Free Coin Collecting Books for the Kindle

A couple of months ago I finally pulled the trigger and bought a Kindle. I wanted to take advantage of all the books now in the public domain and free to anyone with internet access. It never occurred to me that the Kindle might also have a numismatic connection; it was a pleasant surprise to me when I finally realized it does.

There are literally millions of books available for free. Google alone has digitized millions of books that can be found for free at Google Books. There are also plenty of books at Amazon.com that are free or for a very low cost at their Kindle Store. There are other sites as well with books in the public domain such as Internet Archive, Open Library, and Project Gutenberg just to name a few.


Popular Classics for Free

Here are just a few of the books I've read in the past two months that I downloaded for free:

• The Sherlock Holmes classic A Study in Scarletby Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Free Numismatic Books and Magazines

What didn't occur to me until I came across them on Google Books is that there are many numismatic titles free as well. Here is just a sample of what I found in the public domain and have since downloaded to my Kindle:

• Entire volumes of The Numismatist magazine between 1895 and 1922
• Illustrated History of the United States Mint by George Evans (1885, 1893)
• Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (Occasionally has articles with a numismatic theme)
• The United States Mint: A Brief History of the Institution . . . by William Runkel (1870)
• A Description of the Medals of Washington of National and Miscellaneous Medals; and of other Objects of Interest in the Museum of the Mint by James Ross Snowden (1861)
• The Laws Relating to the Mint of the United States and Its Branches (1859)
• The Early Coins of America and the Laws Governing their Issue by Sylvester Crosby (1875)
• The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal by the Royal Numismatic Society (Great Britain)
• Mason’s Coin and Stamp Collector’s Magazine (1870)
• The Coin Collector’s Journal by Edouard Frossard

Downloading Free Books to the Kindle

Of course you could just read these books on your computer, but I personally like to read books while relaxing in my recliner or when I go to bed at night. Reading a book on my desktop computer or laptop just doesn’t do it for me.

The Kindle allows me to relax in my recliner with a whole library of books available at my fingertips. The trick is in knowing how to get them downloaded to your Kindle. While it’s fairly quick and straightforward, there are a few steps that you need to know. I will cover these steps in a separate article.

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