How Did I Not Know About archive.org?
Unlocking a World of Free Knowledge with a Simple Kindle Trick
I wanted to read The Theory of the Universal Wave Function by Hugh Everett, his first introduction to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which led me to discover archive.org.
I also really wanted to read it on my Kindle instead of sitting in front of my computer, so I ended up learning a few things I didn’t know. One is that your Kindle has an email address you can use to send books and documents to it. You can find this address in your Kindle settings.
If you go to archive.org, you’ll find tons of books, movies, audio files, videos, software, and even stuff for the Commodore 64, which is very close to my heart. Most book pages offer an option to download an EPUB file. You can then email that file to your Kindle's address. No subject or message is needed.
The first time I tried this, the file was rejected with an error saying the format was invalid. I then downloaded a program called Calibre, which lets you view and convert ebooks. I used it to convert the document to a clean EPUB and saved it to a folder.
That fixed the format error, but then I got a message saying the email address I sent from wasn’t approved. I had to go to Amazon and add my email to the list of approved senders. On the third try, it worked. Now I can read tons of books, scientific papers, and all sorts of things for free.