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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Read an E-Book Week, Day 3

More free reads and a few that I hadn't mentioned this week. Mostly non-Kindle formats, although many can be easily converted.

Another author makes a book offer via comments:

Readers can also receive a free e-book by posting a comment on my blog post between now and March 14th. They can choose from among my two novels and five titles from my editing clients (quantities of client books are limited).

Lillie Ammann
http://lillieammann.com

Bullying: A Parent’s Primer is a 19 page booklet, free this week if you request it by email (link is mid-way down their page).

CurrClick provides curriculum material for homeschooling and has a free download of St. Patrick: The World's Greatest Missionary, just in time for the upcoming holiday.

Sharing Books specializes in children's books and they are available on a "shareware" basis. Download it - if you like it - pay a donation.

EcoBrain offers e-books and mp3 audios about the environment. They are offering Understanding The Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming, Secondary Level as a free purchase from March 8-14. They also offer a companion book, Understanding The Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming Inter. Level that is currently marked down to $5.99. Both are educational in nature. NOTE that the files there are watermarked PDF's with cut/paste prohibited; you may not be able to convert them to any other format.

Jean Sheldon has a free download of The Effects of Gravity on the Soul of a Poet, a book of poetry.

If you haven't read Heather Wardell's Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo yet, be sure to grab a copy. Not only are both the PDF and PRC formats DRM free, you are also free to copy them for others, convert them and give out the converted copies and pretty much anything else you want to do with them other than sell them or print them out and bind them as a book (print out and keep looseleaf and you are fine).

Pauline Rowson's Tide of Death, free in PDF format, is a marine mystery and is the first in a series, with a new book coming this April.
The Eye of Alloria by Rae Lori. Also two short free reads on her web site.

One I missed earlier was Steve Jordan's Berserker: The Kestral Voyages. Steve set up the web site for Read an E-Book Week

Wizards.com (of Dungeons and Dragons fame) has up a free PDF copy of Paul S. Kemp's Twilight Falling. It looks like a printers proof, so I doubt it would convert well for the Kindle, but it's still worth reading.

Libby McKinmer has Fox Hollow up as a free PDF this week (it's on the right side of the web page).

A Veneer of Respect: a free e-book by Alex Domokos and Rita Y. Toews. I'm not sure what it's about, as it isn't mentioned on their web site other than the free link. Another free ebook, Looking In... Portraits of the Canadian Soul , is on their Novels page.

The Long and the Short of It has two sections: Romance and Erotica. Both have a selection of free short story reads and on the main page you can request a PDF of past Friday Recipes.

There are a few additional sites changing the books every day: Twilight Times Books has Darrell Bain's e-book Darrell Bain's World of Books all week and an additional free e-book each day. Among the selections will be Jerome and the Seraph by Robina Williams, Behold the Eyes of Light by Geoff Geauterre and No Place for Gods by Gerry Mills. In an unusual move, Rose Dog Books and Red Lead Bookstore change their free reads at 5 PM, just as they close down for the day - so West Coaster better check early or you'll miss that day's books. I suspect that Whitmore Publishing Company is doing the same, as the book hasn't changed since last night. Calderwood Books has A Falling Down Man by James Lally as today's read and a Pirate Adventure coming up tomorrow.

If you grabbed the ereader formatted books over at Zumaya Publications, you may want to head back over there. They've added a title Better Than Chocolate that wasn't there previously. These are not easily converted to other formats, but can be read on your computer. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, the fire up Stanza and look for the Ebook Week entry in the online catalog. Not only are many of the other free reads there, but this entire list from Zumaya has it's own entry. Better yet, there is a bonus read you only get there: Kingdom Come by David Lynn Anderson. And for those that will only read on the iPhone - you'll miss out on Better than Chocolate, as that's only on the web download page. For those who haven't used Stanza before, there is an excellent tutorial, featuring this weeks free reads, over on Lexcycle.

All Romance E-Books claims to have "a wide variety of e-books", but nearly all are erotica (there are some "young reads", but even those are for older teens). However, they do have about 80 free reads. I find their web site a little annoying (the car will time out on you while browsing, making you log back in a lot). These reads are also available thru Stanza for you iPhone - but the ordering is less integrated than many others, using the web site in Safar (and you can't see what you are doing when typing in your login info). Still, the short nature of the free reads is a natural for the short reading time that most will use their iPhone for. Note that once you have purchased a book, you can't purchase it again and that you can only download a book in ONE format (even if several are available). So you must decide ahead of time where you'll be doing your reading (or grab the HTML, if available, so you can convert it yourself -- although the effort required seems a bit much for short stories you'll probably delete after reading). If you want something a bit milder in nature, check out the free reads at Wild Rose Press (there are 64 of them).

Olive Tree Software has a number of biblical related ebooks: several versions of The Bible, including translations in a number of other languages, devotionals and commentaries. If you read just the free material on this one website, it would keep you busy for years (of course, to read it all, you'll need a years of language study as well). The only problem is that their materials appear to only be available in PDB format. They have loaders for many of the PDA's and phones out there, including the iPod/iTouch, but no mobi or HTML files that would let you easily ocnvert them for the Kindle. Additionally, these PDB files can't be read with the current ereader software, which is version 3.0.3, as they require 3.0.4 or above, which appears to be limited to handheld devices. Still, if you have a smartphone, PDA or iPhone, they have a large collection.

If you are hunting for a good multi-format reader (software) for your computer, you may want to check out Calibre (version 0.5 just released this week). It reads most non-DRM formats (but not ereader PDB) and will let you convert several older formats to more modern ones. It even understands screen size differences amongst reader hardware and lets you customize things like the margins around text. It's also quite useful for fixing the metadata on mobi/prc files, which have the author names missing or don't sort correctly. The program is completely free (although the author does accept donations).