A 2017 Cheat Sheet for All You New Kindle (and Other E-Reader) Owners

December 25, 2017 | 12 books mentioned 2 min read

coverWith each new holiday season the reach of ereaders expands, as a new crop of Kindles, Nooks and iPads are fired up. The first thing to do is download a few books.

Just a few years after ebooks and ereaders first emerged as futuristic curiosity, they are fully mainstream now. Even among the avid, book-worshiping, old-school readers that frequent The Millions, ebooks are very popular.

The volume in ebook sales seems to be driven in part by promotional pricing that will see prices on books (usually backlist, but not always) drop below $3.00 for days or weeks at a time. Followers of our Twitter feed know that we are adept at finding these deals, usually posting about two a day. Many a great book has been snagged this way, and if you are reading more on a device, we highly recommend you follow us on Twitter and look out for these posts as they are a great way to build a deep digital library. We also occasionally post them on Facebook.

For all those readers unwrapping shiny new devices (or looking for new titles to add to an old one), here are some more links to get you going.

For starters, The Millions published a pair of very highly regarded and very affordable ebook originals back in 2013. If you haven’t read them yet, we hope you’ll pick up these titles:

covercoverEpic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever by Mark O’Connell ($1.99)

The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong? by Konstantin Kakaes ($2.99)

Here are some of the most popular ebooks purchased by Millions readers in 2017 (which you’ll see are very similar to our Hall of Fame and most recent top-ten which take into account books in all formats). Unlike in prior years, where ebooks seemed to hover around the magic number of $9.99, our list below shows that many top sellers are going for higher prices (all prices as of this writing). Occasional promotional pricing, a frequent occurrence in the Kindle store, may have driven some of these sales as well, however.

A Separation by Katie Kitamura ($12.99)
Ill Will by Dan Chaon ($13.99)
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders ($13.99)
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living edited by Manjula Martin ($11.99)
Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh ($11.99)
Enigma Variations by André Aciman ($13.99)
The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet ($13.99)
The Changeling by Victor LaValle ($13.99)
Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones ($6.49)
The North Water by Ian McGuire ($9.99)

Other potentially useful ebook links:

Editors’ Picks
Best of 2017
Bestsellers
Kindle Singles

And in this fractured ebook landscape, you’ve also got your NookBooks, Google ebooks, Apple ibooks, and IndieBound/Kobo that lets you buy ebooks from your favorite indie bookstore. Finally, don’t forget Project Gutenberg, the original purveyor of free ebooks (mostly out-of-copyright classics), and check your local library! Many will allow you to download lots of ebooks for free.

Happy Reading!

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