Do you love to read?
Do you love your iPad? (Or iPhone or iPod Touch? I'll keep saying "iPad" most of the time in these posts just to keep it simple, but most of the time you can just insert the name of your iDevice as you continue reading here.)
I do, on both counts.
Well, there's great news for us. Apple, Amazon, and a growing number of other ebook venues have our backs. The result for us could be a match made in Reading Heaven. And although there's a lot to be said for the Kindle and iBooks Apps, they are just the tips of the two-tipped iceberg when it comes to our reading choices.
Among the many terrific features of the iPad as an ebook reader is the fact that it allows you to grab free or paid content from numerous sources on the web and read it right on your iPad screen without any extra steps for file conversion, USB cable connections, etc. For some authors and publishers the free content may lead to paid transactions involving their other offerings; in other cases the texts are simply offered freely or are in the public domain.
Over the next few days we'll focus briefly on -- and provide the steps you need to take advantage of -- several approaches to getting great free reading content on your iPad. Many of these will also work well on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
The bottom line for us is that the iPad can be the gateway to millions of free books and other free reading content. (By the way, I hope you'll allow iPad Nation Daily to be your guide with tips, suggestions, and alerts for free and bargain content, and perhaps even consider a subscription if you also happen to own a Kindle. Subscriptions in the Kindle Store begin with a free 14-day trial
, and if you continue after 14 days I'm pretty confident we can save you far more than the monthly subscription cost.)So let's get started today with Google Books, which according to Google allows you access to over 10 million books and magazines from commercially available releases to books scanned from the world's libraries.
Just to keep it simple, we'll focus on Lois Stiles Edgerly's Give Her This Day: A Daybook of Women's Words, newly re-issued in Google Books' free digital edition or available on Amazon.com, at prices that range all the way from a penny to $29.85, in its original 1990 Tilbury House Publishing hardcover and paperback editions
. (In case you had any doubts about the value of literary pedigree, I happen to know of Edgerly's work because her young son Len is the remarkable creative force behind The Reading Edge Podcast: Conversations About the eBook Revolution, other podcasts, blogs, and publications poetic and personal, and along with co-founder Ken Clark, the eBooks for Troops initiative.)
You can start reading Give Her This Day: A Daybook of Women's Words on your iPad within seconds. Just click on this link and then, when the title's Google Books page comes up with a display similar to that shown in the screenshot below, click on the blue "Read this book" button.
My favorite angle of exploratory approach involves the Advanced Book Search that's visible at the upper-right corner of the above screenshot. Experiment and organize your searches in any way you please to focus on millions of books or thousands of magazines, and be aware -- although there are bound to be some glitches along the way -- that you can limit your search to free content by selecting the "Full View Only" option.
Happy iReading! And here, just so you don't lose touch with them, are today's free promotional book listings from the Kindle Store:
- "Free" in the Kindle Store refers, for now, to the price for download to US-based Kindles. Amazon adds charges for Kindles based beyond US borders.
- Originally posted to the iReader 4.13.2010.
- Click here (or type "ipad nation" in your Kindle's Kindle Store search field) to have Free Book Alerts pushed directly to your Kindle 24/7 with a 14-day free trial to the Kindle edition of Pad Nation Daily in the Kindle Store
- Click here to see recent iPad Nation Daily Free Book Alerts.
Bite Me. There, I've said it.
And the reason I've said it is that it is the title of the latest free offering in the Kindle Store, a teen novel whose protagonist Val Shapiro "is just your ordinary, part-demon, teenaged vampire hunter with a Texas drawl." And it should be no surprise that the author, whose parents may or may not have named her Parker Blue, has a sequel, Try Me, for sale for $9.99 in the Kindle Store.
Aside to parents who wonder if the you should somehow content-block a book entitled Bite Me from your teens: sorry, but get over it. As the very proud dad of two daughters who have turned out wonderfully, I learned a long time ago that (1) you'll lose the war if you try to win a lot of battles by trying to draw pre-emptive lines too restrictively in the sand; and (2) if you think you are protecting your 14-year old from anything real by keeping her nose out of books like Bite Me, chances are good that you have a lot to learn about what's really going on in her life.
If you also own a Kindle, the best way to find out about these free listings right away, when they occur, is to subscribe to the Kindle edition of iPad Nation Daily
, which pushes iPad Nation Daily Free Book Alerts directly to your Kindle Home screen 24/7. And in the case of many free listings that disappear within a matter of hours or days, "right away" is often just in time. No Kindle Required: Whether you are a long-time Kindle owner or you've just acquired an iPad and are filling it with ebooks for the first time or you are reading Kindle books on a PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPhone or iPad Touch, you can get any and all of these titles absolutely free on your Kindle-compatible device of choice! Click here to download a free Kindle App for your device
.
Bite Me by Parker Blue
Great to see this blog! I've an enhanced book app of short stories for iPhone + iPad.
ReplyDeletehttp://bit.ly/dtmApZ
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