A gift card of mine expired at the end of October, so I decided to spend the $15 or so that were left on a chess book. I figured the shipping and handling would cost at most $5, so the book should cost around $10. Went into a portal to look at the candidate books. It turned out the choice was very limited. Most of the books were well over $20, and I spent a lot of time looking for something sensible. Finally settled on Chernev's The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played, for $9.95. The book arrived yesterday, and it looks like I made the right choice. Anyone else have suggestions for an alternative under $10? Just wondering if I could have picked something better.

In California Gift cards by law are not allowed to expire nor can they charge for not using them.

How about some FREE chess books to download.

Try:

http://www.chessville.com/downloads/ebooks.htm

 Or this one: But the web site is very hard to read.

http://www.chesszone.org/lib/other-books.html

Try Google "Free Chess Books Download"

                           Denver

Thanks, Denver. Just downloaded Debut Hooliganism from the second site, and it looks interesting, even though written in Russian.

Do You Speak or read Russian.

Funny I have access to 20 Russian books I never even  looked at them.  I speak Spanish and English.

Russian is easy to read, as it is derived from Greek, and everyone learned some Greek letters in school. There are maybe 200 words that you need to learn chess-wise to read Russian chess books with ease.

Some of my Russian books. Always bought them used and never paid more than $5.

And speaking of learning Greek in school:

I love those greek letters on those students.

Here is another site for free books.

I am going to see is I can use some of those Russian books. I know that Bobby Fisher always carried some arround with him studying them.

http://books.google.com/ebooks?q=free+chess+books&as_brr=4&lr=&sa=N&start=30

Bye

Back to the paper books, here is another for $9.95 :

And here is Capablanca'a A Primer of Chess for only $5.30 on amazon.com

Nunn' Learn Chess for $9.46. Too late for me.