Amazon says it will post each day’s deal on its Twitter stream (@amazonkindle), and “frequently” on its Kindle Daily Post blog, but it does’t provide an RSS feed specifically for the daily deal. (Both the Twitter account and blog are used for all sorts of announcements.) Fortunately a Booksprung reader has created a simple one using page2rss that will attempt to syndicate the actual Kindle Daily Deal page each day. You can try it out at—

For future reference, or in case the Pipes version doesn’t work properly in the future, here’s the original link:

http://page2rss.com/page?url=www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000677541

[Thanks to Jordi!]

I’ve checked out the fine print and I don’t see any hidden gotchas, other than that the $100 code has to be used within 90 days, and if you cancel your Audible membership after the first month, you’ll have to pay for the remainder of the 12-month membership. (You can cancel within the first month without incurring the penalty, but you’ll have to go ahead and pay $14.95 if you’ve already used your first credit, and you’ll have to give up the code of course.) You also have to be a new Audible member to take advantage of this offer, or at minimum you can’t have signed up within the past 24 months. I couldn’t find details on which countries are eligible for the offer, so you’ll have to contact Amazon or Audible to ask.

Frankly I agree with the online chatter that right now is probably a bad time to buy a new Kindle, since it’s likely that a newer model will be announced very soon. The Audible offer is good until the end of January 2012, but the fine print says the $100 code has to be used within 90 days of receiving it, so you might want to bookmark this page and come back once Amazon reveals pricing and availability on the next Kindle model.

Finally, let me make it clear that this isn’t an advertisement—no one is paying me anything and I won’t get any kickbacks. I’m writing about this deal because I think it’s a good one, if you already want to buy a Kindle and want to join Audible. (It was an easy choice for my mother, for example, since she loves audiobooks.) I’m also writing about it because I’ve noticed that even though the offer is valid until January 31, 2012, it’s all but disappeared from the Amazon site, at least for me. (I realize everyone sees a custom version of Amazon based on purchase patterns). So this is my attempt to publicize it a little more.

Update: Wow, I have a terrible memory. It looks like I wrote a very similar post (with almost the exact same headline!) eighteen months ago, when the offer was first announced. Ah well, it’s still a good deal…

But what this long-running genre magazine is doing is far more interesting than just blindly throwing out freebies as a marketing campagin. This is the first print periodical I’ve seen to try out a true freemium model, similar to services like Dropbox or Evernote. In a lot of ways this is similar to how online newspapers and magazines use paywalls to attract both readers and paying customers—in this case, F&SF will offer all of its nonfiction and news elements for free, plus one story out of each issue, and charge of the remaining fiction pieces.

Another way of looking at this is the magazine is adopting an email list newsletter model to sell more copies. Each issue, everyone on that “email list”—meaning everyone subscribed to the free version—will receive a content-packed free issue that will remind readers to think about upgrading to a paid subscription.

I’ll be curious to see how it works out, and whether it will lead to other problems like devaluing the perceived worth of the magazine’s nonfiction content. Already paidContent has noticed one issue with customer service, although it’s largely Amazon’s fault. Because every Kindle subscription comes with a free 14-day trial period, some customers were getting confused by the free vs. paid versions and thinking that this was a trick—that after two weeks, the free version would automatically switch to paid. It’s the sort of customer hand-holding that Amazon normally does well, but in this case Amazon’s own platform has undermined the experiment by generating a lot of unjustified negative customer reviews.

You can view the special offer on the Amazon Store if you’re interested.

Of course, it’s also a good way for Amazon to remain relevant in the device war this summer, after being upstaged pretty dramatically by both the Nook and Kobo touchscreen readers. The one thing a $139 Kindle 3G has over either of those newer, sexier models is, well, free 3G connectivity. (They both offer Wi-Fi only.)

As to what AT&T’s sponsorship entails, Amazon’s press release offers no details, although I’m guessing you’re going to be seeing a lot of targeted ads for AT&T services on your Kindle. Probably not anything about AT&T’s iPad 3G plan, though.

Enough jibber jabber! I have firework accidents to get into and film for YouTube! Here’s the deal—and it’s not a bad one if you’re a heavy reader of sci-fi and fantasy books, and you like what Angry Robot has to offer:

…for £69, you get every new release for the next twelve months, which AR promises will consist of at minimum 24 titles. For books that are part of a series, subscribers will be able to purchase the earlier titles at a 30% discount (although the discount is only good for one use, apparently).

The titles are in EPUB format but since there’s no DRM, you can easily convert them to a Kindle-friendly format if necessary.

If you’re curious about it, you’re in luck. The audiobook version—which is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, who I think we can all agree is the Hollywood talent to turn to when you need the word “fuck” said with verve and forcefulness (e.g. “Snakes on a Plane”)—is free from Amazon’s audiobook company Audible for a limited time. The Kindle version is $4.79, and the hardcover is just over $8 right now.

One nice touch, and why I’m mentioning the offer in the first place: Audible will wirelessly deliver the file directly to your Kindle via Wi-Fi if you like.

I found out about the offer through literary agent Janet Reid’s blog. Reid made her purchases from a local bookstore and reported back that the process is unnecessarily complicated, with each store bringing a different level of online competence to the transaction. I foolishly tried it out myself after reading her post, and I think she’s being too polite; I was stunned at how awful the purchasing experience was. I think Google is more to blame than any of the booksellers, though, because of how clumsily it integrates its Google Books service with each store.

But before I show you how it went down, let’s look at the good news here. These are the lowest prices you’ll find for these books. I chose three titles at random from Unbridled’s list and looked up their prices on the Kindle, Nook and Kobo stores, and here’s what they’re currently going for:

So it’s clear that 25 cents is a pretty good deal.

Unfortunately, while the price is terrific, the actual process of purchasing the books is almost comically painful, especially when compared to how seamlessly you can buy music, apps, ebooks, subscriptions, and basically anything else online these days from other vendors.

Here. I took screenshots of every screen that I had to go through to buy two ebooks from one of the participating booksellers:

At this point, you can either log in to this new account you suddenly have with this particular bookseller, or you can say to hell with this, as I did, and just go over to the ebooks section of Google Books and find your purchases there. Either way, you’ll then be able to read your new ebooks online or download EPUB versions that are locked with Adobe Digital Editions, which should work on both Nook and Sony Reader—right after you’ve authorized it through ADE on your desktop, sigh.

If you choose to read it in your web browser, at least Google has made sure that the experience is fairly pleasant:

So that’s what you have to do to get these discount ebooks. If you want to give it a shot yourself, then the easiest way to proceed is to look at this list of available titles at Unbridled Books, then jump directly to Google Books, bypassing any indie bookseller, and buy the ebooks from Google. Of course, that shuts your local bookstore out of yet another transaction, so if you don’t mind the extra hoop jumping you can do this instead:

1. Choose a local indie bookstore from this list of stores that sell Google Ebooks. (You don’t have to choose a local store, but it’s probably a nice thing if you do.)
2. Visit the store’s website. If you’re lucky, the store you picked was thoughtful enough to promote the 25-cent sale on its home page. (See WORD and Greenlight for good examples.) If you chose badly, you won’t see any mention of the sale and will have to search for the titles yourself—or just hit your back button and try another store on the list until you find one that’s easier to shop from.
3. Take a deep breath and get ready to run the checkout gauntlet as shown above. Be brave!

Either way, good luck. Imagine how much more you’ll enjoy reading something that you had to hunt down and kill yourself, the way people had to do it back before all this one-click-purchase nonsense made us all fat and lazy.

Note: The downloadable versions won’t work on the Kindle.

We all know that there are always bargain-priced ebooks on the Kindle store, so why did Amazon bother creating a special promotion that ends on June 15th? It’s actually not about customers so much as smaller publishers, notes paidContent.org. The promotion is being run in collaboration with small and mid-size publishers that don’t use agency pricing, and that in fact don’t usually experiment with pricing much at all. This is Amazon’s way of getting these publishers to loosen up a little and experiment with marketing their titles to consumers.

That means that unlike the typical brick and mortar bargain shelf selection, these titles aren’t necessarily unlovable or unwanted, and you can probably find something you like regardless of your tastes if you’re willing to dig through a few pages of listings.

Sunshine Deals [Amazon.com] ]]> http://booksprung.com/amazons-two-week-sunshine-deals-sale-has-a-little-of-everything/feed 0 http://booksprung.com/kobos-summer-reading-challenge-read-books-help-charitable-organizations http://booksprung.com/kobos-summer-reading-challenge-read-books-help-charitable-organizations#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:41:58 +0000 Chris Walters http://booksprung.com/?p=6546 Did you ever participate in a summer reading program when you were a kid, where you attempted to reach a goal of n books or pages before the end of August? Do you miss that sort of thing? If so, Kobo has just the program for you.

Their “One Trillion Minute Challenge”, which launched last week, is designed to turn your daily reading efforts into something vaguely rewarding for some organization nearby. I’m not kidding about the vague part; I can’t find any sort of fine print that explains exactly how Kobo intends to choose what awards to give to which charities, but here’s the gist of it from the press release:

For every 10 million-minutes read, Kobo will make a contribution of eReading valued between $1,000 and $20,000 to a recipient chosen through the Read On program. Recipients will receive Read On kits including eReaders, eBooks, and the materials needed to start digital reading programs in their community. Kobo is contributing the first million dollars and will work to enlist additional partners inspired by this innovative new program.

In an article for the National Post, Kobo’s CEO Michael Serbinis gives a little more info:

The Read On program is international and Serbinis said Kobo will work to ensure that not all the donation packages end up in one area. But, banding together to support one cause could help your chances, he said, adding that if a large portion of the overall minutes-read comes from a group supporting one cause, that would be a factor in their decision.

Basically, you sign up, nominate a charity candidate, then start reading ebooks using one of Kobo’s Reading Life ebook apps. Your reading time will be logged by the app and reported back to Kobo.

This is just the latest in Kobo’s strategy to incorporate game mechanics into everyday reading. When it comes to gamification, Kobo has been way ahead of every other bookseller or device maker in 2011. I wrote earlier this year that I thought Kobo’s Reading Life ebook app for the iPad was the best ebook app I’d ever seen, and since then it’s been extended to other Apple devices as well as Android devices. The major appeal of Reading Life is the more you read, the more badges you earn, which sounds useless (it is) but is also oddly satisfying. Other more practical features include streamlined ways to share passages on Facebook and Twitter, and a dashboard of stats and charts to measure your reading habits.

This trillion minute challenge may or may not pan out as Kobo has described it, but if you enjoy reading towards a specific goal, it’s an easy option.

Well, “new” isn’t quite right. These are either classics, like E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India,” or books that went on to become classic movies, like James Leo Herlihy’s “Midnight Cowboy” and Charles Webb’s “The Graduate.”

The remaining two titles might not sound as familiar, but W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe” became “Field of Dreams,” and Peter Bryant’s “Red Alert” was the basis for “Dr. Strangelove.”

All five books are temporarily being offered for free from RosettaBooks on the Kindle store, although it looks like they’re only being made available to U.S. customers due to SRI (stupid rights issues).

Fun ebook history trivia!

(This is about the publishing industry, not about bargain books.)

RosettaBooks actually plays a huge role in the burgeoning ebook industry. It was founded in 2001 by the owner of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and it made deals with authors whose existing contracts with publishers didn’t include e-rights. It was sort of the same business plan Wylie Agency started last year with its Odyssey Editions company.

Random House immediately sued RosettaBooks and sought to prevent the company from publishing digital editions of the printed titles it controlled, but it lost, and lost an appeal as well. Eventually Random House was forced to work out a deal with RosettaBooks with respect to the titles in question. Random House also worked out a deal with the Wylie Agency last year over the Odyssey Editions titles, presumably because it knew from experience that another lawsuit was probably pointless.

(Photo: The Graduate, 1967)