National Kindle & Koffee Day

First proposed on the Amazon Kindle forums and now being promoted by several other kindle boards, June 6th has been declared the "official" National Kindle & Koffee Day. Take your Kindle to your local Starbucks (or other local/national coffee shop) at 10:00AM local time and read while having a cup of coffee (or another beverage of your choice). Perhaps you'll meet up with other local Kindlers or someone wanting to see a Kindle in person. You might want to work on your home page, if you've downloaded some of the racier freebies available lately, just in case you want to give someone a demo. I will say that at my local Starbucks, this won't be any different than any other time I've been there (and so far, no one has seemed to notice my Kindle or they are all too polite to interrupt my reading).

Need a suggestion of what to read for this important day? How about It's Not About the Coffee ($9.99) by Howard Behar? Don't forget to dress up your Kindle 2 or Kindle Klassic for the occasion.

Some other suggestions with a Starbucks theme:
How Starbucks Saved My Life ($9.99)
Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture ($9.99)
Grande Expectations: A Year in the Life of Starbucks' Stock ($9.99)
The Gospel According to Starbucks: Living with a Grande Passion ($9.99)
The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary ($14.82)
Tribal Knowledge: Business Wisdom Brewed from the Grounds of Starbucks Corporate Culture ($13.77)
Starbucks SECRET Coffee Recipes ($4.79)

Or a general coffee theme:
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Starting and Running a Coffee Bar ($9.99)
The Coffee Trader: A Novel ($9.99)
Uncommon Grounds The History Of Coffee And How It Transformed Our World ($9.99)
The Various Flavors of Coffee ($13.20)

Or just coffee in the title:
Black Coffee ($4.79) by Agatha Christie
Let It Rain Coffee ($12.57)
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere ($9.99), a collection of short stories
Coffee Clutch ($1.19, a coffee length short story)

See you there....

Free Ebook: Viral Spiral (PDF)

The author of Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own ($16.17 Hardcover; not on Kindle), David Bollier, was on BookTV over the weekend to promote his book. One theme of the book is how making your content free on the internet actually increases revenue and in keeping with that (hey, if you're going to write a book, you really have to follow the advice yourself to maintain credibility), he has put up a PDF copy of the book as a free download.

Book Description

A stunning narrative history of the emergence of electronic "free culture," from open-source software and Creative Commons licenses to remixes and Web 2.0—in the tradition of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture.

A world organized around centralized control, strict intellectual property rights, and hierarchies of credentialed experts is under siege. A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant. —from Viral Spiral

From free and open-source software, Creative Commons licenses, Wikipedia, remix music and video mashups, peer production, open science, open education, and open business, the world of digital media has spawned a new "sharing economy" that increasingly competes with entrenched media giants.

Reporting from the heart of this "free culture" movement, journalist and activist David Bollier provides the first comprehensive history of the attempt by a global brigade of techies, lawyers, artists, musicians, scientists, businesspeople, innovators, and geeks of all stripes to create a digital republic committed to freedom and innovation. Viral Spiral—the term Bollier coins to describe the almost-magical process by which Internet users can come together to build online commons and tools—brilliantly interweaves the disparate strands of this eclectic movement. The story describes major technological developments and pivotal legal struggles, as well as fascinating profiles of hacker Richard Stallman, copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig, and other colorful figures.

A milestone in reporting on the Internet by one of our leading media critics, Viral Spiral is for anyone seeking to take the full measure of the new digital era.

Free Audiobook - The Good Book

David Plotz, a commentator on Slate.com, has the unabridged audiobook version of The Good Book: Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible as a free download at Audible until May 29th. Those new to Audible.com can just click on the download button, then create a new account. Existing users should log in first, then return to the original page to download the book (don't use the link on the front of Audible's homepage, as this same title is $17.47 there). The book will download as two parts, so you don't take as much space on your Kindle (or ipod) if you load them there for listening.

At a time when wars are fought over scriptural interpretation, when the influence of religion on American politics has never been greater, when many Americans still believe in the Bible's literal truth, it has never been more important to get to know the Bible. Good Book is what happens when a regular guy - an average Job - actually reads the book on which his religion, his culture, and his world are based.

Along the way, he grapples with the most profound theological questions: How many commandments do we actually need? Does God prefer obedience or good deeds? And the most unexpected ones: Why are so many women in the Bible prostitutes? Why does God love bald men so much? Is Samson really that stupid? Good Book is an irreverent, enthralling journey through the world's most important work of literature.

Kindle Dollar Days Continue

If you read Shadow of the Ghost (previously $0.89, now $2.80), then you'll want to get the second book of the Lord of Chaos Trilogy, Legacy of the Ghost, which the author, Tanner Artesz, has marked at an introductory price of $0.89 for the month of June.

The Nine and The Council of Darkness begin seeking replacements for the members they had lost during the conflict with Rachk'sha. Meanwhile, Ky prepares the Inheritance Ceremony he had to deny his triplets to protect them. Not wishing to see harm come to his children again, he, with The Lady's help, plans a uniquely special gift.

Unknown to Ky, the old goblin had been absorbing residual magic by tracing the runes Ky placed on the walls of the goblin caves many years ago. Now the goblin craves magical knowledge and finds Mistress, an albino necromancer. Together, they plan to become gods in their own right. To do this, they must steal the power of one of the current gods. In the process they carve a path of deception, betrayal, and blood.

The Grove by John Rector

The last time farmer Dexter McCray went off his medication, someone wound up dead. So, after waking from an alcoholic blackout to discover his tractor stuck in a ditch and the body of a teenage girl in the cottonwood grove bordering his cornfield, things look worryingly familiar.

With no alibi and a creeping suspicion that he might indeed be guilty, Dexter decides to investigate the crime himself. He can't tell anybody. Not his friend, the sheriff, who keeps offering to help him winch his tractor out of the ditch. Nor his estranged wife, whose love he's desperate to win back. And certainly not the Tollivers, his redneck neighbors.

Fortunately, Dexter's not entirely alone. He has some help.

In the shape of the dead girl herself.

Richard Russell is hoping to pick up a few readers and maybe a few reviews for his books (both those he's written and some he's published for others). He's reduced the price on a number of them from $3.19 to 99 cents each:

California Tumbles Into the Sea is the initial book in a series about Nick Carlson and his family and friends. The rest are: On a Morning from a Bogart Movie, Dont Forget to Say Grace, Secrets are the Things We Grew and Little GTO. Nick is a journalist/writer just returned from Southeast Asia in this first book. He finds that his old girlfriend's brother has been convicted of a murder in his old hometown and a major magazine wants him to investigate. Crime/Mystery.

Modern Problems is the first book of a series by "Dorian Taylor". This first book is short stories, some of which appeared in the Blue Review and a novella all of which is pretty experimental stuff. It's followed by Top 40, a nouveau roman, also pretty experimental. Literary fiction.

The Apocryphon (Book One Corinthus) is a modern Gnostic fable that concerns a man who found the secret to living the same life, time and again and the challenges he faces doing this. Paranormal Romance.

Finally The Friends of Fu Manchu is a collection of turn of the nineteenth century villains and is actually the second such collection he has published, the first The Colleagues of Professor Van Helsing. Following these two is Sinister Sisters, which covers the distaff side of Gothic/Victorian Vampires, Lady Geraldine, through Lady Ducayne, the female vampire in the 19th century. Vintage crime.

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If you missed The Legend of Witch Bane (The Witch Bane Saga) by Kevis Hendrickson when it was on sale a couple of months back, this weekend is your chance to grab it for 99 cents once again. His Rogue Hunter (Chronicles of the Rogue Hunter) is also a bargain priced $3.19, but is set in a different world than Witch Bane.

Not under a dollar, but close, there is now a ninth book in Brendan Carroll's The Red Cross of Gold series, IX: The Queen of the Abyss. Like the rest of the series, this one is priced at $1.59 (at least, for now).

Free Ebook from Books on Board: Sherlock Holmes

As part of today's Daily Steal, Books on Board has The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Abbey House Classics) (epub, PDF and PRC) as a free download. Like the Bram Stoker's Dracula they had a couple of days ago (only for a few hours), the PRC version this one does have DRM, so won't won't open in Calibre (but may work on the Kindle, as Dracula did; BooksonBoard says there is no DRM in the download, but a flag for DRM is definitely set). However, if you get the ePub version (not the "Adobe Digital Editions" version of the second link, as that will be a PDF, which Calibre can also have problems with, if printing is limited), then Calibre will open it with no problems and from there you can convert it to any supported format, including Mobi/Kindle AZW, and publish it straight to any supported ereader (Kindle and Sony, so far)