How to Get Kindle, Nook, Sony e-Subscriptions for Free
Before you buy a newspaper or magazine subscription for your Kindle, Nook, Sony, or other ebook reader, you should try using Calibre’s news fetch feature first.
While reviewing the Graphite Kindle DX this past week, I download the Kindle Edition of USA Today and compared it to Calibre’s free version—the results were surprising.
First off, some background info. The Kindle Subscription of USA Today costs $11.99 per month and delivers Monday through Friday wirelessly to the Kindle each morning.
The Calibre version is free, delivers everyday, and costs nothing. You can get the daily news via the Calibre content server or have it automatically emailed.
So what’s the free version look like compared to the paid version?
They two are pretty much identical. I had trouble keeping track of which one was the Calibre version and which one was the Kindle version. About the only way to tell is to go all the way to the first page to see if it says Kindle Edition or Calibre.
They both share the same news stories and layout, each has a picture at the start of the article if it has one, and each is organized into sections. The article sections differ slightly, and the Calibre version says USA Today Mobile because it uses the mobile news feed to create the newspaper ebook.
Not all subscriptions will work as well as USA Today though; it requires some initial testing. Time, for instance, comes back with short, abridged articles that require a subscription for the whole story.
I also compared the New Yorker. Both editions had the same articles. The Kindle Edition has a better layout and the articles are broken down into section whereas the Calibre version has 50 articles in one section. The Kindle Edition doesn’t have any pictures and the Calibre version does have some.
Below is a list of the top twenty Calibre News Feeds. A longer list of 50 can be found here.
Make sure to check out this post for help getting started with Calibre.
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Filed under: Amazon Kindle, How To, Nook, Sony | Tags: calibre, magazine, newspaper, subscriptions | 7 Comments »
[...] at Calibre’s version of the USA Today newspaper via the news-fetch feature (here’s a how to article for more about getting free news subscriptions with [...]
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I prefer actual magazine subscriptions. The kindle is nice because you can have it instantly, but it doesn’t have color. It’s great for reading a book, but not for viewing a magazine.
[...] Free news feeds from Calibre on the other hand have all the layout settings available that ebooks have since they are in ePub format. The only feature they lack, like other non-Kobo ePubs, is the ability to share on Facebook. It has the same articles and mostly the same layout as the paid version from Kobo. [...]
would request to send in updates as and when availible……
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