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Saturday, August 27, 2011

Today's Deals

Sony books has a 50% off coupon, good thru the weekend, 50OFFTWODAYS, good on one ebook purchase (non-Agency).

Food Inc.: A Participant Guide: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer-And What You Can Do About It ($1.49), by Karl Weber, is today's Kindle Deal of the Day.
Book Description
Food, Inc. is guaranteed to shake up our perceptions of what we eat. This powerful documentary deconstructing the corporate food industry in America was hailed by Entertainment Weekly as “more than a terrific movie—it’s an important movie.” Aided by expert commentators such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, the film poses questions such as: Where has my food come from, and who has processed it? What are the giant agribusinesses and what stake do they have in maintaining the status quo of food production and consumption? How can I feed my family healthy foods affordably?
Expanding on the film’s themes, the book Food, Inc. will answer those questions through a series of challenging essays by leading experts and thinkers. This book will encourage those inspired by the film to learn more about the issues, and act to change the world.

Elizabeth Adler Beach Listens are all $7 ($4.90/member) at Audible. These are in addition to the New Cay/New Deal, which changes later on this morning.
Description
Pick any or all up at $7.00/$4.90 apiece.
  • The Hotel Riviera
  • The House in Amalfi
  • Invitation to Provence
  • It All Began in Monte Carlo
  • Meet Me in Venice
  • One of Those Malibu Nights
  • There's Something about St. Tropez

Friday, August 26, 2011

Bargain Book Roundup

Today's roundup will have links to the Kindle store, but I suspect a few of them will have matching prices elsewhere, such as Barnes & Noble or Kobo. Those that are pre-orders, though, you'll usually have to wait until release day to check.

Promised Land ($0.99), by Robert B. Parker, appears to be a price drop in reaction to a special being run at Copia Books. That means the price could change back at any time or stay that way for weeks. Great price, though, for a good author.
Book Description
Spenser is back. The fourth novel featuring the wisecracking boxer-turned private-detective finds him investigating a marriage in turmoil, a shady business deal, a nefarious loan shark and, of course, a murder. The real charm of the book, however, is Spenser himself, his inimitable wit, his keen grasp of human nature, his love of food and good beer, and his reluctant but capable fists.

Nut, Egg, and Dairy-Free Sweets for the Classroom ($0.99), by Lori Sandler, is a mini-cookbook taken from her larger text, The Divvies Bakery Cookbook: No Nuts. No Eggs. No Dairy. Just Delicious!. It's available now and a second mini-book, Nut, Egg, and Dairy-Free Sweets for Birthdays ($0.99), is available for pre-order. Between the two, they may have all the recipes you need for baking occasions and the total is $11 less than the full book.
Book Description
This mini cookbook is filled with an assortment of delicious recipes from Lori Sandler of DIVVIES BAKERY that are not only perfect for taking to school and sharing with friends but also are free of the four major food allergens – peanuts, tree nuts, dairy, and eggs (all vegan!). What ingredients are left out have been replaced by double dollops of the good and the gooey – like chocolate, oatmeal, and molasses, – making the confections not only safe to eat, but absolutely delicious for everyone, even those without food allergies.

Divvies, an irresistible “fun-foods” company devoted to baking safe-to-eat, tasty treats for people with life-threatening food allergies, has been featured on Good Morning America and The Martha Stewart Show, as well as in the New York Times, New York Post, Gourmet Magazine, Vogue, Everyday with Rachel Ray, Daily Candy, and Urban Baby. All of their products are made in a dedicated facility where no nuts, eggs, milk, or ingredients that may have been exposed to these allergens are allowed in the door.

Soups, Salads, and Sandwiches Your Family Will Love for $5 or Less ($0.99), by Erin Chase, is another mini-cookbook, this one taken from The $5 Dinner Mom Breakfast and Lunch Cookbook: 200 Recipes for Quick, Delicious, and Nourishing Meals That Are Easy on the Budget and a Snap to Prepare.
Book Description
The $5 Dollar Dinner Mom—savings guru, savvy supermarket shopper, and mommy extraordinaire Erin Chase of www.5dollardinners.com —shares favorite recipes for sandwiches, soups, quiches and salads that use her fool proof system for cutting your weekly food budget and putting a healthy and delicious $5 meal on the table for your family. With the help of Erin, you can create delicious meals for less than $5 that are easy and kid-friendly too!

The Six O'Clock Scramble: Dinner in 20 Minutes or Less ($0.99), by Aviva Goldfarb, a mini-cookbook taken from SOS! The Six O'Clock Scramble to the Rescue: Earth-Friendly, Kid-Pleasing Dinners for Busy Families, is available for pre-order.
Book Description
Dinner with kids shouldn’t be a battleground. And it shouldn’t make a martyr out of the parent whose job it is to get it on the table fast, fresh and hot every day at 6 PM. Aviva Goldfarb’s cheerful Scramble system takes the hassle, stress and worry out of mealtime. Now, with The Six O’Clock Scramble: Dinner in 20 Minutes or Less, Goldfarb is taking an extra of-the-moment stress away from meal planning for busy families: concern about the environment, about the cost of shipping out-of-season food halfway around the world, about packaging, about additives and preservatives.

In SOS! The Six O'Clock Scramble to the Rescue, readers will recipes that:
  • help readers eat seasonally without missing their favorite foods
  • move toward a slightly more vegetarian menu for health and a lighter environmental footprint
  • save money through easy, efficient planning, bulk buying, freezing and storing, and avoiding waste
  • and much more!

Executive Lunch ($0.99), the first in the Sedona O'Hala Mystery series from Maria E. Schneider, is marked down to this special price for the weekend, only, if the price lasts that long (she's changing it tomorrow morning and it usually takes a couple of days to update, but could do so at any time after that.
Book Description
Sedona is given the opportunity of a lifetime: play an up-and-coming executive with all the trappings of wealth with someone else footing the bill. The catch: find out who is stealing company funds before the criminals find out that their program is being debugged.

Sedona runs into danger, the corporate glass ceiling, and an occasional chance at romance in her quest to figure out who is stealing money from Strandfrost. Unfortunately, Sedona is better at writing computer code than deciphering political vitriol, and if she doesn’t find a way to wade through the red tape and red herrings, she could lose both her job and her quarry!

Captured by the Highlander ($2.99), by Julianne MacLean, is currently being discounted by Macmillan, to get you hooked on the series before Seduced by the Highlander is released this October.
Book Description
Lady Amelia Sutherland would rather die than surrender to a man like Duncan MacLean. He is the fiercest warrior of his clan—her people’s sworn enemy—and tonight he is standing over her bed. Eyes blazing, muscles taut, and battle axe gleaming, MacLean has come to kill Amelia’s fiancĂ©. But once he sees the lovely, innocent Amelia, he decides to take her instead…

Stealing the young bride-to-be is the perfect revenge against the man who murdered Duncan’s one true love. But Lady Amelia turns out to be more than a pawn of vengeance and war. This brave, beautiful woman touches something deep in Duncan’s soul that is even more powerful than a warrior’s fury. But when Amelia begins to fall in love with her captor—and surrenders in his arms—the real battle begins…

Taken by the Cowboy ($0.99), by Julianne MacLean, looks to be a backlist title from the same author as the one above, but she's self-published it and has it marked way, way down.
Book Description
HERO AND PROTECTOR
Former bounty hunter, expert gunslinger, and the toughest sheriff Dodge City has ever known, Truman Wade is a real man from the tip of his black Stetson right down to his spurs and leather boots. He’s never met his match in a gunfight, but he’s never met a gorgeous, gutsy woman from the twenty-first century either…

TORN BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Newly single after a rocky breakup with her self-absorbed fiancĂ©, newspaper columnist Jessica Delaney crashes her car in a lightning storm and soon finds herself dodging bullets in the Wild West. Before the night is out, she’s tossed in jail for a murder she didn’t commit, and if things don’t seem complicated enough, the impossibly handsome sheriff in charge of her arrest has danger written all over him - and a sexy swagger to die for. Jessica knows she needs to get home, but when Sheriff Wade’s enticing touch sets her passions on fire, she begins to wonder if fate has other plans for her, and soon she must choose between the life she longs for in the future… and the greatest love she’s ever known.

The Samurai's Wife ($2.99), the fifth in the Sano Ichiro Mysteries series by Laura Joh Rowland, is being discounted by Macmillan. Sure enough, a bit of poking around found a new title in the series, The Ronin's Mistress:, to be released in September.
Book Description
Far from the Shogun's court at Edo, Most Honorable Investigator Sano Ichiro begins the most challenging case of his career. Upon the insistence of his strong-willed and beautiful wife Reiko, Sano arrives with her at the emperor's palace to unmask the murderer--who possesses the secret of kiai, "the spirit city," a powerful scream that can kill instantly. A high Kyoto official is the victim. Treading carefully through a web of spies, political intrigue, forbidden passions, and intricate plots, Sano and Reiko must struggle to stay ahead of the palace storm--and outwit a cunning killer. But as they soon discover, solving the case means more than their survival. For if they fail, Japan could be consumed in the bloodiest war it has ever seen...

A legendary land comes alive in this compelling murder mystery set in seventeenth-century Japan. Filled with finely drawn characters and suspenseful plot twists, The Samurai's Wife is a novel as complex, vivid, and artful as the glorious, lost world it portrays.

Dying Bites ($2.99), the first in the Bloodhound Files series by DD Barant, is being discounted to get you ready for the upcoming volume Better Off Undead (which, so far, can only be pre-ordered in a paper edition). It has good reviews and looks like my kind of book, so I've sent a sample to my Kindle, already.
Book Description
Her job description is the “tracking and apprehension of mentally-fractured killers.” What this really means in FBI profiler Jace Valchek’s brave new world—one in which only one percent of the population is human—is that a woman’s work is never done. And real is getting stranger every day…

Jace has been ripped from her reality by David Cassius, the vampire head of the NSA. He knows that she’s the best there in the business, and David needs her help in solving a series of gruesome murders of vampires and werewolves. David’s world—one that also includes lycanthropes and golems—is one with little knowledge of mental illness. An insane serial killer is a threat the NSA has no experience with. But Jace does. Stranded in a reality where Bela Lugosi is a bigger box office draw than Bruce Willis and every full moon is Mardi Gras, Jace must now hunt down a fellow human before he brings the entire planet to the brink of madness. Or she may never see her own world again…

Winter and Night ($2.99), by S. J. Rozan, is one I've already bought (the sample definitely had me hooked).
Book Description
From the critically acclaimed, award-winning S. J. Rozan comes her finest novel to date - an explosive novel about the corrosive power of secrets and corruption in a small town.

In the middle of the night, private investigator Bill Smith is awakened by a call from the NYPD. They're holding a 15-year-old kid named Gary -- a kid Bill knows. But before Bill can find out what is going on, Gary escapes Bill's custody into the dark night and unfamiliar streets. Bill, with the help of his partner Lydia Chin, tries to find the missing teen and uncover what it is that led him so far from home. Tracking Gary's family to a small town in New Jersey, Bill finds himself in a town where nothing matters but high school football, where the secrets of the past - both the town's and Bill's own - threaten to destroy the present. And if Bill is to have any chance of saving Gary and preventing a tragedy, he has to both unravel a long buried crime and confront the darkness of his own past.

Borrowed Time and Blind Faith (both $0.99), by USA Today Bestseller CJ Lyons, are both marked down for a limited time (although I don't see an end date specified).
Borrowed Time
Pittsburgh Police Officer Kate O'Hern is on the trail of a killer targeting cops. Only problem, he's already killed her once...

Trauma surgeon Joshua Lightner saved Kate's life, only to have her awaken suffering from an unexpected side effect: visons of other people's deaths. As a doctor, he refuses to believe in "psychic mumbo-jumbo" but as a man, he can't deny his feelings for Kate.

When the killer targets them both, are they living on BORROWED TIME?


Blind Faith
When her husband and son are murdered, she thought she'd lost it all. But for Sarah Durandt the nightmare is just beginning...

Sarah has just witnessed the execution of the man who confessed to killing her husband and son, among others. She leaves with no closure as the killer has refused her repeated requests to reveal the site of her family's graves. Sarah returns home to her small town of Hopewell in the Adirondacks Mountains and vows to search until she finds Sam and Josh.

Her hunt leads her to a trail of lies and unearths a new killer. In a race to save everything she holds dear, Sarah is forced to place her faith in the man who betrayed her...her husband.

Today's Deals

Kobo has a few new coupon codes for non-Agency titles: aug25ca1, aug25us1, aug25au1 and aug25row1 ($1.00 off, each) and Borders20 and save20offer (20% off). All are one-time use only. It looks like the Georgette Heyer books are still $1.99 there, which means you can pick several of them up for 99 cents each, using these coupon codes.

Wonder EBooks has a 40% off discount code for the rest of the month, MURDER40OFF, on their mystery and science fiction titles. I haven't shopped there and it's all vintage titles, so I don't know if there is DRM (or if it's all public domain stuff you can get elsewhere).

Elizabeth Street ($1.99), by Laurie Fabiano, is today's Kindle Deal of the Day.
Book Description
Based on true events, ELIZABETH STREET is a multigenerational saga that opens in an Italian village in the 1900's, and crosses the ocean to New York's Lower East Side. At the heart of the novel is Giovanna, whose family is targeted by the notorious Black Hand -the precursor to the Mafia. Elizabeth Street brings to light a period in history when Italian immigrant neighborhoods lived in fear of Black Hand extortion and violence-a reality that defies the romanticized depiction of the Mafia. Here, the author reveals the merciless terror of the Black Hand-and the impact their crimes had on her family. Giovanna is based on Fabiano's great-grandmother, and the book's heroes and villains - such as Lieutenant Petrosino, the crusading cop and "Lupo the Wolf," a cold-blooded criminal - are drawn from real life in this thrilling tale. While set in a dynamic historical context, Elizabeth Street is, above all, the dramatic story of the heroine, Giovanna, and how she triumphed over tragedy.

The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream, by Paulo Coelho, narrated by Jeremy Irons, is today's $7.95 audiobook at Audible.
Book Description
Paulo Coelho's enchanting novel has inspired a devoted following around the world. This story, dazzling in its simplicity and wisdom, is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, a man who calls himself king, and an Alchemist, all of whom point Santiago in the direction of his quest. No one knows what the treasure is, or if Santiago will be able to surmount the obstacles along the way But what starts out as a journey to find worldly goods turns into a meditation on the treasures found within. Lush, evocative, and deeply humane, the story of Santiago is art eternal testament to the transforming power of our dreams and the importance of listening to our hearts.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Today's Deals

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void ($8.24 Kindle), by Mary Roach, narrated by Sandra Burr, is today's $7.95 book at Audible. If you watch Eureka and saw the recent episode about the isolation chamber and the origami cranes, you'll find out how that is a mere shadow of the actual candidate selection process in Japan, amongst other behind-the-scenes trivia (Canada? They practice high altitude jumps from a burning space capsule, while China disqualifies candidates with bad breath).
Book Description
“America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post) returns to explore the irresistibly strange universe of life without gravity in this New York Times bestseller.

Space is a world devoid of the things we need to live and thrive: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much can a person give up? How much weirdness can they take? What happens to you when you can’t walk for a year? have sex? smell flowers? What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a space walk? Is it possible for the human body to survive a bailout at 17,000 miles per hour? To answer these questions, space agencies set up all manner of quizzical and startlingly bizarre space simulations. As Mary Roach discovers, it’s possible to preview space without ever leaving Earth. From the space shuttle training toilet to a crash test of NASA’s new space capsule (cadaver filling in for astronaut), Roach takes us on a surreally entertaining trip into the science of life in space and space on Earth.
If you are not an Audible member, you might be interested in the two-book trial membership that has joined the ads on my KSO today. It isn't a KSO offer, though, as it is open to anyone with an Amazon account (making today perhaps the first without two new offers on the 4-day schedule that Amazon has been following). You tie together your Audible and Amazon logins, so that your Audible books can be seen in the archives on any WiFi enabled Kindle (and sent to one directly from your Audible library, as well, eliminating the need to find the USB cable). With the trial, you can get your two books and participate in the New Day, New Deal sale this month and still cancel before the trial is over, with no additional charges or obligation.

Fine print: This offer is available only to new customers who have never joined an AudibleListener membership plan, or who have never participated in a free trial or handheld device offer.

Water for Elephants ($2.99), by Sara Gruen, is today's Kindle Deal of the Day.
Book Description
An atmospheric, gritty, and compelling novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932, by the bestselling author of Riding Lessons.

When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, drifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her.

Beautifully written, Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford.

Save $20 on coffee & tea essentials (KSO)

This offer is only for those with a Kindle with Special Offers:

Save $20 on a $50 purchase of coffee & tea essentials at Amazon.com

Click on offer, then click on the link on the offer page to receive an email with the promotion code. Sign-up for this offer expires on August 28.

You'll get an email (right away), a link to the Special Offer page and a promotion code to enter at checkout. Once you have the promotional code, you have until September 28 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).

This offer can be used more than once per account, so long as you have more than one KSO registered. Just click on the ad on each device to receive the individual promotion codes via email.

When I first saw this offer, I first thought "ooh, we can always use more coffee", then I saw the word "essentials". My next thought - "how did Amazon know we were talking about getting a new, glass French Press?' Alas, neither is on this sale. Instead, there are dozens of items, from gorgeous to whimsical: coffee servers (some porcelain, some silver and goofy red tower that includes the cups), tea pots, cups, thermoses, travel mugs, cream and sugar sets, glassware and a lot of stuff that isn't "coffee" related, at all - cake stands, serving platters, knife sets, cutting boards, etc. There is one french press, but it's a travel mug version (and I actually have one of those, already). I don't doubt I'll find a few things there I might like; for those starting out, though, there are several essentials that would work well, so be sure to check out the list if you have any graduation or newlywed gifts on the horizon. I noticed a few of the items also qualify for a 4-for-3 promotion, so you may be able to double up on that with this offer, as well (I saw one Tea For One Set (a pot/cup single serving combo) on this offer, for example, that worked out to getting four of the item for the cost of about 2; or you could get three of them and the discount and pick any item on the 4-for-3 promotion as the "free" item).