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A Tip for Kindle Owners with Access to an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch: Thousands of Free, High Quality Audiobook Readings

I know I’ve posted before about great sources of read-aloud books that will play on your Kindle, and there’s an entire chapter on this in my bestselling book, The Complete User’s Guide To the Amazing Amazon Kindle 2: Tips, Tricks, & Links To Unlock Cool Features & Save You Hundreds on Kindle Content, but I just posted about another great service for the first time over at our sister site iPad Nation Daily: Enjoying eBooks with iPad, iPhone, or Touch, and I wanted to share the link with Kindle Nation citizens right away.

The bottom line: Audiobooks has a great app runs anywhere from free to 99 cents for folks who have access to an iPad, an iPhone, or an iPod Touch.

For more information about its user-friendly features and easy access to over 3,000 free classics in over a dozen language, presented by talented readers, check out this post:

iPad Nation Daily Free Books Alert for Thursday, April 22: A High-Quality Audiobooks App and Thousands of Free Books Read Aloud to You on Your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch

Enjoy!

Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alert for Friday, April 23: The Scent of Shadows, Free with Bonus Material (A HarperCollins Pre-Order) by Vicki Pettersson, and Dozens More

Here’s the latest free listing in the Kindle Store as of Friday, April 23 – a pre-order from HarperCollins!


(Kindle Edition, Pre-Order) 

by Sandra Felton
4.5 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
by Leslie Parrott
(-) Free Books for Your Kindle (updated twice daily)
Saving Sailor: A Novel

An AmazonEncore Publication Gets Reviewed by USA Today

Here’s yet another sign of how far Amazon has come in the past few months as a book publisher: one of the new AmazonEncore titles that we mentioned here a while back has just scored a full-scale book review from USA Today:

By Francine Thomas Howard 
AmazonEncore, 276 pp., $19.95

“It’s a story as suspenseful as it is rich in detail about the evolving relationships between blacks and whites and men and women in the rural south,” says USA Today reviewer Carol Memmott. With an average rating of 4.6 stars from 19 Amazon customer reviewers, Page from a Tennessee Journal is currently #73 on the Kindle Store’s Literary Fiction bestseller list and is also selling reasonably well in hardcover.

Although USA Today was among the first keepers of book bestseller lists to factor Kindle sales into its rankings, this particular review points readers to the hardcover edition (discounted from $19.95 to $13.57 by Amazon) rather than the $7.99 Kindle edition, which can be read on the Kindle or, with a free Kindle app, on a PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, or iPod Touch. Both editions were released on March 16 of this year.

Amazon Poised for Earnings Report, and Why It Matters to Kindle Customers

By Stephen Windwalker

Any company’s profitability and share-price performance can be significant in a variety of ways for people who are invested either in those shares, or in the company’s most important product, or both. For those of us in Kindle Nation, Amazon’s corporate viability is especially important because the long-term value of our ownership of Kindle hardware and Kindle content is based in part on assumptions that the company will continue to support the hardware, the Kindle store and apps, and the “cloud” in which our archived content is maintained.

So, it’s probably worth mentioning here that Amazon will report its quarterly earnings for the first quarter of 2010 as the stock markets close at around 4 p.m. ET today, with a webcast conference call to follow about an hour later. Here are links for each event:

In early trading at the opening of the markets today, Amazon’s shares are offered at just over $147, double their 52-week low and within a whisker of their all-time high.

In the first quarter of 2009 Amazon’s earnings were 41 cents a share on revenue of $4.89 billion, and the company’s recent guidance for the quarter to be reported today called for revenue of $6.45 to $7 billion. “Market consensus” calls for first-quarter 2010 earnings of 51 to 76 cents per share on revenue of $6.56 to $7 billion.

Disclosure: My household has a minor long position in AMZN stock, valued currently at about $235 million less than the value, at the time, of Amazon shares that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sold in mid-February.

Love, Sex, and Freedom on the Kindle

Kindle Nation is a pluralistic society, and it very likely that there will be little consensus among our citizenry as to whether or not we should be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the FDA’s approval of the birth control pill for contraceptive use. (Given the fact that our Kindle Nation citizen surveys have revealed that Boomers make up a very large percentage of Kindle owners, it’s entirely possible that the news of this anniversary will simply make many of us feel a little older.)


But Time Magazine and Amazon are apparently celebrating the anniversary with the roll-out of a Kindle exclusive e-book Love, Sex, Freedom and the Paradox of the Pill: A Brief History of Birth Control, newly available today for $5.59 in the Kindle Store:

As iPadMania continues, Amazon’s business strategy continues to involve making sure that the Kindle for iPad App — like its other apps for the iPhone, the iPod Touch, the BlackBerry, the PC, the Mac, and the Kindle itself — offers access to a much larger selection including lots of exclusive content. 

Here’s the guts of Amazon’s news release this morning:


TIME Magazine’s ‘Love, Sex, Freedom and the Paradox of the Pill: A Brief History of Birth Control’ Now Available Exclusively in the Kindle Store
 
An exclusive e-book about the history of the birth control pill–published to coincide with TIME magazine’s issue covering the 50th anniversary of the pill–now available in the Kindle Store for download in under 60 seconds
 

SEATTLE, Apr 22, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) –Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that TIME magazine has released the short e-book by the magazine’s executive editor, Nancy Gibbs, “Love, Sex, Freedom and the Paradox of the Pill,” exclusively in the Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore). The e-book is being published to coincide with TIME magazine’s May 3 issue commemorating the 50th anniversary of the FDA’s approval of the birth control pill for contraceptive use. It will be exclusive to the Kindle Store for one year.

Customers can download this book from the Kindle Store for $5.59, and can read it on their Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and iPad.

The Kindle Store now includes over 500,000 books and the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read, including New York TimesBestsellersand New Releases. Over 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle, including titles such as “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “Treasure Island.”

“We’re happy to be able to offer our customers this exclusive e-book from TIME magazine’s executive editor, Nancy Gibbs, in the Kindle Store,” said Melissa Kirmayer, Director, Kindle Content. “Timed to the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill, ‘Love, Sex, Freedom and the Paradox of the Pill’ is a timely and important addition to the Kindle Store, available for our customers to download and start reading in less than 60 seconds.”

“Love, Sex, Freedom and the Paradox of the Pill” is expanded from a May 3 TIME cover story on the birth control pill. The book traces the invention of the pill half a century ago by its unlikely pioneers–from the early feminists looking for a way to free women from the fears of frequent childbirth to a prominent Catholic doctor who was seeking a treatment for infertility and instead found a guarantee of it. It traces the social upheavals that coincided with the pill’s arrival and asks which ones it actually caused. It follows the unfolding attitudes of women toward the first form of contraception that they could totally control–and the backlash in recent years among social conservatives who once welcomed the pill as a blessing and now challenge it as a threat. And it explores the social, political and philosophical issues that men and women face when considering the most private questions of family life.

Gibbs is the executive editor of TIME. She has written more than 100 cover stories, including eight “Person of the Year” essays, as well as dozens of stories on the past three presidential campaigns. Gibbs has won several awards for her journalism, including the National Magazine Award for a single-topic issue from the American Society of Magazine Editors, Time Inc.’s Luce Award for 2002 Story of the Year and a New York Press Club Award in the Anticipated News category. She currently writes the back page essay for TIME.

“Nancy’s original research was so rich we decided to publish the unabridged version of her article and make her complete research available in e-book form exclusively for Kindle,” said Richard Stengel, managing editor, TIME. “We’re glad TIME readers and Kindle customers can now discover and read ‘Love, Sex, Freedom and the Paradox of the Pill,’ available only in the Kindle Store.”

TIME magazine is also available to purchase as both a single issue and subscription in the Kindle Periodicals Store.

Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alert for Thursday, April 22: "Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices" by Julie Clawson, and Dozens More

Here’s the latest free listing in the Kindle Store as of Thursday morning, April 22!

by Sandra Felton
4.5 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
by Leslie Parrott 

The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity
by Skye Jethani
4.6 out of 5 stars  (16 customer reviews)

Saving Sailor: A Novel

Saving Sailor: A Novel

Around the Global Kindlesphere: Paulo Coelho Books Available in Spanish and French Worldwide in Kindle Store; Other Language Diversifications Lags; International Wireless Charges Pared Down for U.S. Kindle Owners

By Stephen Windwalker
Originally posted April 21, 2010 – © Kindle Nation Daily 2010

 
With so much going on in the Kindlesphere lately, I apologize for the fact that it’s been a while since I caught up with news, trends, and rumours that may be of interest to Kindle content customers across the pond and around the world as well as stateside. So, let me try to summarize several recent matters of interest:

  • On Monday, April 19,  Amazon announced that a new deal with bestselling author Paulo Coelho to make several of his books, available in both Spanish and French for worldwide distribution in the Kindle Store.  “There will be 13 books in Spanish and nine in French, including The Alchemist,” Amazon said in its release (scroll down to read it), noting that “all of these books are also available in the author’s native Portuguese in the Kindle Store.”
  • While the news on Coelho’s titles is great, a quick look at some Kindle Store title counts suggests that Amazon has yet to operationalize a priority on the international and foreign-language side of its commitment to make every book every published available for immediate download in the Kindle Store. Since the last time we checked a little over two months ago, the number of U.S. Kindle Store titles in French has actually decreased from 1,495 to 1,475, while the count of German titles has increased ever so slightly from 1,074 to 1,127. There’s been a healthier boost of 59% in the umber of Spanish-language titles, but even there a jump from 2,320 titles to 3,390 since February 19 hardly suggests that there’s a working group addressing this.
  • One piece of good news for U.S. Kindle customers traveling internationally came in a post by the I Love My Kindle blog’s Bufo Calvin: Apparently, Amazon is no longer charging such travelers fees for sending them the Kindle Store books they purchase (or recover from archiving) wirelessly via the Whispernet. Fees still apply to international Whispernet transmission of Kindle blogs, periodicals, and personal documents; Amazon explains those here. (Also, Amazon recently added a feature that should make it easier for international travelers to guard against unexpectedly high file transfer charges for sending personal documents wirelessly to their Kindle; click here for a post on this subject).
  • Meanwhile, still no word from Amazon about when Kindle blogs will be available either to Kindle owners beyond US borders or as content that can be read with Kindle apps on other devices.

Here’s the guts of Amazon’s news release concerning the Coelho translations:

International Bestselling Author Paulo Coelho’s Books Now Available in Spanish and French in the Kindle Store Worldwide

 
Coelho’s books, including the iconic “The Alchemist,” 
are now available in Spanish and French for download in under 60 seconds
 

SEATTLE, Apr 19, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) –Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that international bestselling author Paulo Coelho has decided to make select books, including “The Alchemist,” available in both Spanish and French for worldwide distribution in Amazon’s Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore). This is the first time any of these editions have been available as electronic books. There will be 13 books in Spanish and nine in French, including “The Alchemist,” “The Pilgrimage,” “Veronika Decides to Die,” “The Witch of Portobello,” “By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept,” “The Zahir” and “The Devil and Miss Prym.” All of these books are also available in the author’s native Portuguese in the Kindle Store. The Kindle Store now includes over 480,000 books and the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read, including New York TimesBestsellersand New Releases. Over 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle, including titles such as “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “Treasure Island.” 

“Our global customers were thrilled when Mr. Coelho made electronic copies of his book available in Portuguese in the Kindle Store,” said Melissa Kirmayer, Director, Kindle Content. “We’re excited to work with Mr. Coelho again to offer these titles in Spanish and French in the Kindle Store for download in less than 60 seconds in more than 100 countries around the world.” 


Paulo Coelho is the all-time bestselling Portuguese-language author. One of his best-known books, “The Alchemist,” was a No. 1 bestselling title in 74 countries. “The Alchemist” also holds the 2008 Guinness World Record for the most translated book in the world (67 languages in more than 150 countries). 


“It was with great joy that I was able to make 17 of my books available in my native Portuguese for Kindle,” said Coelho. “I am proud to now offer more readers around the world access to my work by publishing my books in both Spanish and French, regardless of the country they live in and their ability to get to a bookstore that carries my books in their mother tongue.”