The last two days have had some pretty great deals. Usually the deal of the day is some so-so book from an author you've kind-of think you've heard of. Not so since yesterday! Yesterday they had 25 great books for $1.99 and today they've got fourteen Kurt Vonnegut books for only $1.99! Of the one's available I'd highly recommend Timequake and Galapogos (though you can't really go wrong with any Vonnegut book).
Click the link at the top of the page to check them out!
Showing posts with label Kindle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kindle. Show all posts
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
Sunday, October 14, 2012
In Case You Didn't Get the Email
Depending on how many ebooks you bought, you could be looking at a huge payday of between $3-$15! Woo-Hoo!
via amazon.com
Customer FAQ for Attorneys General E-book Settlements
What are the settlements?Publishers Hachette, Harper Collins, and Simon & Schuster have settled an antitrust lawsuit about e-book prices that was brought by a coalition of state Attorneys General. Amazon is not a party to this lawsuit. Under the proposed settlements, the publishers will provide funds for a credit that will be applied directly to Amazon.com accounts of eligible customers. If the Court approves the settlements, the account credit will appear automatically and can be used to purchase Kindle books or print books. Alternatively, eligible customers may request a check in the amount of the credit by following the instructions included in the formal notice of the settlements. For additional information, please visit www.EbookAGSettlements.com.
Who is eligible for this credit?
If you received an email about the settlements from Amazon, you are eligible for this credit and it will be applied automatically to your account. To be eligible, you must have a U.S. billing address and must have purchased a Kindle book published by Hachette, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin or Macmillan between 4/1/10 and 5/21/12. Customers who returned these books or were refunded their money do not qualify. Residents of Minnesota are also excluded from the settlements. For additional information, please visit www.EbookAGSettlements.com.
I think I'm entitled to a credit but I didn't get an email. How do I check?
We sent emails to eligible customers based on the criteria provided to us by the Attorneys General. All eligible customers will have the credit automatically applied to their accounts. If you have questions about the criteria, please visit www.EbookAGSettlements.com. If you think you made a qualifying purchase but did not receive an email from Amazon, please contact Amazon Customer Service using the Contact Us button on the right side of this page. If you'd like to opt for a check, you may also provide an Order ID from any of your Kindle purchases to the settlement website, www.EbookAGSettlements.com. You will be notified by the settlements administrator appointed by the Court if you are eligible for the check.
I am a resident of Minnesota – why don't I qualify?
We're sorry, but we understand that the Attorney General of Minnesota chose not to participate in the settlements.
When will I receive this credit?
The proposed settlements are still subject to court approval. A hearing on the settlements will be held on February 8, 2013. When the Attorneys General notify us that the settlements are final, we will automatically apply the credit to the accounts of eligible customers and send another email notifying them that the credit is available.
How will I know if the settlements are approved?
If the Court approves the settlements, we will provide an automatic credit to the Amazon accounts of eligible customers. We will then send an email letting them know the credit is available. Eligible customers do not need to do anything to receive the credit.
Did Amazon disclose any of my personal information?
No, Amazon did not and will not disclose any of your personal information. Eligible customers do not need to do anything or give any information to anyone to receive the credit.
What if I bought a qualifying e-book from another retailer?
For questions about other retailers, please visit www.EbookAGSettlements.com.
What is the Settlement ID Number for?
The Settlement ID Number is generated by Amazon and included within the legal notice from the Attorneys General, which we included in the email we sent to eligible customers. The settlement website will require customers to submit that number, along with other information, in order to opt out of the settlements or request a check in lieu of an account credit. Eligible customers do not need to do anything with the Settlement ID Number in order to receive the credit.
I lost my Settlement ID. Can you help me find it?
All eligible customers will automatically get the Amazon credit. You only need the Settlement ID to take a different action on the settlement website, www.EbookAGSettlements.com. If you lost your Settlement ID, please contact Amazon Customer Service using the Contact Us button on the right side of this page.
Where can I find my Settlement ID on my email?
Eligible customers can find the Settlement ID at the very bottom of the email that you received from Amazon. Look for the sentence "Settlement ID Number:"
How much will my credit be?
While we will not know the amount of the credit until the Court approves the settlements, the Attorneys General estimate that it will range from $0.30 to $1.32 for every eligible Kindle book that was purchased between April 2010 and May 2012. For more information, please visit www.EbookAGSettlements.com.
Will this credit expire?
The credits will be valid for one year from the time they become available. Amazon will apply the credits automatically to any Amazon Kindle book or print book purchase.
What if I bought an eligible book but returned it?
We’re sorry, but returns are not eligible for this credit.
Who is funding this credit?
The publishers Hachette, Harper Collins, and Simon & Schuster will fund these credits.
Can I use this credit for non-book purchases?
No, but you can apply this credit toward any Kindle book or print book.
How do I exclude myself from receiving this credit?
For more information, please visit the settlement website: www.EbookAGSettlements.com.
How do I get a check instead of a credit?
For more information, please visit the settlement website: www.EbookAGSettlements.com.
Where can I read more about the settlements?
For more information, please visit the settlement website: www.EbookAGSettlements.com.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Free Book Alert! Connor Westphal #1
Local author and PHBC interview subject (http://pleasanthillbookclub.blogspot.com/2009/07/interview-with-local-authors-penny.html) Penny Warner is releasing he latest book (Dead Body Language) free for download on Amazon.com. The offer is only good for 6/28 and 6/29, so act fast.
Below is a brief description of the novel from Warner's website:
When deaf reporter Connor Westphal moves to the California Gold Country town of Flat Skunk to publish her own weekly newspaper, she doesn't expect a
murder to be her first headline.
But she's discovered a body lying
on top of a grave instead of it in.
With the help of her hearing-ear signal dog, Casper, her TTY telephone, and her ability to see what others only hear, Connor investigates the mysterious death,
while trying to avoid a cemetery plot of her own.
Support your local authors!
Click the link to amazon.com to download the book:
http://www.amazon.com/LANGUAGE-Connor-Westphal-Mystery-ebook/dp/B00865SOFO
For more information on Penny Warner you can visit her website below:
http://www.pennywarner.com/
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
May Book of the Month: A Night of Horrors by John C. Berry
Monday, December 26, 2011
Kindle Deal of the Day
I recently found this and I think anyone who owns a Kindle should know about it (if they don't already).
The Kindle "deal of the day" has a different great book deal each day of the week. Today's deal (7hrs left at the time of post) was 99 cents for The Life of Pi (one of my favorite books).
Click the link below to get it! I'm excited to see what's coming tomorrow!
Kindle Deal of the Day
The Kindle "deal of the day" has a different great book deal each day of the week. Today's deal (7hrs left at the time of post) was 99 cents for The Life of Pi (one of my favorite books).
Click the link below to get it! I'm excited to see what's coming tomorrow!
Kindle Deal of the Day
Monday, December 12, 2011
Kindle (under)Fire
via Yahoo News and The New York Times:
By DAVID STREITFELD
The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users. The most disgruntled are packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer.
A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky.
All the individual grievances — recorded on Amazon’s own Web site — received a measure of confirmation last week when Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert, denounced the Fire, saying it offered “a disappointingly poor” experience. For users whose fingers are not as slender as toothpicks, he warned, the screen could be particularly frustrating to manipulate.
“I feel the Fire is going to be a failure,” Mr. Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said in an interview. “I can’t recommend buying it.”
All this would be enough to send some products directly to the graveyard where the Apple Newton, the Edsel, New Coke and McDonald’s Arch Deluxe languish. But as a range of retailers and tech firms could tell you, it would be foolish to underestimate Amazon.
Amazon sees the Kindle line of devices as critical for its future as a virtual store, and is willing to lose money on the sale of each one for the sake of market share. Once dominance is achieved, it plans to make money on the movies, books and music that users download directly from Amazon.
First, however, it needs to make the devices ubiquitous. Promoting them every day to its tens of millions of customers at the cheapest possible price will surely help. If Apple brought the notion of the tablet into the mainstream, Amazon is making it affordable.
The retailer says the Kindle Fire is the most successful product it has ever introduced, a measure of enthusiasm that reveals nothing; it has not specified how many Fires it has sold, nor how many Kindles it has ever sold. It also says it is building even more Fires to meet the strong demand. But, at the same time, it acknowledges that it is working on improvements.
“In less than two weeks, we’re rolling out an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire,” said Drew Herdener, a company spokesman.
There will be improvements in performance and multitouch navigation, and customers will have the option of editing the list of items that show what they have recently been doing. No more will wives wonder why their husbands were looking at a dating site when they said they were playing Angry Birds.
Amazon declines to say, but soon — probably in the spring — there will be an improved version of the device itself. One more shot is all the retailer will get, Mr. Nielsen said. “If that’s a failure, then the Fire is doomed to the dust pile of history.”
Despite Amazon’s silence on the matter, analysts have been estimating the company will sell from three to five million Fires this quarter. They are neither raising their estimates nor lowering them.
Amazon’s devotion to this product line is such that it has stripped down the original Kindle e-reader, reduced its price and begun to sell it through other retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart for $79, as well as prominently on its Web site. If Amazon had Apple-like margins, analysts estimate that the basic Kindle might cost $180.
According to calculations by the research firm IHS iSuppli, the $79 Kindle costs Amazon $84 to make. That sum does not include research and development, shipping or, with a third-party retailer, the wholesale discount. Add these up, and Amazon might be losing as much as $20 on every $79 Kindle sold at, for example, Best Buy.
For most hardware makers, that would be a recipe for corporate suicide. But once the device is activated in a buyer’s home, the losses stop and the consumption begins.
“What else are you going to do on this Kindle?” asked Andrew Rassweiler, senior director of teardown services at iSuppli. “Nothing. It’s a useless device unless you’re planning on putting books, a lot of books, on it.”
The Fire is trying to do much more than be an e-book reader, a function some say it does not do as well as the original Kindle. Slightly more than a third of the 4,500 reviewers of the Fire on Amazon have given it mixed to negative reviews, three stars or fewer. Of Amazon reviewers of the iPad 2, 22 percent have given three stars or fewer; for the original Kindle, that number is 11 percent. (There are a few caveats. At least some of the iPad reviewers bought not from Apple but from resellers, the real target of their ire. As for the original Kindle, after four years it has both a huge number of reviews — over 34,000 — and the advantage of being a known quantity.)
Many of the initial customers of the Fire seem to have bought it on a mixture of faith and hype. The striking thing even about some of the one-star reviewers is that they are regretful rather than angry. One review, couched as an open letter to Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, began: “I have spent thousands on your outstanding site. I own and love the original kindle. When asked about why I would buy a Fire when I had an ipad, I said that half of me wanted to just support your effort and that I believed amazon just did things right.” The reviewer is now recommending that friends skip lunch to buy an iPad.
Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, has been tracking the opinions as more reviews are posted on Amazon. Since Nov. 18, five-star reviews have fallen slightly, to 47 percent from 50 percent, he says. One-star reviews have held relatively steady at about 13 percent.
“I would have expected things to be even worse at this point,” Mr. Munster said, adding that initial buyers were usually the most critical. Pricing will save the Fire, he predicted. At $199 versus $500 for an iPad, “Amazon has a lot of air cover to have a B-level product.”
Mr. Nielsen, the consultant, disagreed.
The 7-inch Fire does a good job displaying sites optimized for smaller mobile devices, he said, but stumbles when it tries to show pages designed for 10-inch tablets. “Like squeezing a size-10 person into a size-7 suit,” Mr. Nielsen wrote in his report. “Not going to look good.” As for displaying desktop sites, forget it.
It is true that the device is only $199, but so what? “Look at your hand. Is it thin or fat?” he asked. “If it’s fat, you just know it’s going to be bad.”
The device does do one thing well, he said. Shopping on Amazon is a breeze. “If I were given to conspiracy theories, I’d say that Amazon deliberately designed a poor Web browsing user experience to keep Fire users from shopping on competing sites,” Mr. Nielsen said.
By DAVID STREITFELD
The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users. The most disgruntled are packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer.
A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky.
All the individual grievances — recorded on Amazon’s own Web site — received a measure of confirmation last week when Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert, denounced the Fire, saying it offered “a disappointingly poor” experience. For users whose fingers are not as slender as toothpicks, he warned, the screen could be particularly frustrating to manipulate.
“I feel the Fire is going to be a failure,” Mr. Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said in an interview. “I can’t recommend buying it.”
All this would be enough to send some products directly to the graveyard where the Apple Newton, the Edsel, New Coke and McDonald’s Arch Deluxe languish. But as a range of retailers and tech firms could tell you, it would be foolish to underestimate Amazon.
Amazon sees the Kindle line of devices as critical for its future as a virtual store, and is willing to lose money on the sale of each one for the sake of market share. Once dominance is achieved, it plans to make money on the movies, books and music that users download directly from Amazon.
First, however, it needs to make the devices ubiquitous. Promoting them every day to its tens of millions of customers at the cheapest possible price will surely help. If Apple brought the notion of the tablet into the mainstream, Amazon is making it affordable.
The retailer says the Kindle Fire is the most successful product it has ever introduced, a measure of enthusiasm that reveals nothing; it has not specified how many Fires it has sold, nor how many Kindles it has ever sold. It also says it is building even more Fires to meet the strong demand. But, at the same time, it acknowledges that it is working on improvements.
“In less than two weeks, we’re rolling out an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire,” said Drew Herdener, a company spokesman.
There will be improvements in performance and multitouch navigation, and customers will have the option of editing the list of items that show what they have recently been doing. No more will wives wonder why their husbands were looking at a dating site when they said they were playing Angry Birds.
Amazon declines to say, but soon — probably in the spring — there will be an improved version of the device itself. One more shot is all the retailer will get, Mr. Nielsen said. “If that’s a failure, then the Fire is doomed to the dust pile of history.”
Despite Amazon’s silence on the matter, analysts have been estimating the company will sell from three to five million Fires this quarter. They are neither raising their estimates nor lowering them.
Amazon’s devotion to this product line is such that it has stripped down the original Kindle e-reader, reduced its price and begun to sell it through other retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart for $79, as well as prominently on its Web site. If Amazon had Apple-like margins, analysts estimate that the basic Kindle might cost $180.
According to calculations by the research firm IHS iSuppli, the $79 Kindle costs Amazon $84 to make. That sum does not include research and development, shipping or, with a third-party retailer, the wholesale discount. Add these up, and Amazon might be losing as much as $20 on every $79 Kindle sold at, for example, Best Buy.
For most hardware makers, that would be a recipe for corporate suicide. But once the device is activated in a buyer’s home, the losses stop and the consumption begins.
“What else are you going to do on this Kindle?” asked Andrew Rassweiler, senior director of teardown services at iSuppli. “Nothing. It’s a useless device unless you’re planning on putting books, a lot of books, on it.”
The Fire is trying to do much more than be an e-book reader, a function some say it does not do as well as the original Kindle. Slightly more than a third of the 4,500 reviewers of the Fire on Amazon have given it mixed to negative reviews, three stars or fewer. Of Amazon reviewers of the iPad 2, 22 percent have given three stars or fewer; for the original Kindle, that number is 11 percent. (There are a few caveats. At least some of the iPad reviewers bought not from Apple but from resellers, the real target of their ire. As for the original Kindle, after four years it has both a huge number of reviews — over 34,000 — and the advantage of being a known quantity.)
Many of the initial customers of the Fire seem to have bought it on a mixture of faith and hype. The striking thing even about some of the one-star reviewers is that they are regretful rather than angry. One review, couched as an open letter to Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, began: “I have spent thousands on your outstanding site. I own and love the original kindle. When asked about why I would buy a Fire when I had an ipad, I said that half of me wanted to just support your effort and that I believed amazon just did things right.” The reviewer is now recommending that friends skip lunch to buy an iPad.
Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, has been tracking the opinions as more reviews are posted on Amazon. Since Nov. 18, five-star reviews have fallen slightly, to 47 percent from 50 percent, he says. One-star reviews have held relatively steady at about 13 percent.
“I would have expected things to be even worse at this point,” Mr. Munster said, adding that initial buyers were usually the most critical. Pricing will save the Fire, he predicted. At $199 versus $500 for an iPad, “Amazon has a lot of air cover to have a B-level product.”
Mr. Nielsen, the consultant, disagreed.
The 7-inch Fire does a good job displaying sites optimized for smaller mobile devices, he said, but stumbles when it tries to show pages designed for 10-inch tablets. “Like squeezing a size-10 person into a size-7 suit,” Mr. Nielsen wrote in his report. “Not going to look good.” As for displaying desktop sites, forget it.
It is true that the device is only $199, but so what? “Look at your hand. Is it thin or fat?” he asked. “If it’s fat, you just know it’s going to be bad.”
The device does do one thing well, he said. Shopping on Amazon is a breeze. “If I were given to conspiracy theories, I’d say that Amazon deliberately designed a poor Web browsing user experience to keep Fire users from shopping on competing sites,” Mr. Nielsen said.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Kindle Lending Library
Amazon.com has introduced its new 'library' for Kindle owners. Before you sign-up, however, I suggest you read the following article.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/kindle-lending-library/
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/kindle-lending-library/
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
WMc's Summer Book List
Reposted from McMadness.com
I just finished a very disappointing book that was released last month--Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan. It was touted by an author I generally enjoy as the "perfect summer read" on her blog. I am a sucker for perfect summer reads, and I even pre-ordered the book and dug right in as soon as it arrived on my Kindle. It took me nearly a week to finish this book and I was left disappointed. I found the characters mostly lacking positive attributes and I am still wondering about all of the loose ends the author failed to tie up. I am annoyed that a week of summer reading was sacrificed to something so falsely advertised when I could have been spending my precious reading time with something better.
To counter my bitterness, I am posting my own summer reading list, with books that I would classify as "perfect summer reads."
Mammoth Cheese by Sheri Holoman. Exactly what it sounds like. Small town makes giant cheese for a cheese contest and has to transport it to be judged. Well-written and hefty. You will get lost in another world. That is, unless you are a small town dairy-farmer, then it might hit a bit too close to home.
The Dirty Parts of the Bible by Sam Torode. No, this is not Bible porn. It's a whitty adventure story set in 1936 when 19-year-old Tobias is sent from Michigan to Texas to find a bag of money his father, a newly ousted baptist-pastor, hid many years ago as a teenager himself. The characters are complex and fantastic in a way that cannot really be described. I liked this book so much that I emailed the author after reading it. Bonus, it is only $2.99 for the Kindle Edition, although I would gladly pay more for it.
Angry Housewives Eating Bon-Bons by Lorna Landvick. Women's literature at its finest. This book completely enraptures you in its characters while touching on serious issues, spanning generations and having moments of all-out hilariousness.
Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith. Voted best book of the year for 2010 by my book club, which is saying a lot because it had a lot to compete with in 2010, including the book below. Historically accurate with some vampire, it is a great balance of intellect and straight up fluff. And I generally dislike vampire books.
The Hunger Games series by Susan Collins. If you have not already jumped on the bandwagon, please do. You will not regret it. And no, it is nothing like the Twilight series which I could never understand the hype behind. See comment above regarding my general feelings on vampire books.
Books on my summer reading list include (note, the large amount of Young Adult science fiction/adventure is due in large part to the current obsession of the genre by many of my coworkers, whom I get a lot of my book recommendations from. Lawyers reading teenager books en masse. We all get our brain breaks somehow.):
- Switched and the next two books in the Trylle trilogy by Amanda Hocking
- Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winslow
- The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
- Matched by Allie Condie
- Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner (available July 12, 2011)
- Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Ipad
Perhaps its because my bookshelves are beginning to avalanche, but I am really starting to like the idea of the Ipad. What is wrong with me? Anyone with any experience with Kindle or Nook type products care to share some pros and cons?
Monday, July 27, 2009
The Tribe Has Spoken!
In a landslide victory, visitors to this blog have overwhelmingly voted that they would never use or own a Kindle (or something similar). In slight contrast though most of our visitors said they would not be opposed to others using it. I guess any way you can get someone reading is good enough no matter what the medium.
Friday, July 17, 2009
The Kindle: Friend or Foe
Arguments for the Kindle:
1. http://k.indled.com/The-Amazon-Kindle/tag/kindle-criticism/
2. http://collectedmiscellany.com/2008/05/why-i-love-my-kindle/
3. http://pcmike.com/2009/03/13/why-i-love-the-kindle-a-review/
Arguments against the Kindle:
1. http://www.edrants.com/books-for-me-thanks/
2. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/12/why_i_dont_like_amazons_kindle.html
3. http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/books/blog/2009/02/10_reasons_to_hate_the_kindles.html
What do you think? Leave a comment or vote in our poll!
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