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Thursday, March 10, 2011

New Kindle Apps - Math Flash Cards for Kids

There are two new Apps from Digi Ronin Games in the Kindle store, both aimed at improving your kid's math scores. Looking at the pictures, they remind me of some of the Brain Age games for the DS (but without the timers or having to get the touch screen to recognize the numbers you draw with the stylus).

Flash Cards: Basic Math for Kids ($2.99)

App Description
Now kids can exercise their math skills on Kindle - anytime, anywhere.

Flash Cards: Basic Math for Kids helps your child learn basic arithmetic by giving them practice doing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. There are five difficulty levels designed around common arithmetic learning concepts that progress from single digit operations with no regrouping to double digit problems with regrouping. There are three different modes of play you choose from depending on your confidence with the material: You can use the cards as a study guide to introduce a concept, practice with multiple-choice answers, and progress to fill in the answer directly.

To give students timely feedback, correct answers are acknowledged and incorrect answers are corrected immediately upon submitting an answer. A high score table tracks your ten highest scores to help you track your progress and improvement.


Flash Cards: Fractions for Kids ($2.99)

App Description
Flash Cards: Fractions helps your child learn about fractions by giving them practice doing conversions from fractions to decimals and percentages, and converting from percentages and decimal values back to fractions.There are four difficulty levels designed around common fraction usage. For example, 1/2 and 1/4 conversions are in an easier level than 3/7 conversions.

There are three different modes of play you choose from depending on your confidence with the material: You can use the cards as a study guide to introduce a concept, practice with multiple-choice answers, and progress to fill in the answer directly.

To give students timely feedback, correct answers are acknowledged and incorrect answers are corrected immediately upon submitting an answer. A high score table tracks your ten highest scores to help you track your progress and improvement.

Turn your Kindle into a learning tool today!

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Read an eBook Week 2011 (Wednesday Update)

Wednesday updates for Read an eBook Week.
  • The free book at Dorrance today broken and I get a file not found error from yahoo.
  • The free book at Rose Dog Books Ann Veronica Wilson's Molding a Golden Heart (novella)
  • The free book at Red Lead Books is Dr. Richard D. Worley's Heroes of the Cold War (short)
  • The free book at ireadiwrite today is Ellen Ekstrom's Armor of Light.
  • Imajinnbooks has added the two new books for today (Jaye Roycraft's DOUBLE IMAGE and Carin Rafferty's Touch of Night). Be sure to click NEXT at the bottom of the page to find the 2nd book for today. If you are late finding this deal, all previous books so far are still free.
If you have problems getting the books from Rose Dog or Red Lead, see my comments on Tuesday's post on how to find the downloads.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Free Book Updates (Non-Kindle)

A number of books that were free only on Kindle are now free from a number of other stores the publisher in EPUB and PDF formats. Here's a list to the posts with links for the available formats.

Read an eBook Week 2011 (Tuesday Update)

Tuesday updates for Read an eBook Week.
  • The free book at Dorrance today is Sylvia Klope Eller's The Squirrel Who Hitchhiked to Atlanta (short story)
  • The free book at Rose Dog Books Christina Sterling's What Makes a Sandwich (short story)
  • The free book at Red Lead Books is Ruth Pallock's Mr. Fenly Frog (short story)
  • The free book at ireadiwrite today is Geoff Moeller's All In God's Time, My Sons.
  • Imajinnbooks has added the two new books for today (My Lord Viking and Winged Victory) and fixed the older PDF listings to be free (they were at $6). be sure to click NEXT at the bottom of the page to find the 2nd book for today. If you are late finding this deal, all six books so far are still free.
  • DigBooks Cafe has eight books you can download free this month (scroll down the page a bit, to the March Specials section). You can pick up PDF (convert via Amazon, lit (best choice to convert via Calibre) or html (no cover art).
  • R. Scot Johns is giving away drm-free copies of The Saga of Beowulf, Part I: The Land of Death & Shadow, if you either subscribe to his newsletter or friend him on facebook (both forms have a place for comments, where you can let him know what format you want). If you sign up, tell him Books on the Knob sent you (and, hey, I'll get the 2nd book in the series free!).
  • Kobobooks.com has their $1 off coupon going again. It says "selected books", but I generally get these to work on any non-Agency titles. The code mar8ww1 is valid today thru March 10; you can get many of the 99 cent short stories or novels by indie authors for free or get a decent discount on books that are under $5; ebookweek2011 gives you 15% and is a better coupon for some more expensive titles. I picked up a couple by Amanda Hocking for free and you can get Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants for $5.29, Richard Castle's Heat Wave for $3.99, Sarah Bower's Sins of the House of Borgia for $1.39 or Elizabeth Chadwick's To Defy a King for $1.39 or several titles in the Guardians Of Ga'Hoole series for $3.69, using the $1 off coupon (or get them all; it's an unlimited use coupon).
  • [e-reads] has two free books you can download in PDF form: To Tame a Duke by Patricia Grasso and Fool’s Gold (Reid Bennett) by Ted Wood.
  • Vanilla Heart Publishing still has a free giveaway of their Valentine's Day anthology.
  • While you are digging thru Smashwords, be sure to look for backlist books that a number of authors are now re-publishing on their own (these are traditionally published books, in paper, that are now in e-format and self-published). Authors doing this include Patricia Ryan, Doranna Durgin and Kevin J Anderson (yes, the very one that co-authored a number of DUNE volumes) and I noticed several with discounts for this week.

Free Book (EPUB/Mobi/nook) - The Fortunes Of War

The Fortunes Of War: Four Great Battles Of World War II (out of print), by Andrew A Rooney (aka Andy Rooney), is free over on the B&N website. No doubt this was done just so he could make a point during his 60 Minutes commentary this last week and there is no telling how long it will remain free. I opened it up in nookStudy and it is 124 pages, two columns per page and there are a few areas where it looks like you get hieroglyphics instead of text (around some photos). He says this was his first published book (at $7.50 for a Hardcover), but there is no info on the Kindle or B&N sites as to the content. Rather obviously, from the title, it's a look at four battles during WWII and does include some maps and illustrations. I did manage to find one review, from 1962, in Harper's magazine, but could not read it (it's only available to subscribers). A little more digging located the book on the Internet Archives and Kobo. Originally published by Little and Brown, it's now free in many formats and all of them look like OCR'd scans that haven't been corrected.

Click HERE for the free download from B&N.
Click HERE for the free download from Kobo (DRM-free EPUB or PDF)
Click HERE for the free download from the Internet Archive (there is a Kindle compatible edition there).