

However, having worked in publishing, I know that the cost of printing, as a proportion of the cover price, is very low. It's even lower now, as the big print runs are all sent to printers in China. So, if there are savings to be passed on, they're only of the order of 5-10 per cent. Having said that, I think punters should get a degree of discount due to the fact that they can't lend their eBooks to anyone (not yet at least) or sell them on second-hand.

But then to complicate things further still, the taxman charges VAT on eBooks but not on paperbacks.

Charging the same for an eBook as a hardback is sharp practice by the publisher and not Amazon's fault.

I've found if you're patient, so of the Kindle prices can get very low. I finally got round to reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and I think I only paid about £3.50 for it.

Because of licensing issues, between the published edition and the Kindle. i bought mine because I'm a teacher and spend the long holidays in my home in the middle of nowhere, and carrying 6 weeks of books is a suitcaseful. and while it's been good to download 400 existing novels free to peruse at will, if I want current stuff I still have to buy it in physical form I'd got the idea that as soon as a book was published, it would simultaneously be available on Kindle, which hasn't been the case.

Brooklyn Follies - I really well written gentle story that will reel you in. The ending is a bit of a shock but best book I have read for a while.

Joseph Wambaughs The Onion Field is chilling - even more so because it is factual although written like a novel.

33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, by Dorian Lynskey. It's very readable history full of good stories and juicy facts.

Not a book but an application that's well worth downloading onto your PC. Effectively it let's you collate the newsfeeds from sites such as the Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail etc and downloads them to your kindle. Hey presto - free newspapers.

Get an Instapaper account to save web pages to read later, and (if you have Mac) a copy of Ephemera to sync your saved web pages to read on your Kindle.

There's probably a similar tool for Windows too.

http://www.jungle-search.com/UK/kindle.php

You can get an email sent to you when new free books are added. This is pretty useful as some of these aren't on for long eg Life of Pi.

Whahey!!! It's not the most user friendly method, but I'm reading this blog and entering this from my Kindle.

May be a little outdated attitude but books I want to keep I buy hard copies. Books I will only read once go on the Kindle. Enjoyed The Rivers of London, a first novel by Ben Aarovitch on the Kindle - sort of a grown up Harry Potter in the Metropolitan Police.

I just downloaded Mark Kermode's "It's Only A Movie" for £4.94 - seemed good value, but I haven't started reading it yet.

You simply MUST get City of Bohane by Kevin Barry. It's astonishingly good.

for free. Just go to this website in your Kindle's browser.

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/~mark/random/guardian-for-kindle/

Firstly I would say that I have one and love it. I still buy what I would regard as "serious" books as I like to possess a copy but now read all "throwaway" stuff on a Kindle.
Having said that there is a very real fear that the book business could go the same way as the music biz if we are not careful.It is already pretty easy to get a "free" copy of any popular new book within a day or two of release by a simple search of the internet using the right words.
Even if you can only find a PDF version then it is only the work of a minute or two on Calibre to convert and upload to your device.
Whilst one of the benefits (for gig lovers) of illegal downloading of music has been the need for musicians to get off their bums and tour again there is hardly any equivalent for writers to earn monies in various other ways.
Is the inevitable rise of the ebook going to create a future where less and less people can afford to actually write?

You can get all the Sherlock Homes books for free on Project Gutenburg. I've been working my way through them. They're excellent!

(I didn't buy a Kindle proper though, you can get a free version as an application for Android phones.)

When I send an MS word document to my Kindle via the free.kindle.com email address I can read it without any problems. But is there any advantage to me saving it as a PDF first and then having it converted by Amazon? Will I get any extra features this way?

I've got loads of good books to dip into, and daily free newspapers via Caliber.

I did try tweeting from the Kindle, just because I could, but I don't expect to be doing that too often.

As ever, The Massive have come up trumps.

Given your avatar/profile picture you really should read this book by Christopher Brookmyre if you haven't already (either on Kindle or paper) That picture plays a significant part in the story.

http://www.moxon.net/ebooks/

"When I walk, I bounce" , the story of a walk from Land's End to John o Groats is a nice little read.

the Kindle Store today, where I came across this intriguing tome:

Psychic Training for Men Who Want to Find a Young Beautiful Russian Woman in the Internet and Marry Her in the Nearest Future.