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It’s a new year, and if you’re like me you have new gadgets. It’s time to fill them up with content.
Here are 5 free graphic novels from the Kindle Store and iBookstore. All of these titles can be read on the Kindle Fire Android tablets or on the Kindle iPad and Android apps, and some can even be read on the Kindle ereaders. If you don’t have any of those gadgets you can also read these titles in your web browser.
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We live in an amazing world, and as we learn more about the universe the wonders only increase. On Wednesday NASA shared some of those wonders with us in the form of a couple iPad-only ebooks.
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Apparently Google has a problem with its ads being posted on sites that “distribute copyrighted materials.” (Never mind that this should mean they shouldn’t have ads on any sites, given that under the law any material that is created is instantly copyrighted to its creator.) Techdirt’s Mike Masnick posts about technical author Cody Jackson, who decided to give away electronically a book he wrote about the Python programming language as a way to give back to the open source community—which resulted in Google disabling AdSense ads on his site because of this violation of its policy.
Puzzled, Jackson pointed out that he is the author and copyright holder of the work in question, and he had explicitly granted permission for this distribution. No dice, Google said. So he removed the links to torrents on Pirate Bay and Demonoid, even though he felt they were still perfectly legitimate…and Google still refused to reinstate ads on his site, apparently because he had the temerity to mention Pirate Bay and Demonoid—but Google won’t actually explain exactly why.
Every day I find another traditional publisher is offering free ebooks. Amazon has made a business out of offering free ebooks. And let’s not forget the many indie authors who are offering their ebooks for free.
What is this doing to the market for ebooks?
I admit that I may be atypical in my buying and reading habits, but I do not think so. I have watched my to-be-read (TBR) pile grow dramatically in the past couple of months from fewer than 300 ebooks to more than 1,100 ebooks. If I obtained not another ebook until I read everything in my TBR pile, at my current average rate of reading two to three ebooks per week, I have enough reading material for between 367 and 550 weeks or 7 and 10.5 years.
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Amazing Stories magazine, the oldest SF magazine in the world, stopped publishing in 2005. However, it’s coming back in 2012, and in order to build some publicity, as well as satisfy trademark registration requirements, its publisher is offering a free electronic issue of the magazine to all comers.
Steve Davidson writes that the e-zine will be available for purchase on Amazon and other e-book outlets soon, but if you want a free copy you can send him an e-mail, explaining why you think you deserve a free copy in the body of the message. It is currently available as a PDF, with MOBI and EPUB versions coming soon—and all will be DRM-free.
The NYPL is one of the oldest and largest public libraries in the US, and the nice thing about their size and age is that they have an extensive archive of old and rare books, images, and more. Yesterday they announced plans to digitize selections from their image gallery archives and make them available via iBooks. The first title has already been released.
The inaugural issue, Kenn Duncan’s Male Photography, features the photographer’s stunning portraits of male actors of the late 1960s – 1980s, such as Christopher Walken, William Hurt, and Sal Mineo, and is a perfect complement to the Library’s 2008 collaboration on Divas!, which highlighted Duncan’s images of actresses such as Bette Midler, Angela Landsbury, and others.
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Broad-billed Parrot
Project Gutenberg may have long since been surpassed by the Internet Archive and Google Books, but the granddaddy of all digitization programs is still chugging along and uploading more free ebooks.
Today they announced that they’d released their 40 thousandth title. (Of course, this does include some duplicates and withdrawn titles so the count is slightly off.)
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Spambots and other computer generated text is widely considered the bane of the modern web, but that wasn’t always the case. There was a time where when this idea was new and clever, and someone reportedly even used a precursor to today’s spambots to write a book.
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Amazon have just posted another free app for the Kindle. It’s called Grid Detective, and it’s a logic puzzle type of a game.
You start each level with a set of clues. Your goal is to deduce the solution based on the apparently unrelated clues. There are 10 Easy, 10 Moderate, and 10 Hard puzzles in the app, and the easy ones look difficult to me.
On a related note, I’ve also added this app to the page which lists free Kindle apps.
HP sent out another newsletter tonight with a new offer for 4 more free apps. Like the last set of free apps, these are limited in quantity and probably also limited to the US. Also like the last apps, this set has a theme (Learn-Explore-Discover-Play), only this set has a more explicit and better conceived theme.
Hmm. I was looking over the past free app offers, and I noticed that HP appear to be giving away a set of apps every week. Counting the two 6 packs that HP announced on their blog, this is actually the 4th such offer. I wonder if this is going to be a weekly event for HP?
If so, that would be a sign of an ongoing marketing effort which would indicate that HP might be planning to bring back the TouchPad.
BTW, you might want to visit this page from your TouchPad; it would give you the chance to copy&paste the promo codes and that would be the easiest way to enter them.
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