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Sunday, August 9, 2009

More Free Weekend Reading - PDF's

Continuing yesterday's theme, there are plenty more free PDF's out there for your weekend reading (I suspect several weekends worth, just in these two post alone). The first is a buy one, get one free offer from R.W. Ridley, author of The Takers: Book One of the Oz Chronicles ($0.99). If you purchase the first book (which is under a dollar on Kindle), you can email him at member (at) rwridley.com and ask for Book Two (which is not yet available on Kindle) and he'll send it to you in either DOC or PDF format (your choice, just tell him which). It's on the honor system, no need to send your receipt.

Takers (Book One)
The first volume in The Oz Chronicles recalls both Stephen King’s The Stand and L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. When 13-year-old Osmond “Oz” Griffith wakes from an illness on the floor of his closet, he discovers the world overrun by man-eating monsters, the Takers, and it’s largely his fault. In an effort to make things right, he gathers a band of survivors (a baby, an aged mechanic and a talking gorilla, among others), and sets off down his version of the yellow brick road, leading to the Atlanta Zoo. Along the way, he learns that his destiny was written by Steve, a boy from his past. Afflicted with Down Syndrome, Steve created new worlds, replete with battles between good and evil, in the comic books that served as his sole refuge from the teasing of Oz and his friends. Steve’s untimely suicide leaves only the comic books as clues to vanquishing the Takers.

Ed Dunlop, a minister perhaps best known for his Terrestria Chronicles series, has several young adult/children's books with a Christian theme available on his web site. These are mostly his Jed Cartwright series, set in the 1860's, each with a specific lesson/moral. Further down the page, you'll find Phantom Pilot (aimed at older youth) and two Sherlock Jones books.

Book One - Jed Cartwright and the Midnight Escape
Orphaned by the fever of 1860, twelve-year-old Jed Barrett and his sister Mandy are sent to an orphanage. When a local farmer makes plans to adopt Jed but not Mandy, the two children run away to St. Louis so as not to be separated. Surviving many perils and setbacks, the runaways reach their destination and eventually are adopted by the wealthy Jake Cartwright family.
Theme: forgiveness and salvation.


Click HERE for the free downloads

King's Property, by Morgan Howell, The Briar King, by Greg Keyes, and The Brass Bed, by Jennifer Stevenson, have all been available as free downloads for the Kindle and in the Sony store for a while. The Suvudu free library page has now been updated and you can get these all as PDF's, just click HERE.

Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution ($34.95 hardcover), by Michael Rubin, is available, for a limited time, on the author's web site, as three PDF's. I did a quick conversion on part one and it looks pretty good, including the photographs. If you want to recombine it as one book, you'll need to do that with a PDF tool first, or be prepared to do some a little extra work in MobiPocket Creator to include all three in one book definition.

Book Description
The inside story of George Lucas, his intensely private company, and their work to revolutionize filmmaking. In the process, they made computer history. Discover the birth of Pixar, digital video editing, videogame avitars, THX sound, and a host of other icons of the media age. Lucas played a central role in the universe of entertainment technologies we see everyday.

Click HERE for the download.

Last, get The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wine, Second Edition (2nd Edition) (out of print) as a free download from BestDealsMagazines.com. It's the complete book (11M, 547 pages), but not one I'd try to convert for the Kindle - there are just too many graphics and too much special formatting for it to work well. Read it on you PC or on your DX. You will have to create an account (use a throwaway address, if you don't want to be on their mailing lists). Click HERE for the download.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Free Weekend Reading - PDF's

I've found several PDF's available for free download lately and I'm combining them into one post. First, two from Simon & Schuster. They ask for your email address, zip code and birthdate, but none of the info is validated, so just enter anything you wish (and leave today's date as the birthdate). Uncheck the box to receive their email updates (unless you used your own email address) and click submit and the download link is displayed immediately. The first one is A Knight to Remember, by Karin Tabke. They are promoting her latest book, Master of Craving ($5.59), the third book in her Blood Sword Legacy series. Click HERE for the download.

Next up, get Uglies ($7.19), by Scott Westerfeld. The newest in his children's/young adult's series, Leviathan is schedule for release in November, so you have plenty of time to get caught up, if you start now.

Book Description
"Everybody gets to be supermodel gorgeous. What could be wrong with that? Tally is about to turn sixteen, and she can't wait. Not for her license -- for turning pretty. In Tally's world, your sixteenth birthday brings an operation that turns you from a repellent ugly into a stunningly attractive pretty and catapults you into a high-tech paradise where your only job is to have a really great time. In just a few weeks Tally will be there. But Tally's new friend Shay isn't sure she wants to be pretty. She'd rather risk life on the outside. When Shay runs away, Tally learns about a whole new side of the pretty world -- and it isn't very pretty. The authorities offer Tally the worst choice she can imagine: find her friend and turn her in, or never turn pretty at all. The choice Tally makes changes her world forever."

Click HERE for the download.

The third PDF is direct from the author, In Over Her Head ($24.95 paperback), by Elsie Russell. Visiting her web site is worth the time, just to see the samples of paintings.

Book Description
The debut of Penny Bell's's musical composition, featuring the use of mysterious extremely low frequency waves takes a tragic turn when several concert-goers die in their seats during the performance. The once-bright horizons of Penny's career collapse, and she retreats to a dank Soho basement apartment lit only by the glow of computer monitors and electronic displays. There, using herself as a guinea pig, she sets out to unlock the secrets of her beautiful and deadly symphonies. A series of strange coincidences intrude upon her solitary quest. Her neighbor, the erotic performance artist Ula Nova's, disappears after her studio is broken into. And then Ula's charming and damaged young choreographer appears, and sweeps Penny off to Europe to search for the diva, plunging Penny into a seedy and unfamiliar world of jet set artists and international intrigue where the threads of every encounter always seem to lead back to those ELF waves and their pint-sized progenitor.

Click HERE for the download.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Free Book: A Soldier's Love

It's L.K. Campbell's birthday and she is making one of her novels, A Soldier's Love, available as a free download to celebrate. The offer says "24 hours" and the first reference I found was yesterday evening, but it is free as of this momemt. Download it now and if you have an account at Smashwords (which is free), you can add it to your library and you should be able to download it again at any time. There are several formats and the one for the Kindle is clearly marked - just save it to your computer and copy to the Kindle's \documents folder or save it there in the first place, or email it to your Kindle account (not the @free.kindle.com address; no conversion is needed for this one) for wireless delivery.

Book Description
Katie McNeill is a shy clerk at the University of Maryland when in the fall of 1941, she finds herself caught between two very different men. One is Army officer, Ron Miller. The other is Jimmy Garrett, a young student determined to win Katie. On Sunday, December 7, all three of their lives are changed forever when innocence is lost and the future becomes uncertain.

B1G1F on Kindle: Brian Haig

From August 1st-August 31st, 2009, buy Brian Haig's Secret Sanction ($6.39) and receive a free download of Mortal Allies ($6.39). Secret Sanction is the first novel by Brian Haig, military strategist and son of former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, but he's written quite a few since.

This one works like the other B1G1F offers from Amazon - only click and order Secret Sanction; Mortal Allies will also appear in your library and on your Kindle, but you don't click the buy button for it (I don't believe it appears on your receipt/order summary either, which I don't like).

Secret Sanction
Word of Honor meets A Few Good Men in this gripping thriller that pits the Green Berets, the CIA and the U.S. government against a top Army lawyer conducting an investigation everyone wants quashed.

Mortal Allies
Army lawyer Sean Drummond has gotten himself in way over his head-with a case that challenges his deepest fears and a co-counselor who challenges just about everything else.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Oprah Update!

Don't forget to download your PDF copy of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. See my earlier post for more details.