As many of you know,
Borders has been having massive problems with their new ebook store. When it first opened, the address they had published for months in advance did not work. They fixed that and launched a free ebook offer - some of us managed to get them all, but many who tried later got nothing but error messages and as the weekend started, all of the free books reverted to full price (and some who purchased the free books from inside the app were charged, before they all just started getting error messages). A problem with in-copyright free books, present when they opened, has remained the entire time: you can't get them into your library using the web site and many are impossible to find using search in the app (which does work to add them to your library, if you can find the book). And finding out about these freebies can be nearly impossible, as they have next to no search tools and they are buried in the free book list under a deluge of google freebies (many not even in English).
This morning, though, the site is entirely offline. A message is being displayed that they will be back after 8AM EST, but it's nearly 11AM now and nothing has changed. They have posted a one day coupon: THANKS712. Use it on the website anytime today (before midnight PST) and get 30% off list price of any time ... so long as it isn't on the long exclusion list (which includes all ereaders and many ebooks, most likely all of those on the Agency pricing model). Of course, it doesn't do you much good when the entire site is down. Assuming they get the store back up later today, though, the coupon is good on many (if not all) of the paper books available (although I've found in the past, at least in the stores, that coupons don't work well on books that are already on sale, as the adjustment comes off the list price, not the current sales price).
In the meantime, if you didn't get the freebies, be sure to keep checking the
Borders Free Books Offer
page to see if it is live again. Supposedly, if they continue having problems, they may even extend the offer past the original July 14th deadline. I've seen a few reports that they had the prices back down to zero late Sunday, before they took the site down for maintenance. If you are having problems creating an account, be sure that you don't include any dashes or spaces in your phone number (and that you are using a US address, as, like B&N and Sony, Borders is only set up to sell ebooks in the US).
