Remember when finding a good deal on books required sifting through piles of used or on-sale paperbacks? As fun as that was (and still is), it's pretty time consuming. In the world of eReaders, we're now used to thinking of a book one moment, and reading it the next. Unfortunately, finding eBook deals can still be time consuming. Unless you find a hack.

As you probably already know, IFTTT is just the hack you're looking for. This great automation service can be used for anything from superpowering Google Calendar to making money, and yes, it can also be used to supercharge your eBook reading. From finding eBook deals to automatically sending articles to your Kindle, these are all the recipes you need.

Find Free Amazon Kindle Books

ifttt-books-1

This recipe is based on the website FreeBooksHub — a website dedicated to finding Kindle deals. FreeBooksHub is not only for free Kindle books, it also includes a wide section of $0.99 books —still a very decent price for an eBook. Activate this recipe to get notified of new items in FreeBooksHub's feed. When something interesting arrives, you can hop in and buy it from Amazon.

Send RSS Items To Kindle

ifttt-books-2

Did you know your Kindle has its own email address? This is a personal (and free) email address you can use to send files over to your Kindle. In order to use this recipe, you're going to need to know your @free.kindle.com address. If you don't know what it is, go to wwww.amazon.com/myk, click on "Manage Your Devices" and look at your Kindle information. The address you see might be listed as @kindle.com, which should work just the same as long as your device is Wi-Fi only.

This recipe takes any RSS feeds you're interested in, and sends any new items to your Kindle. Who said your Kindle is just for books?

From Dropbox To Kindle

ifttt-books-3

This is another recipe that makes use of your Kindle email address, this time using Dropbox. In this recipe, you get to define a Dropbox subfolder in your Public folder (for example, public/kindle), which automatically transfers files to your Kindle. This is done using your Kindle email address.

From Pocket To Kindle

ifttt-books-6

Similar to the two recipes above, this recipe takes new tagged items from Pocket (default tag is #kindle, but you can change that), and sends them to your Kindle using your Kindle email address.

Feedly To Kindle Through Readability

ifttt-books-7

If you're a Feedly user, you can use this recipe to send any article you save for later to Readability. What does this have to do with your Kindle? Readability has a feature that lets you connect your Kindle to your Readability reading lists. You can check out this help page [Broken URL Removed] to find out more about setting it up.

Scour Amazon Gold Box For Kindle Deals

ifttt-books-4[5]

Amazon Gold Box is a good place to find all sorts of daily and hourly deals, but what if you're only interested in Kindle related deals? This recipe monitors the Gold Box feed for the "Kindle" keyword, and emails you only when a relevant deal appears. When using the recipe, you can change the keyword to anything you want, so if it's not Kindle you're interested in, the recipe is still very useful.

Get Notified Of Nook Free Friday Deals

Yes, I am aware of the fact that not everyone uses a Kindle. This recipe is made for Nook users who want to stay on top of Nook Free Friday offers. It monitors the Nook blog RSS feed for the keywords "Free Fridays", and emails you when a new matching post goes up. The Nook blog RSS feed is quite busy, so if you're only looking for those Free Friday deals, this is a great way to filter them out.

woot[12]

There are several IFTTT recipes that can help you find those elusive eReader deals. The first is the Woot Kobo recipe, that monitors the Woot feed for anything Kobo-related, and sends you an email when those appear. A similar recipe, the Woot Nook recipe, monitors the deals for anything Nook related, and a third monitors Woot for Kindle deals, although I'm not really sure how often those actually appear.

Get Alerted On Discounted/Free iOS Books

eBooks are not just for eReaders. What about those of you reading on your iOS device? There are many iPad books and book-related apps on iTunes, and this recipe hunts for just such discounts and freebies and lets you know about them immediately. The recipe uses AppShopper's RSS feed to locate those deals, but you can change this feed if you have one you like better.

Most of the free iPad books are children's books, which is great if you have kids, but there are other interesting finds every now and then.

Did We Miss Any?

If you know of or use great IFTTT recipes that boost your e-reading experience, be sure to share them in the comments below.

If you're just getting started with IFTTT and the recipes above confuse you, or if you're not sure how to activate some of them, head over to our ultimate IFTTT guide. It's free, and it will answer all your questions. Happy reading!