Zero dollar ebooks

But what makes it the best? And how do you make and keep a zero-based budget? Every dollar that comes in has a purpose, a job, a goal.

It just means your income minus all your expenses equals zero. Before you start making your zero-based budget , open up your bank account online or grab those bank statements out of your drawer. You can also check out these budget percentages and averages. You can do this the old-fashioned way with a sheet of paper, or you can use our free budgeting app, EveryDollar.

We suggest the second way. Income means your regular paychecks and anything extra you plan to bring in during the month think side hustles or child support. Write it all down and add it up! Think of everything you spend money on during the month. List out your expenses like this:. When you subtract all those expenses from your income, it should equal zero. Practically no one gets this right the first time.

Got money left over? First, throw some confetti and do a celebration dance. Like, for real. Then, put that money to work!

The 7 Baby Steps are the proven, guided path to save money, pay off debt , and build wealth. Aka how to win with money. What if you subtract your planned expenses and end up with a negative number? You can get the number to zero. Get out your metaphorical hedge clippers, and trim that budget. It can mean cutting spending. Since the site updates with new discounts every hour, you might consider subscribing to their RSS feed to keep an eye on new additions.

The site is built on top of Amazon Affiliate referrals, so buying through the site helps keeps the site alive. OneHundredFreeBooks isn't the only way to get free ebooks though. For more, head to your local library, and check out our guide to loading up your ereader for free.

Have any more tips? These accounts worked together to artificially inflate the number of ebooks downloaded, thus raising the ranking of each ebook in Amazon's charts. That visibility helped to draw in real readers. The server hosted a table containing 83, fake Amazon accounts an easy feat given that, when we checked, Amazon doesn't verify email accounts.

At any given time of the day, dozens of those accounts could be pushed through one of over proxy servers -- provided by a third-party internet company -- which makes it harder for Amazon to detect the logins.

The server installed the Selenium web driver, a browser automation tool, which simulates a real person typing in the accounts' usernames and passwords, one after the other. Not all logins will be successful. Some are blocked or banned. If that happens, the table would log the the failure, and move on to the next account. The fake accounts would download hundreds of these ebooks over a short period of time -- usually a few hours.

Each promoted ebook can be offered for free for a short period of time, allowing the downloads to run at no additional cost. Free books don't generate royalties, but they do help to raise an ebook's visibility in the Amazon charts. An author who didn't want to be named for the story said that the visibility can drive paid sales, earning the publisher money. That increased interest and visibility doesn't just go away once the book goes back to its original price," explained the author.

The downloads would be tunneled over the Tor anonymity network, masking the IP addresses of the server, making it tougher for Amazon's systems to spot the fraudulent downloads. It can take just a few days for an ebook to rise up the charts and increase visibility -- these books can easily reach the Top list, particularly in niche categories. That visibility could drive dozens of genuine downloads per day.

Some reach the hundreds of sales, which can drive thousands of dollars in royalties. Imagine that on a far larger, automated scale -- and those royalties begin to add up. There are a lot of four-letter words to describe Shershnyov. One springs to mind: "rich". On a small scale, each ebook can generate anything from a few cents to hundreds of dollars over the course of its life span -- until Amazon figures out that the book is a fraud.

Fraudulent books get pulled offline quickly but often reappear under a different title, cover, and author's name. Meet the new ransomware that knows where you live. Read More. Amazon's algorithm is very sensitive to fluctuations so if the momentum isn't maintained you can drop off fast," the author said.

Even if that momentum is maintained over a few days for each ebook, each little boost adds up. Once the royalties and refunds, rarely begin to trickle in, the transactions are recorded in Amazon's sales and royalties reports. It's not known what was made during the six months prior to that, which was when the scam began. Shershnyov was so successful with his scheme that he created near-identical databases for his girlfriend, Anna Mandryko, a former investment advisor.

Since we reached out on Thursday, neither Shershnyov or Mandryko have responded to a request for comment. But both servers were pulled offline within hours of the email. Shershnyov subsequently deleted his Twitter account , scrubbed his LinkedIn page , and pulled his company's site offline -- though, a cache remains online. A spokesperson for Amazon said on Tuesday: "All titles related to this issue have been removed, and we're evaluating all our legal options against the perpetrators.