How to get free Kindle, Nook, Sony e-subscriptions

 

Before you buy a subscription to newspapers or magazines for your Kindle, Nook, Sony or other e-book reader, you should first try using Calibre’s newsfeed feature.

This week, while reviewing the Graphite Kindle DX, I downloaded the Kindle edition of USA Today and compared it with the free version of Calibre – the results were surprising.

First, some background. “The USA Today Kindle subscription costs USD 11.99 per month and is delivered wirelessly to your Kindle every morning from Monday to Friday.

“The Calibre version is free, delivered daily and costs nothing. You can get daily updates via the Calibre content server or automatically by email.

So what does the free version look like compared to the paid version?

They are both almost identical. I found it difficult to keep track of which one is the Calibre version and which one is the Kindle version. The only way to tell is to go all the way to the first page and see if it says Kindle Edition or Calibre.

Both versions have the same news stories and layout, each has a picture at the beginning of the article if there is one, and each is divided into sections. The article sections are slightly different, and the Calibre version says ‘USA Today Mobile’ because the newspaper’s e-book uses a mobile phone news feed.

However, not all subscriptions will work the same as USA Today, which requires some initial testing. For example, Time is coming back with short, abbreviated articles that require a subscription for the whole story.

I also compared the New Yorker. Both publications had the same articles. The Kindle edition has a better layout and the articles are divided into chapters, whereas the Calibre version has 50 articles in one chapter. The Kindle edition has no photographs, whereas the Calibre version does.

The following is a list of the top 20 Calibre news feeds. A longer list of fifty can be found here.

Be sure to check out this post for help getting started with Calibre.