Free Book (EPUB) - God Save the Mark

God Save the Mark ($7.19 Kindle), by Donald E. Westlake, is free as a DRM'd EPUB from COPIA tonight. Be sure to report the lower price to Amazon and perhaps the Kindle price will drop, as well.

Book Description
Donald E. Westlake's great comic suspense novel, won MWA's Edgar Award in 1967. Con men descend upon its gullible hero when he comes into a $317,000 inheritance but Fred Fitch, as lovable as he is naive, stumbles to victory. Westlake's earlier novel THE FUGITIVE PIGEON virtually originated the modern comic-suspense genre so brilliantly refined in this later work.

* mark n. An easy victim; a ready subject for the practices of a confidence man, thief, beggar, etc.; a sucker.
-Dictionary of American Slang, Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1960

That's the long definition of a mark. But there's a shorter one. It goes:

* mark n. Fred Fitch

What, you ask, is a Fred Fitch? Well, for one thing, Fred Fitch is the man with the most extensive collection of fake receipts, phony bills of sale, and counterfeit sweepstakes tickets in the Western Hemisphere, and possibly in the entire world. For another thing, Fred Fitch may be the only New York City resident in the twentieth century to buy a money machine. When Barnum said, "There's one born every minute, and two to take him," he didn't know about Fred Fitch; when Fred Fitch was born, there were two million to take him.

Every itinerant grifter, hypester, bunk artist, short-conner, amuser, shearer, short-changer, green-goods worker, pennyweighter, ring dropper, and yentzer to hit New York City considers his trip incomplete until he's also hit Fred Fitch. He's sort of the con-man's version of Go: Pass Fred Fitch, collect two hundred dollars, and move on.

What happens to Fred Fitch when his long-lost Uncle Matt dies and leaves Fred three hundred thousand dollars shouldn't happen to the ball in a pinball machine. Fred Fitch with three hundred thousand dollars is like a mouse with a sack of catnip: He's likely to attract the wrong kind of attention.

Add to this the fact that Uncle Matt was murdered, by person or persons unknown, and that someone now seems determined to murder Fred as well, mix in two daffily charming beauties of totally different types, and you have a perfect setup for the busiest fictional hero since the well-known one-armed paperhanger. As Fred Fitch careers across the New York City landscape-and sometimes skyline-in his meetings with cops, con men, beautiful girls, and (maybe) murderers, he takes on some of the loonier aspects of a Dante without a Virgil. Take one part comedy and one part suspense and shake well-mostly with laughter.

Click HERE to get the free book. Make sure it says Your Price: $0.00 underneath the Buy this Book button, then click and go thru the full checkout process. You'll need an account and their reader software to download the book (but you can load it into Adobe ADE after it is on your PC, to load onto an ereader).

Free Book (nook) - Manage Your Image

Harvard Business Review's OnPoint Executive Edition: Manage Your Image is free from Barnes and Noble today. So far, I don't see it at all in the Kindle store.

Book Description
From the Editors of Harvard Business Review. OnPoint Executive Edition: Manage Your Image is filled with 120 pages of thoughtful and practical advice on how to create and maintain a solid reputation. First impressions count, whether you're spontaneously introducing yourself in an elevator pitch or presenting to a room full of C-level managers. Your reputation- and your organization's success- hinges not only on how people perceive you at first, but also on how they judge you over the long term. This special issue of HBR's OnPoint helps you to learn how to build your image in person, online, and in social media so you will reap the rewards of having a strong and positive reputation.

Click HERE to get the free book from B&N.

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.