March is here! We already had our Kindle Frist freebies, now it’s the turn of the University of Chicago to hand out their freebie. And you don’t have to be a Prime member for this one 🙂 However, this is a DRM-ed e-book, so you have to use apps that have Adobe compatible DRM. But it’s free 🙂

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Eat your Veggies. Or rather, …read your veggies! The University of Chicago free e-book for October 2017 is the 128-page 2012 e-book “Vegetables: A Biography” by Evelyne Bloch-Dano, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan.

You have to give them your email address to get this free e-book. This book also uses Adobe DRM, so you either need the Adobe DRM satanic software on your computer or an iOS/Android app that is compatible with that nonsense.

The book (in all its formats) has just three customer reviews at amazon.com with an average of 3.9 out of 5.

Speaking of free ebooks, if you are a Prime member, don’t forget to scoop up your October 2017 freebie. As previous months, you can get one out of six pre-release options for FREE!

On the first of every month, in addition to the Kindle First freebie, there’s another promotion that gets you one free e-book per month, the University of Chicago (Press).

Every month, on their promotional page they have a new book. For September 2017, the free book is “The Secret Lives of Teachers” by Anonymous. It is 272 pages long.

This is however is a DRM e-book, so in order to read it, you need to use an app that is compatible with Adobe’s DRM. You need Adobe Editions on a PC and compatible apps on Android and iOS.

If you don’t hate DRM in ebooks and you don’t object to using Adobe’s Digital Editions DRM software and licensing technique, August 2017 brings us a new e-book freebie from the University of Chicago (the publisher). Their latest freebie is the 220-page e-book “Wallis’s War: A Novel of Diplomacy and Intrigue” by Kate Auspitz, published in 2015.

You have to enter your email address to get the freebie. Then you receive an email with a BiblioVault download link. You follow that, and then you can either download it or read it online. Because of the DRM-ness of it, either option requires some kind of a login/authentication.

I’m sure I’m not saying anything groundbreaking here in that I hate DRM, especially the way Adobe does it. It is invasive and inconvenient and unnecessary. Its most practical effect is to irritate legit readers.

A new month means more free ebooks are coming in. In addition to the previously mentioned Kindle First options, the University of Chicago monthly freebie is now up and running on their website. The book for June 2017 is “The Political Origins of Inequality: Why a More Equal World Is Better for Us All” written by Simon Reid-Henry. This was published in December 2015 and is 208 pages long.

Further down the page, they have a new coupon code, promo AD1611 gets you 20% off ebooks on their “Readers Catalog”.

NOTE that this is delivered by BiblioVault, and it is a DRM-ed e-book. You have to use an AdobeID to download it, which means downloading Adobe’s DRM crap. SAD!

The monthly free e-book promotions continue with the University of Chicago Press. This one sadly is Adobe DRM, so to download it you need an Adobe ID that is used for the evil DRMalia. Still, if you have an Adobe DRM ePUB ecosystem device or app, you may already be setup for it anyway, so not a lot of hassle. On the other hand, if you are a Kindle-only reader, then this is a kerfuffle.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the free ebook offered for January 2017 (you have until 1/31/17 to claim it) is a 2013 book, “Looking for Strangers: The True Story of My Hidden Wartime Childhood” by Dori Katz, 184 pages long. This is not a famous book, but it averages a solid 4.6 out of 5 with 12 customer reviews at amazon.com. You have to get the free e-book through University of Chicago, I am including the link to Amazon so you can read reviews and a sample if you wish!

This is a screenshot below visually explaining how to claim the free ebook. The link in the first paragraph is how you can claim it…