Free Audiobooks - Shiver and Romeo & Juliet

Audiobook Sync is once again giving away audiobooks aimed at young adults during the summer. There are two new ones each week, so you have to keep checking back. You can't get any titles that have been missed, but once they are loaded into Overdrive (which you will need to install, if you are not already using it for library books), they are yours to keep (there is no expiration date). Two new titles each Thursday!

First, I've linked in the info from the ebook or audiobook version of each title (Amazon has the best reviews), then a link to get your copies free.

BBC Radio Shakespeare: Romeo & Juliet (Dramatized) ($11.95 Audible), by William Shakespeare, narrated by Douglas Henshall, Sophie Dahl, Susannah York and the Full Cast.

Book Description
BBC Radio has a unique heritage when it comes to Shakespeare. Since 1923, when the newly formed company broadcast its first full-length play, generations of actors and producers have honed and perfected the craft of making Shakespeare to be heard.

With the intimacy of radio the full beauty and meaning of some of the most lyrical lines ever written can be truly heard: tenderness and passion, betrayal and bigotry are brilliantly evoked as the tale comes to its tragic conclusion.

Revitalised, original, and comprehensive, this is Shakespeare for the new millennium.

Shiver ($8.54 Kindle), by Maggie Stiefvater, is the first in her Wolves of Mercy Falls series.

Book Description
For years, Grace has watched the wolves in the woods behind her house. One yellow-eyed wolf--her wolf--is a chilling presence she can't seem to live without. Meanwhile, Sam has lived two lives: In winter, the frozen woods, the protection of the pack, and the silent company of a fearless girl. In summer, a few precious months of being human . . . until the cold makes him shift back again.

Now, Grace meets a yellow-eyed boy whose familiarity takes her breath away. It's her wolf. It has to be. But as winter nears, Sam must fight to stay human--or risk losing himself, and Grace, forever.

Click HERE to sign up for an account and get the free downloads. Don't forget, you'll also need to install the Overdrive software (there is a link at Sync). In addition, you end up clicking about three pages, for each book, before the audiobook actually downloads. Don't stop so long as you still see a button that talks about your Sync download (or until you see the Overdrive software open up). Once in Overdrive, you'll need to tell it where to save the files (just click OK to use the default location, since Overdrive will keep track of them for you), then again to actually start the download (by default, all parts of the book are downloaded; I would suggest not changing this in the last dialog box, just click on OK to get the download started).

Free Book (noDRM) - Blue Galaxy

Blue Galaxy ($2.39 Kindle), by Diane Dooley, is free as a DRM-free EPUB from Carina Press, today only.

Book Description
Falling in love is easy; staying alive long enough to enjoy it just might be impossible.

Javan Rhodes, the hard-drinking, disreputable captain of space freighter The Kypris, took a mission to save himself from hitting the bottom of the food chain. Transporting Sola, a beautiful young aristocrat, from Earth to an unknown destination on the outer rim of the colonies is lucrative, but also highly illegal.

As tough as it is to evade both the law and the lawless, the hardest part of the job is not falling in love with his irresistible cargo. Just as he decides that he will never be able to hand her over to the warlord she must marry, he discovers that Sola has been playing a very dangerous game—one that could not only cost them their lives, but could also affect the balance of power in an increasingly dangerous universe.

Click HERE to get the free book from Carina Press. Use coupon code GALAXYFREE during checkout to drop the price to $0.00 before completing checkout (you should not have to enter any payment info). If you are having problems with the coupon code, try cutting and pasting the code, rather than typing it in, making sure you don't have a space at either end of the code. Also, check the time - these coupons are ONE DAY ONLY and the company cuts them off at midnight where they are (eastern time, US). Last, check to see if another coupon code is being applied to the order (just above the total); if so, click to remove it first, then apply this code.

Spend $10 on eligible Kindle Books: Get a $10 Gift Card (KSO)

This offer is for those with the Kindle Wi-Fi with Special Offers or Kindle 3G + Wi-Fi with Special Offers only. Turn on your wireless, click Menu, Sync & Check for New Items, then on View Special Offers after the sync has completed. You should see a new offer:

Spend $10 on any of thousands of eligible Kindle Books and get a $10 Amazon.com Gift Card

Click on offer, then click on the link on the offer page sign up and get an email with the promotion code. Sign-up for this offer expires on June 25.

You'll get an email (right away) with a link to the special Special Offers page. There is no promotion code on this one; instead, just buy at $10 in Kindle books between now and July 9 (June 22, 2011, 12:00 a.m. [PDT] through July 9, 2011, 11:59 p.m. [PDT]); if you return a book during this period, it won't count towards the $10, but you should not have any problem finding one or more books from the list. To narrow the list to $5 and under, click here (you may see a few higher prices, if the book is cheaper outside the US).

There are a few things to watch for with this offer:

• First, you must click on the Special Offer on your KSO and get the email (so, if a family member has the KSO on your account, have them perform this step).
• Second, you cannot use an existing gift card balance to buy the books. So, if you always get gift cards to fund your Kindle account, you'll need to let them run out and buy the qualifying books using your credit or debit card before adding the next gift card to your account. The rules don't mention promotional balances, but since I have both on my account, I'll just assume I have to spend both before I do my shopping on this one.
• You must have a KSO registered to your account when you make the purchases and, presumably, when the gift card is sent out the next month.
• The offer is limited to those in the US.

Get $20 Off Select Vehicle GPS (KSO)

Update: This offer is back on my Kindle. Looks like it expired after only six hours, rather than the 4 days it should have and Amazon figured out how to send it back out, with proper dates. So, if you were wanting a new GPS, be sure to sign up before it disappears again!

This offer is for those with selected Kindle Wi-Fi with Special Offers or Kindle 3G + Wi-Fi with Special Offers only. Turn on your wireless, click Menu, Sync & Check for New Items, then on View Special Offers after the sync has completed. You should see this new offer:

Get $20 Off Select Vehicle GPS

Click on offer, then click on the link on the offer page sign up and get an email with the promotion code. Sign-up for this offer expires on June 25.

You'll get an email (right away), a link to the Special Offer GPS page and a promotion code to enter at checkout. Once you have the promotional code, you have until July 25 to complete your purchase. Like previous offers, this one requires you to use the full checkout process in order to enter your promotional code. Also, like all Amazon sales that use promotional codes, if you have a gift card balance, you must use it for the payment (if there is not a sufficient balance, then you can pick which credit card or other payment to use).

Once again, this offer can be used more than once per accounts, so long as you have more than one KSO registered:

4. Limit one promotional code per device.

Just click on the ad on each device to receive the individual promotion codes via email.

This particular offer, I wasn't sure if I would take advantage of (I have GPS on my phone and in my car, but hubby keeps wanting to upgrade his handheld GPS). Not that it matters, as this one appeared on my View Special Offers page, but once I clicked on it, I received an error message that the offer materials were no longer available. I don't know if it downloaded with a bad ending date and thought the offer had expired or if some of the offer files didn't download properly. In any case, my "choice" was limited to clicking OK and then the offer disappeared from the list. If this happens to you, be sure to call Kindle support (having this happen isn't on their list of "things that can go wrong" on the KSO offers, so they wrote up a ticket to send to their marketing and tech depts). For my trouble (and rather long times on hold), I did get a $20 credit on my account ... which I can use on anything at Amazon, not just the GPS!

Two Free Books (nook/noDRM) - The Message

Both Barnes and Noble and ChristianBook have two free titles in The Message series by Eugene H. Peterson this morning, Both are produced by Christian publisher NavPress. One of the two isn't on Kindle and the the other, The Book of Proverbs, is $1.59. If you pick these up from ChristianBook, you'll get a DRM-free EPUB, which is easily converted for Kindle via Calibre. (ChristianBook / B&N)

Book Description
Updated in a riveting, modern paraphrase, let this practical wisdom transform your life--at home, at work, at play.

"A manual for living, for learning what's right and just and fair." --Proverbs 1:3 The Bible isn't just about getting people into heaven. That's part of it, but that's not the whole story. The Proverbs represent God's "manual for living"--for practical, everyday living. These truths teach us how to honor God with our words, our work, and our money; there's advice on how to handle temptation and gain wisdom. Rephrased from the original Hebrew into a riveting, modern language, the Proverbs resound with uncompromising insight into real life.

The Book of Psalms (ChristianBook / B&N)

Book Description
The ancient hymns, poems, and prayers found in the Psalms teach us how to communicate with God. As Eugene Peterson writes, this book "gives us a language adequate for responding to the God who speaks to us." Translated directly from the original Hebrew, the Psalms come alive in the heart-stirring words of The Message.

"I hold on to you for dear life." --Psalm 63:8 The ancient hymns, poems, and prayers found in the Psalms teach us how to communicate with God. As Eugene Peterson writes, this book "gives us a language adequate for responding to the God who speaks to us." Translated directly from the original Hebrew, the Psalms come alive in the heart-stirring words of The Message. Read them, pray them, and hold on to them for dear life.