28 Free Ebooks in Kindle Format

The Kindle Formatting website has convinced 25 28 (yes, twenty-five twenty-eight, plus one excerpt) of their clients to offer their books as a free download this week, in celebration of Read an E-Book Week. These are all in non-DRM mobi format, can be copied or emailed straight to your Kindle or converted to use with other readers. If you think you'll want to read them at all, grab them now - this offer is only good thru March 14. Here's a list of the titles:

Non-Fiction
A Broad Abroad in Thailand
Ahead of the Curve: A Guide to Applied Strategic Thinking
Disrupted Ambitions
Dot Boom: Marketing to Baby Boomers through Meaningful Online Engagement
Dynamic Energetic Healing
The Essential Employee -- The Adventures of Carmen Senz
The Future of Music
Getting Started as an Independent Computer Consultant
Leader's Digest The Leader's Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success
The Medicaid Handbook 2008 - Protecting Your Assets From Nursing Home Costs
Questing Marilyn: In Search of My Holy Grail
Spymaster: Wild Bill Donovan, Father of the CIA
The Team Approach: With Teamwork Anything Is Possible

Fiction
Beneath the Sassafras (One)
Dustin and a Mouse Named Cody in The Mouse That Stirred on the Night Before Christmas
Esmeralda & The Pirates Esmeralda & The Pirates
Microbe
Nathan, Paw-Paw & The Dinosaurs
Poison Pen
RHYTHM: A Novel
Spa Deadly, An Allie Armington Mystery
Thaddeus T. and Barnaby
Where's Blackie?
The Cabal (Three Chapters Only)

Extra Large Print, courtesy of the Virgina M. Woolf Foundation
A Canticle for Leibowitz
PartnerShip
Childhood's End
Leaves of Grass
Screwtape Letters

Free Ebook: Mighty Hammer Down

Mighty Hammer Down, by David J. Guyton, is available in PDF format for FREE ($0.99 on Kindle, $10.99 in Paperback).

This one is direct from the author; simply email him at d [AT] davidjguyton [DOT] com (just substitute the proper punctuation in the address) and he'll send you a PDF copy. All he asks in return is that if you like it, write a short review on amazon.com. Just getting reviews and readers can be difficult for self-published authors (and Amazon won't let them give their books away for free, unlike the larger publishing houses), so I'd expect more deals like this from independent authors in the future. If you'd prefer to get a copy already formatted for your Kindle (or don't want to write a short review), it's still a bargain at $0.99. I picked this up a while back at $1.59, which I considered quite a bargain then, and it's gotten quite a few good reviews on Kindleboards and Amazon.

Synopsis

A longstanding peace is about to be shattered by villains in the shadows of Medora. They conspire with distant nations to cripple the western Empire and spread their venom eastward. In their secretive attempt, they stumble across the power to slay Arius, the god of war, and replace him with a human puppet. That mission fails however, and they not only pave the path for the seven gods to walk the earth, but create a god of war who is bent on their destruction. He clumsily learns to use his powers and hones them into a powerful weapon to wield against the Mages and their twisted vision of society. In the chaos, a great war ignites and threatens all nations and cultures.

Rommus has no idea that he has become the new god of war. He also has no idea that his companion Alana is responsible for the assassination attempt on his father, the General of the Medoran army. While the Medoran Legions head east to aid the Vindyri in their battle against the oppressive Bhoors, Rommus follows the visions he sees in his dreams, pulling him north towards the Land of the Gods. Along the way they meet a strange man named Vohl who claims to be immortal, and the three of them end up before the golden throne of the great god Oderion. But Rommus refuses to be like the uncaring gods, and quickly makes six very powerful enemies.

In all of this mayhem, the small flames of the old magic roar to mighty infernos; burning some and lighting the way for others. Great beasts now walk the earth again, and the gods themselves have come down to influence the world of man once more. But the new god of war is not interested in their agenda, and instead joins the battle on the Vindyri planes. He fights with all his might for the freedom of mankind, struggling to bring light to the coming darkness.

Read an eBook Week - lots of free ebooks!

This week is Read an Ebook Week and there are a number of authors and publishers making one or more of their ebooks available for free. These range from short stories to full novels to entire libraries, with topics from self-help to fiction to erotica. Something for nearly everyone, if you look around a little.

For your first stop, go by eBookGuru and sign up for the special eBook Week mailing list. They've partnered up with partnered with Champagne Books and will send you a link and passwordd for two books, both in PDF and MOBI format (no DRM, so you can convert to any format from there): Invisible By Kimber Chin and Mis-Staked by J. Morgan.

Zumaya Publications has an entire page of free ebooks. These are all in non-DRM ereader format and are not Kindle compatible without some conversion.

BeWrite Books is giving away a different selection of books every day this week. Be sure to check back there every day; today's selections are all Mysteries, while tomorrow is poetry, etc. Click on the covers on the special promotion page (not on the author info pages) to get to the special zero cost versions of these books. All of the selections will be in PDF format.

Amanda Young has several free reads available on her blog, in PDF format.

There are links to many more at the Read an E-Book Week website.

And, of course, there are the sites that provide a steady source of new and newly formatted ebooks in the public domand and under Creative Commons licenses. These include:

MobileRead
Feedbooks
ManyBooks

Almost free on Kindle: Soul Identity

Soul Identity by Dennis Batchelder is now available for $0.01. This is is $10.20 in paperback and has several reviews, all three stars or above (and enough of them that it probably isn't just the authors friends and family). The premise looks interesting and it's currently the #1 seller in the Technothrillers category at the Kindle Store. For some reason Amazon has set up two links to buy this title, one at the previous sale price of $0.99 and the current penny sale - careful you don't overpay! Today's mystery is: what is the difference between the $0.99 edition and $0.01 edition of this book? The file sizes are different and often that means that there is a difference in covers or one is topaz format and the other mobi (topaz files are often larger, due to the embedded fonts). However, with this book, the more expensive version is 50% longer: 6868 locations instead of 4352 (they end the same). It could be just a formatting difference (on the first page, the chapter heading is left justified on one, right on the other, but otherwise, they seem the same for the first few pages). I've emailed the author and will let you know what I find out. Update - mystery solved, see below.

Synopsis

You can't take it with you...but what if you could? Most people believe their souls outlive their bodies. Most people would find an organization that tracks their souls into the future and passes on their banked money and memories compelling. Scott Waverly isn't like most people. He spends his days finding and fixing computer security holes. And Scott is skeptical of his new client's claim that they have been calculating and tracking soul identities for almost twenty-six hundred years. Are they running a freaky cult? Or a sophisticated con job? Scott needs to save Soul Identity from an insider attack. Along the way, he discovers the importance of the bridges connecting people's lives.

Update

I contacted the author about the two versions and the different file sizes and location counts. I had wondered it perhaps one version was abridged, since there was quite a difference. Seems he checks his email fairly often even on weekends and quickly sent back this reply (reprinted with his permission):

the background: both books were uploaded back in november 2007 from the same
mobipocket creator-produced file. the dollar version is sold directly by
amazon ($0.99 is the least they'll list a book for), and the penny version
is sold through mobipocket.com ($0.01 is their minimum). both companies are
owned by amazon, so they both publish into the kindle market.

i went through the penny and dollar versions, and the words are the same:
all the chapters are in both, and there is no adbridging going on.

so why the location problem? here's what i've noticed: the penny version
shows 9-10 "locations" per page, and the dollar version shows 18-20
"locations" per page. this explains the discrepancy how amazon shows the
size bars.

Dennis Batchelder

So, we know that not only were at least two copies of his book sold today (although he is out a penny one one of them), but that everyone else that grabs up this bargain is getting the full book. I suspect the author makes a few cents more on the Amazon version, but if you enjoy his book, you can always help him out by spreading the word (or buying a print copy for a friend that doesn't yet have a Kindle).

Just we we think we have locations figured out, it seems that they still don't quite mean what we think, if two different mobi versions of the same book can be off so much in the location count. If you've been using location counts to compare the "thickness" of books, much as you would measure the spine size on your bookshelf when deciding what to read next, it seems that they really can't be used in that manner. Since not every book comes with a "page count" (which is often from the paperback or hardback version of the book), we are left without any real method of telling how "big" a book really is.

Kindle iPhone pictures

Here's an example of a graphic on a page - it's in color, but there is no way to zoom in (and the text in the graphic is very, very small - practically impossible to read on the iPhone -- but extremely clear, much more than on the Kindle or Kindle 2). Double click on the photo to get a larger view and you can see that if only the iPhone's screen were as physically large as the Kindle's, that the graphic would be very readable.
And a side-by-side comparison of text and a cover page on all three devices. As you can see, at the same font size, there is more text on both the iPhone and Kindle 2, than on the original Kindle. Again, you can double click to get a larger view of the photo.
On the cover page, you can more clearly see how the differences proportions of the screen from the iPhone to the Kindle affect graphics, forcing them to a smaller size in order to be fully displayed.
I can definitely see using the iPhone Kindle App for quick viewing (and I prefer the iPhone for reading blogs or news web sites), but it's not going to be the one I go to for long reading or curling up with a good book. The backlight may let you read in the dark, but the glare from sunlight means it is unusable outside and that same backlight causes eyestrain, especially in the dark, if used for long periods of time. For those in non-Whispernet areas, however, this opens up the entire world of Kindle samples, basically putting the same bookstore at your fingertips that everyone else has been enjoying. Those outside the US who get the App can get Kindle samples and can purchase books so long as you have met all the other requirements for a regular Kindle, including a US credit card (or a gift card balance) and a US address registered to your account, in order to purchase books, and have a US iTunes account, in order to get the App ). You don't have to purchase the Kindle hardware itself in order to purchase Kindle books; just register your Kindle iPhone app (it's automatic when you log in the first time).

Get the Kindle iPhone app free and be reading your Kindle books on your iPhone within minutes.