Get a $3 MP3 Voucher (AmazonLocal)

Another deal thru AmazonLocal (even if there are no local offers in your area):

Free Voucher Worth $3 Off Any MP3 Album ($5.99 or Greater) from Amazon MP3.

Grab the voucher now and you can use it anytime until thru September 2, 2012. First, you click HERE to redeem the voucher code (which you can see at AmazonLocal by clicking on Your Offers, then clicking on View Code to get the promo code, then the discount is automatically applied to the next MP3 purchase that qualifies (including any gift purchase).

The offer claims that it will last thru Aug 20 or while supplies last. It's that last bit that is important, as they have previously sold out of these vouchers before noon on the day that they have offered them.

Today's Deals

New Kobo coupon codes: aug1725yz for 25% off select titles and KWLsave30 for 30% off Indie Reads; both expire Aug 20.

Today's Kindle Deal of the Day is We, the Drowned ($1.99), by Carsten Jensen, translated by Charlotte Barslund and Emma Ryder.

Book Description
Carsten Jensen’s debut novel has taken the world by storm. Already hailed in Europe as an instant classic, We, the Drowned is the story of the port town of Marstal, whose inhabitants have sailed the world’s oceans aboard freight ships for centuries. Spanning over a hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, and from the barren rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the roughest bars in Tasmania, to the frozen coasts of northern Russia, We, the Drowned spins a magnificent tale of love, war, and adventure, a tale of the men who go to sea and the women they leave behind.

Ships are wrecked at sea and blown up during wars, they are places of terror and violence, yet they continue to lure each generation of Marstal men—fathers and sons—away. Strong, resilient, women raise families alone and sometimes take history into their own hands. There are cannibals here, shrunken heads, prophetic dreams, forbidden passions, cowards, heroes, devastating tragedies, and miraculous survivals—everything that a town like Marstal has actually experienced, and that makes We, the Drowned an unforgettable novel, destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature.

The Detachment ($1.55 / £0.99 UK), by Barry Eisler, is the Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK (the US edition is $5.99/KLL Eligible).

Book Description
John Rain is back. And “the most charismatic assassin since James Bond” (San Francisco Chronicle) is up against his most formidable enemy yet: the nexus of political, military, media, and corporate factions known only as the Oligarchy.

When legendary black ops veteran Colonel Scott “Hort” Horton tracks Rain down in Tokyo, Rain can’t resist the offer: a multi-million dollar payday for the “natural causes” demise of three ultra-high-profile targets who are dangerously close to launching a coup in America.

But the opposition on this job is going to be too much for even Rain to pull it off alone. He’ll need a detachment of other deniable irregulars: his partner, the former Marine sniper, Dox. Ben Treven, a covert operator with ambivalent motives and conflicted loyalties. And Larison, a man with a hair trigger and a secret he’ll kill to protect.

From the shadowy backstreets of Tokyo and Vienna, to the deceptive glitz and glamour of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and finally to a Washington, D.C. in a permanent state of war, these four lone wolf killers will have to survive presidential hit teams, secret CIA prisons, and a national security state as obsessed with guarding its own secrets as it is with invading the privacy of the populace.

But first, they’ll have to survive each other.

The Detachment is what fans of Eisler, “one of the most talented and literary writers in the thriller genre” (Chicago Sun-Times), have been waiting for: the worlds of the award-winning Rain series, and of the bestselling Fault Line and Inside Out, colliding in one explosive thriller as real as today’s headlines and as frightening as tomorrow’s.

Storm ($2.99 Kindle, B&N), the first title in Brigid Kemmerer's Elemental series, is the Nook Daily Find, price matched on Kindle. There are two novellas in the series, Elemental ($0.99, prequel) and Fearless ($1.99, between), leaving the pre-order of Spark to complete the series (so far). The two novellas are $1.59 apiece at B&N, while Kobo is matching Amazon's prices, but allows coupons on each.

Book Description
Becca Chandler is suddenly getting all the guys-- the ones she doesn't want. Ever since her ex-boyfriend spread those lies about her.

Then she saves Chris Merrick from a beating in the school parking lot. Chris is different. Way different: he can control water--just like his brothers can control fire, wind, and earth. They're powerful. Dangerous. Marked for death.

And now that she knows the truth, so is Becca.

Secrets are hard to keep when your life's at stake. When Hunter, the mysterious new kid around school, turns up with a talent for being in the wrong place at the right time, Becca thinks she can trust him. But then Hunter goes head-to-head with Chris, and Becca wonders who's hiding the most dangerous truth of all.

The storm is coming. . .

Newbery Medal winner The Giver ($5.59 Kindle, $1.99 B&N), by Lois Lowry, is the Nook Daily Find for Families; neither edition is price matched on Kindle, but I've reported the lower price.

Book Description
Twelve-year-old Jonas lives in a seemingly ideal world. Not until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver does he begin to understand the dark secrets behind this fragile community.

Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.

Grade Level: 7 and up

Free Audiobook - Kluge

Get a free MP3 download of Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind ($9.99 Kindle, $17.95 Audible), by Gary Marcus, narrated by Stephen Hoye, over at Tantor Media today.

Book Description
Are we "noble in reason"? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but a "kluge", a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind - think duct tape, not supercomputer - that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.

Taking us on a tour of the fundamental areas of human experience - memory, belief, decision making, language, and happiness - Marcus reveals the myriad ways our minds fall short. He examines why people often vote against their own interests, why money can't buy happiness, why leaders often stick to bad decisions, and why a sentence like "people people left left" ties us into knots even though it's only four words long.

He also offers surprisingly effective ways to outwit our inner kluge - for example, always consider alternative explanations, make contingency plans, and beware the vivid, personal anecdote. Throughout, he shows how only evolution - haphazard and undirected - could have produced the minds we humans have, while making a brilliant case for the power and usefulness of imperfection.

Get the free audiobook from Tantor Media.

Today's Deals

Susan Wiggs and Tess Gerritsen are having a Sizzle & Chill contest on Facebook. Like both pages, then enter on either one to try to win an Adirondack chair and a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses.

Additional formats on free books:

• Final Vector (K/N/E/I)
• Hide In Plain Sight (K/N/DF)

Today's Kindle Deal of the Day is White Lies ($1.99), by Jeremy Bates.

Book Description
While driving to a charming village tucked away deep in the Cascade Mountains of eastern Washington, where she is to begin a new job teaching high school English, Katrina Burton picks up a young hitchhiker who turns out to be drunk and predatory. Fearful for her safety, she lies about her destination in order to get him out of the car. But when she later discovers that he is a teacher at the same school, she finds herself feeding that initial lie with more lies. Then Katrina meets a mysterious man . Handsome, charismatic and strong, he is exactly what she needs to extricate her from the expanding network of lies, now spinning out of control. She falls fast and hard for him. But her perfect solution soon becomes a nightmare that lands her in the middle of a grisly murder. And Katrina's problems don't stop there. She must decide whether to betray her new love or to cover up the murder and hope for the best.

Those Faraday Girls ($1.55 / £0.99 UK), by Monica McInerney, is the Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK (the US edition is $9.99).

Book Description
From the bestselling author of Family Baggage and The Alphabet Sisters comes a warm and captivating story of family secrets, traditions and ties. As a child, Maggie Faraday grew up in a lively, unconventional household with her young mother, four very different aunts and her eccentric grandfather. With her mother often away, her aunts took turns to look after her – until, just weeks before Maggie’s sixth birthday, a shocking event changed everything. Twenty years on, Maggie is living alone in New York City when a surprise visit from her grandfather brings a revelation and a proposition to reunite the family. As the Faradays gather in Ireland, Maggie begins to realize that the women she thought she knew so intimately all have something to hide . . .

The Gingerbread House ($1.99 Kindle, B&N), the first title in the Hammarby series by Swedish mathematician and author Carin Gerhardsen and Paul Norlén (Translator), is the Nook Daily Find, price matched on Kindle. I picked this up last month when it was a Kindle Daily Deal (at the same price).

Book Description
In a short space of time, several bestial murders occur in central Stockholm. When criminal investigator Conny Sjöberg and the Hammarby police begin to suspect that there’s a link between the murders, Sjöberg goes completely cold. There is a killer out there whose motives are very personal, and who will not be deterred.

The Gingerbread House by Carin Gerhardsen is the first in the Hammarby series, thrillers with taut, suspenseful plots and unexpected twists and turns. This haunting novel explores schoolyard bullying among young children and the effect it has on them when people look the other way. Many of the scenes in this book are self-experienced and based on Gerhardsen’s own childhood. Urban settings and strong portraits of authentic characters are crafted in depth and detail, insuring the books will linger in the reader’s mind long after the finish.

The Gingerbread House is written in the same tradition as the Sjöwall / Wahlöö crime novels, and has been described as a book version of the tv series The Wire. It is not only published by the same publisher as Stieg Larsson’s The Millennium Trilogy, but by the same editorial team.

Inkspell (Inkheart Trilogy #2) ($8.13 Kindle, $1.99 B&N), by Cornelia Funke, is the Nook Daily Find for Families. This was a Nook Find in April, but never did get a price match, so if you missed it then, you might want to go ahead with the B&N edition.

Book Description
The captivating sequel to INKHEART, the critically acclaimed, international bestseller by Cornelia Funke!

Although a year has passed, not a day goes by without Meggie thinking of INKHEART, the book whose characters became real. But for Dustfinger, the fire-eater brought into being from words, the need to return to the tale has become desperate. When he finds a crooked storyteller with the ability to read him back, Dustfinger leaves behind his young apprentice Farid and plunges into the medieval world of his past. Distraught, Farid goes in search of Meggie, and before long, both are caught inside the book, too. But the story is threatening to evolve in ways neither of them could ever have imagined.

Grade Level: 4 and up

Today's Deals

Today's the last day for the $47.40 Kindle (using Amazon Visa). Amazon has replenished their stock of Kindle Touch 3G, but only the ones "with Special Offers". The Kindle Touch WiFi Only (also only "with Special Offers") is now down to a 2-3 day wait. If you don't want the ads, you have to go with the entry level Kindle or step up to the Kindle Keyboard 3G.

If you use SD or USB Flash drives to back up or move data, Amazon has several from Transcend on sale today, at 40%-70% off list price, as their GoldBox Deal of the Day. There are also a couple of SSD drives in the sale (although not at as high a discount). The 256GB drive would work well as a replacement start drive for many notebook computers (I've noticed several computers now come with an SSD drive as the boot drive and a regular SATA drive as the secondary, for added storage).

On B&N's Facebook page, you can now vote for this weekend's $3.99 deal: Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi vs. Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi. Both are YA dystopian debuts; since they are both published by HarperCollins, the price should be matched on Kindle this weekend. If you pick Shatter Me, you'll also want to pre-order the sequel novella Destroy Me and watch for Unravel Me next February. Under the Never Sky, on the other hand, has already been optioned for a movie and the sequel, Through the Ever Night, releases in January. It's a tough choice (and they are running neck and neck in the voting), but I'm going to go with Rossi on this one.

Celebrate Julia Child's 100th birthday with today's Kindle Deal of the Day: As Always, Julia ($1.99), by Joan Reardon. I was lucky enough to get a review copy and fans should enjoy the tidbits revealed in her correspondence and the photos included. This was one of Amazon's Best Books of the Month, December 2010. You'll also want to check out the extra photos on Amazon's page, including her penciled remarks when she received a rejection letter the first time she submitted their cookbook. Amazon has also picked up a few other books by and about Julia that you might be interested in.

Book Description
With her outsize personality, Julia Child is known around the world by her first name alone. But despite that familiarity, how much do we really know of the inner Julia?

Now more than 200 letters exchanged between Julia and Avis DeVoto, her friend and unofficial literary agent memorably introduced in the hit movie Julie & Julia, open the window on Julia’s deepest thoughts and feelings. This riveting correspondence, in print for the first time, chronicles the blossoming of a unique and lifelong friendship between the two women and the turbulent process of Julia’s creation of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, one of the most influential cookbooks ever written.

Frank, bawdy, funny, exuberant, and occasionally agonized, these letters show Julia, first as a new bride in Paris, then becoming increasingly worldly and adventuresome as she follows her diplomat husband in his postings to Nice, Germany, and Norway.

With commentary by the noted food historian Joan Reardon, and covering topics as diverse as the lack of good wine in the United States, McCarthyism, and sexual mores, these astonishing letters show America on the verge of political, social, and gastronomic transformation.

Running With the Kenyans: Passion, Adventure, and the Secrets of the Fastest People on Earth ($2.02 / £1.29 UK), by Adharanand Finn, is the Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK (the US edition is $13.99). Note that although a Ugandan won the Olympic Gold, he had trained in Kenya since his teens and Kenya took both Silver and Bronze (and the top two slots in the London Marathon this year, as well).

Book Description
After years of watching Kenyan athletes win the world's biggest races, from the Olympics to big city marathons, Runner's World contributor Adharanand Finn set out to discover just what it was that made them so fast - and to see if he could keep up. Packing up his family (and his running shoes), he moved from Devon to the small town of Iten, in Kenya, home to hundreds of the country's best athletes. Once there he laced up his shoes and ventured out onto the dirt tracks, running side by side with Olympic champions, young hopefuls and barefoot schoolchildren. He ate their food, slept in their training camps, interviewed their coaches, and his children went to their schools. And at the end of it all, there was his dream, to join the best of the Kenyan athletes in his first marathon, an epic race through lion country across the Kenyan plains. With global attention on both the London Marathon in April 2012 and the London Olympics in the summer, there has never been a more exciting time to experience what it is really like to train and race with the stars of distance running.

Revenge of the Witch ($1.99 Kindle, B&N), the first title in the Last Apprentice series by Joseph Delaney and Patrick Arrasmith, is the Nook Daily Find, price matched on Kindle. If you missed the incredible pricing snafu on this series last summer, this is your chance to start a good YA series.

Book Description
For years, Old Gregory has been the Spook for the county, ridding the local villages of evil. Now his time is coming to an end. But who will take over for him? Twenty-nine apprentices have tried–some floundered, some fled, some failed to stay alive. Only Thomas Ward is left. He's the last hope; the last apprentice. Can Thomas succeed? Will he learn the difference between a benign witch and a malevolent one? Does the Spook's warning against girls with pointy shoes include Alice? And what will happen if Thomas accidentally frees Mother Malkin, the most evil witch in the county ... ?

Grade Level: 8 and up

Big Nate: In a Class by Himself ($7.15 Hardcover, $1.99 B&N), by Lincoln Peirce, is the Nook Daily Find for Families (no Kindle edition). Note: PagePerfect™ NOOK Books require NOOK TABLET or NOOK Color with software version 1.4.

Book Description
Big Nate is in a class by himself!

But things don't always go your way just because you're awesome.

• Nate barely survives his dad's toxic oatmeal before rushing off to school—minus his lunch.
• He body slams the no-nonsense principal.
• He accidentally insults his least favorite teacher, the horrifying Mrs. Godfrey (aka Godzilla).
• And school has barely started!

Nate keeps his cool. He knows he's destined for greatness. A fortune cookie told him so.

For fans of the ever popular, ever hilarious Diary of a Wimpy Kid series: Get ready to meet Big Nate!

Grade Level: 3 and up