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Friday, October 23, 2009

Marked by PC and Kristin Cast

I knew the Twilight deal was too good to last and about three hours after my blog post, the price was increased to over $46 (which means it is cheaper to buy the individual ebooks instead of the collection). Hopefully some of you managed to take advantage of the low price.

Marked ($2.39), by PC and Kristin Cast, Book 1 of her House of Night series, is aimed at the same audience (young adults and those wanting paranormal without the explicit sex of some other series). The only problem I saw with the book is the formatting (in the sample) -- it looks like the PDF used was one with a footer on each page, containing the authors' names and where the page breaks in the PDF would have been, the two author names are jammed into the text, with no spacing between the words. It's typical of a PDF-Mobi conversion that was not proofread or edited before being published. A second problem with the formatting is the excessive use of white space between paragraphs. It may only be two blank lines, but it looks like a lot more and interrupts the reading flow when several small paragraphs occur in a row (especially as only maybe two fit on a page, with all those blank lines, even at font size 2).

Book Description
Enter the dark, magical world of the House of Night, a world very much like our own, except here vampyres have always existed.

One minute, sixteen-year-old Zoey Redbird is a normal teenager dealing with everyday high school stress: her cute boyfriend Heath, the school’s star quarterback who suddenly seems more interested in partying than playing ball; her nosy frenemy Kayla, who’s way too concerned with how things are going with Heath; her uber-tough geometry test tomorrow. The next, she’s Marked as a fledgling vampyre, forcing her to leave her ordinary life behind and join the House of Night, a boarding school where she will train to become an adult vampyre. That is, if she makes it through the Change—and not all of those who are Marked do. It sucks to begin a new life, especially away from her friends, and on top of that, Zoey is no average fledgling. She has been chosen as special by the vampyre Goddess, Nyx. Zoey discovers she has amazing powers, but along with her powers come bloodlust and an unfortunate ability to Imprint with Heath, who just doesn’t know how to take “no” for an answer. To add to her stress, she is not the only fledgling at the House of Night with special powers: when she discovers that the leader of the Dark Daughters, the school's most elite group, is misusing her Goddess-given gifts, Zoey must look deep within herself for the courage to embrace her destiny—with a little help from her new vampyre friends.

Twilight Saga - Complete Set for Under $6

If you've held off buying the The Twilight Saga Collection ($5.27), by Stephenie Meyer, in ebook form or you are missing even one in the series, run, don't walk, to the Kindle store and pick up this pre-order. 512 pages, the entire saga, all in one ebook at 90% off "list" price. The only reason I'm not picking it up? I already have all four in the series.

Book Description
This stunning set, complete with all four books, makes the perfect gift for fans of the bestselling vampire love story.

Deeply romantic and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn capture the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Amazon Update IPhone App, Announces PC Reader


Amazon has just announced a new reader for the PC (no MAC yet) and you can sign up now to be notified when it is ready for download. Click HERE to sign-up for the Kindle PC Reader. Some may consider the lack of Kindle newspapers, magazines, and blogs on the Kindle for PC to be an issue, but I can already read most of those on my PC anyway.
  • Get the best reading experience available on your PC. No Kindle required
  • Access your Kindle books even if you don't have your Kindle with you
  • Automatically synchronizes your last page read and annotations between devices with Whispersync
  • Create bookmarks and view the annotations you created on your Kindle
In addition to the PC reader, those using the iPhone App should upgrade - it now has highlighting, notetaking and (for those using the original app) can be locked into landscape or portrait mode, just as the DX can, which is good for reading in bed or on a boat.

Here's the full press-release from Amazon concerning the Kindle for PC:

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 22, 2009-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced "Kindle for PC," the free application that lets readers around the world enjoy Kindle books on their personal computers (PC). The U.S. Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore) currently offers over 360,000 books, including New Releases and 101 of 112 New York Times Bestsellers, which are typically $9.99 or less. The Kindle Store is the only place to find some of the most popular books of today in digital format. Kindle books can now be read on the Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone, iPod touch, and PC.

Kindle for PC features Amazon’s Whispersync technology that automatically saves and synchronizes bookmarks and last page read across devices. Whether you read Kindle books on a Kindle, Kindle DX, or one of the free Kindle applications, you can always have your reading with you and never lose your place. With Kindle for PC, you can read some on your PC, read some on your Kindle, and always pick up right where you left off. Whispersync helped make the Kindle for iPhone application the most popular books app in the Apple App Store.

"Kindle for PC is the perfect companion application for folks who own a Kindle or Kindle DX," said Ian Freed, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. "Kindle for PC is also a great way for people around the world to read the most popular books of today even if they don’t yet have a Kindle."

With Kindle for PC, readers can take advantage of the following features:

* Purchase, download, and read hundreds of thousands of books available in the Kindle Store
* Access their entire library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon’s servers for free
* Choose from over 10 different font sizes and adjust words per line
* Add and automatically synchronize bookmarks and last page read
* View notes and highlights marked on Kindle and Kindle DX
* Zoom in and out of text with a pinch of the fingers (Windows 7 users only)
* Turn pages with a finger swipe (available in a future release for Windows 7 users)

Microsoft demonstrated Kindle for PC for the first time ever at the Windows 7 launch event today in New York City. “Customers have told us that they want access to a wider variety of content and an increasingly diverse set of form factors,” said Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows Platform Strategy at Microsoft. “With the announcement of Kindle for PC, Amazon is making its massive selection of Kindle books available on the world’s most widely used platform. The new Kindle for PC’s use of Windows 7 features such as Jump Lists and Windows Touch demonstrates how Windows 7 makes new things possible.”

Kindle for PC takes advantage of capabilities in the new Windows 7, including Windows Touch technology. In addition to Windows 7, Kindle for PC will also be compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista. Kindle for PC will be available to customers around the world as a free download next month.

Amazon Lowers Price on Kindle International, Drops Kindle 2

The (electronic) ink has barely dried on Barnes and Noble's press releases for the Nook and Amazon has fired a shot across their bow - the International Kindle, which is now shipping, has been lowered in price to $259 and the Kindle 2 has been dropped as a new product (you can still order a refurbished Kindle 2 for $219). Although the Nook has wireless built in, Barnes & Noble customers can't order new books when outside of the US, only download content they have previously purchased, while the Amazon customers (regardless of which Kindle they own) can buy new content no matter where in the world they are, transferring via USB instead of wireless or using the built-in Whispernet access in 100 countries.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

B1G1F on Kindle: Chuck Klosterman

December 31, 2009, buy Eating the Dinosaur ($9.99), by Chuck Klosterman, and receive a free download of Killing Yourself to Live ($9.99). As usual, the free book will simply appear in your Media Library and on your Kindle, you don't click on it's Buy button.

Book Description
Chuck Klosterman has chronicled rock music, film, and sports for almost fifteen years. He's covered extreme metal, extreme nostalgia, disposable art, disposable heroes, life on the road, life through the television, urban uncertainty and small-town weirdness. Through a variety of mediums and with a multitude of motives, he's written about everything he can think of (and a lot that he's forgotten). The world keeps accelerating, but the pop ideas keep coming.

In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman is more entertaining and incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of voyeurism, the reason why music fan's inevitably hate their favorite band's latest album, or why we love watching can't-miss superstars fail spectacularly, Klosterman remains obsessed with the relationship between expectation, reality, and living history. It's amateur anthropology for the present tense, and sometimes it's incredibly funny.


Killing Yourself to Live
For 6,557 miles, Chuck Klosterman thought about dying. He drove a rental car from New York to Rhode Island to Georgia to Mississippi to Iowa to Minneapolis to Fargo to Seattle, and he chased death and rock 'n' roll all the way. Within the span of twenty-one days, Chuck had three relationships end -- one by choice, one by chance, and one by exhaustion. He snorted cocaine in a graveyard. He walked a half-mile through a bean field. A man in Dickinson, North Dakota, explained to him why we have fewer windmills than we used to. He listened to the KISS solo albums and the Rod Stewart box set. At one point, poisonous snakes became involved. The road is hard. From the Chelsea Hotel to the swampland where Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane went down to the site where Kurt Cobain blew his head off, Chuck explored every brand of rock star demise. He wanted to know why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing...and what this means for the rest of us.