It all depends on where you have been looking.  If you are currently searching almost anywhere on Usenet besides the alt.binaries.e(-)book hierarchy, you are simply looking in the wrong newsgroups.  Refer to the list of known e-book groups section of this FAQ for more information.

If you are looking in the correct groups, but you are confused because you're seeing something like:

You should read the Guide for Usenet binary attachments FAQ to get some Usenet basic skills under your belt first.

The best thing for anyone wanting Usenet and currently on AOL is to CHANGE ISP's! I've got nothing against AOL, it's just that their Usenet system is made to fail you, and the bigger the file you're trying for, the more likely the news server is to fail. The second best thing, and a distant second it is, is to pay for a news service like Newsguy or GigaNews that will allow you to download from their web pages.

Oh, well, some notes about Filegrabber:

IN AOL land, if Filegrabber won't give you the "download file" option it usually means you're missing parts of the post on your server.  If all the parts ARE there, then the post is mime or the Filegrabber just isn't working. To find only complete multipart posts, AOL has given you the option of filtering out all text posts and incompletes.  The downside of this feature is that you won't be able to read part 0/n of the posts, which contain important information.  If Filegrabber says the message is too long for downloading, keep clicking the "More" button until the whole body of the post is in the window.

If your Filegrabber doesn't give you the option to download the file (as opposed to the article), the post is either MIME or an incomplete UUE post.  You must have all the parts and download them individually.  After downloading, examine one of the files in any text reader to determine whether it's MIME or UUE.  Rename the files accordingly, then decode.

(Free)Agent or other news readers on AOL cannot be used to access AOL's news server, but you can use them with a supplemental news service from your AOL connection.  See Help | Release Notes | Secure News and Email Log ons.

AOL's built-in decompression utility can't handle passwords, and it's unwise to use it anyway.  Click on Members | Preferences | Download and remove the check marks from  "Automatically decompress files at sign off" and "Delete zip files after decompression."  Get WinZip or another good decompression utility and learn how to do it yourself.

There are "features" of the AOL newsreader that will often give you an error message stating that "Follow-up is allowed via email only."  This is dead wrong, and not the author's intention at all. Your news reader is misinterpreting the "reply to" and "follow up" fields in the original post.  In other cases, you are able to post a follow-up Usenet message, but only to the same newsgroups as the original post and you can't redirect it.  Please hold off posting any messages until you have closed ABME and switched to ABMED.

Notes on @home News Servers

For some time @home has been allowing you to connect to each of their news servers rather than confining you to a single server. Below is a list complied from lists by Fluke, Kind Bud, and Quick Brown Fox of the different servers they've found. Note that some of these may have been "blocked" from non-local @home access. If you find one of these let us know so that we can remove it. If you know of a server that isn't listed, and can be reached outside of its local area, please let us know.

Here are some tips to deal with @Home servers:

1.  Try to download as many segments from your default server as possible.  It's much easier to do this with the full version of Agent; try to find it and learn how to use it, especially the 'split/join message' command.

2.  Switch to an alternate server that has better completion or retention and download the missing segments.

3.  If parts are still missing, try to find an open or public news server.

4.  Finally, if parts are still missing, request only the missing sections to the .d group with the header  "ATTN: <poster's nym>".

Of course, subscribing to a premium news service is the way to go. Then you can skip all that crap.  But for now, I'm in the same boat as you: running around and trying to get fills because of @Home's gawd-awful completeness and retention (at least it's fast).

Here is a list of @Home servers provided by Random Fluke. The list was compiled by DoomMeister and the whole message was too good not to paste here in full:

DoomMeister's @home Server List

Foreword:
  
After posting to supposedly different servers on the @home network, and reaching post limits for no apparent reason I did some investigation of my own. To my surprise I found that many of the servers contacted using the form news.rdc1.xx.home.com (where the xx stands for the two letter postal abbreviation for U.S. states and Canadian provinces) end up being one and the same server.

My method was to 'tracert' the server and record the resulting URL and IP address. The results of my efforts are to follow. This will be of more interest to those that major posters in the groups. Using @home it doesn't take long to reach the 209MB post limit and therefore have to switch servers.

For those of you that are new to @home, we as a group have been frowned upon by the Usenet community for our bad manners. The biggest source of this hostility stems from the over abundance of fill requests from @home users. I'm sure you've noticed how terrible retention and propagation is on the @home servers (i.e. many partial postings and posts that are there for only 12 to 24 hours).

Use this list to make every attempt at finding your fills on another @home server before you place that fill request. It is our responsibility to gain respect in the established Usenet community. I hope this contribution
will be used to help us reach that goal.

You can help complete this list. If you have the URL for an @home news server not listed here, do this:

From a MS DOS window type:

'tracert your-url' (without the quotes) and return/enter.

The ping program will say Tracing xxx.yyy.zzz [aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd]
Where xxx.yyy.zzz is the URL resolved through the DNS and aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd is the IP address of the URL.

Compare the resulting URL and IP with those in this list, if there is no match, then please send your results to mailto:space157@home.com.
Your contributions will be added to the list and we will all benefit as a result.

Note: Please send only results you have verified to be new additions to the list. I have gone through most other lists that have been posted to the groups, and they have boiled down to the one's listed here.