The re-organization of the Kindle Store bestseller lists into “paid” and “free” that we discussed several days ago is now a reality, and it’s a wonderful advance that makes it much, much easier to find great books at bargain prices.

Of course, if you are a citizen of Kindle Nation, you are already well aware of the free books that we share with you several times a week, and it’s nice to find them in well-organized lists, overall and by category.

But the real revelation is that the list bifurcation makes it that much easier to find nicely priced books among the paid listings in any category that appeals to you. And as you can see with the Fiction Bestseller Lists, the agency price-fixing model and some big publishers’ concomitant agenda to raise bestseller prices by 30 to 50 percent is laying a big egg with Kindle readers: only 7 of the top 25 Kindle fiction bestsellers are priced above $9.99.

New York Times Bestseller List for Paperback Trade Fiction – May 23, 2010

This Week		Weeks on List
1	THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson. (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, $14.95.) A hacker and a journalist investigate the disappearance of a Swedish heiress. $7.16 in paperback; $5.50 in the Kindle Store; unavailable in the iBooks Store.	47
2	SAVOR THE MOMENT, by Nora Roberts. (Berkley, $16.) A founder of the wedding-planning company Vows has a crush on the brother of one of her partners; Book 3 in the Bride Quartet. $9.36 in paperback; unavailable in the Kindle Store; $9.99 in the iBooks Store.	3
3	THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, by Stieg Larsson. (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, $15.95.) A Swedish hacker becomes a murder suspect. $8.57 in paperback; $7.99 in the Kindle Store; unavailable in the iBooks Store. Excerpt	8
4	LITTLE BEE, by Chris Cleave. (Simon & Schuster, $14.) The lives of a British woman and a Nigerian girl collide. $7.97 in paperback; $9.99 in the Kindle Store; $9.99 in the iBooks Store.	13
5	BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, by Jennifer Weiner. (Washington Square, $15.) Childhood friends, estranged in high school, reunite years later when one needs help. $8.49 in paperback; $9.99 in the Kindle Store; $9.99 in the iBooks Store.	2
6	SOUTH OF BROAD, by Pat Conroy. (Dial, $16.) An unlikely group’s friendship from the ’60s to the ’80s, by the author of “The Prince of Tides.” $9.36 in paperback; $8.42 in the Kindle Store; unavailable in the iBooks Store.	2
7	A RELIABLE WIFE, by Robert Goolrick. (Algonquin, $14.95.) Complications $7.99 in paperback; $7.19 in the Kindle Store; $7.99  in the iBooks Store.	19
8	THE HOST, by Stephenie Meyer. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) Aliens control the minds and bodies of most humans, but one woman won’t surrender. $9.93 in paperback; $9.99 in the Kindle Store; $9.99  in the iBooks Store.	5
9	SARAH’S KEY, by Tatiana de Rosnay. (St. Martin’s Griffin, $13.95.) A contemporary American journalist investigates what happened to a little girl and her family during the roundup of Jews in Paris in 1942. $8.37 in paperback; $9.99 in the Kindle Store; $9.99 in the iBooks Store.	66
10*	CUTTING FOR STONE, by Abraham Verghese. (Vintage, $15.95.) Twin brothers, conjoined and then separated, grow up amid the political turmoil of Ethiopia. $8.73 in paperback; $8.43 in the Kindle Store; unavailable in the iBooks Store. Excerpt	16

Here’s a quick free read (or text-to-speech listen) for your commute, just a little something to whet your appetite for the full release of J.A. Konrath’s latest Jack Daniels mystery, Shaken, which will be published initially in a Kindle exclusive by AmazonEncore this Fall and is available, at least for now, at a pre-order price of $2.99. I don’t ordinarily include many “free samples” in the Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alerts because many of them are just trying to game the bestseller lists through the redundancy of offering something that is already free as a Kindle Store free sample. But when a teaser like Konrath’s comes out while the full ebook is still in its unreleased pre-order state, as in this case, a worthwhile purpose is served.

Shaken (Teaser Chapters) (Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels Mysteries) (Kindle Edition)

by J.A. Konrath (Author)

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Digital List Price:	$0.00  What’s this?
Kindle Price:	$0.00 & includes wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet

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Text-to-Speech: Enabled

Steve Martini’s Shadow of Power Free with Bonus Material

by Steve Martini – Pre-order for May 25, 2010 Release

Text-to-Speech: Enabled

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 655 KB
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Up to 5 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books (May 25, 2010)
• Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers

Soul Catcher, an urban fantasy by Leigh Bridger

The Shadow and Night (The Lamb Among the Stars, Book 1) by Chris Walley

Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Updated and Expanded Edition by Jerry Weissman

The Art of Asking: Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers by Terry J. Fadem

The Truth About Negotiations by Leigh L. Thompson

Every Thought Captive: Battling the Toxic Beliefs That Separate Us from the Life We Crave 

 A Vote of Confidence by Robin Lee Hatcher

• “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 Kindle Nation Daily 5.21.2010.
• Click here (or type “kindle nation daily” 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 Kindle Nation Daily, the #1 bestselling blog in the Kindle Store.
• Click here to see RECENT KINDLE NATION DAILY FREE BOOK ALERTS
  The best way to find out about these free listings right away, when they occur, is to subscribe to the Kindle edition of Kindle Nation Daily, which pushes Kindle 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.

  Click here for Kindle Nation’s archive page with links for over 2 million free books!

Here are our other updated free promotional listings in the Kindle Store as of May 21:

Product Description

Today our Readers’ Alert series will shine a fresh light on some recent Kindle titles whose authors have been in the media this week:

Psychotherapist Stacy Kaiser appeared on the Today show to discuss How to Be a Grown Up: The Ten Secret Skills Everyone Needs to Know.

Former MTV VJ Daisy Fuentes, also on the Today show, with Unforgettable You: Master the Elements of Style, Spirituality, and True Beauty.

Jennifer Baggett and Holly C. Corbett were on The Early Show with The Lost Girls: Three Friends. Four Continents. One Unconventional Detour Around the World. 

My s.o. Betty reported to me that she’d enjoyed Bonnie Hunt’s chat with Lori Gottlieb, author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, but I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with me.

New Yorker contributing writer Patricia Marx appeared on The Leonard Lopate Show to talk about her novel Him Her Him Again The End of Him, which according to reviewer Claudia Deane chronicles its protagonist’s involvement with one of those “caddishly bad college boyfriends you somehow can’t quit.”

• Isobel Coleman, Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women Are Transforming the Middle East
• Bruce Feiler, The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me
• Ross Donaldson, The Lassa Ward: One Man’s Fight Against One of the World’s Deadliest Diseases 
• Russell Brand, My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up
• Fred Thompson, Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir of Growing Up and Second Chances 
• Don Van Ryn, Susie Van Ryn, Colleen Cerak, and Whitney Cerak, Mistaken Identity: Two Families, One Survivor, Unwavering Hope 
• Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House 
• Rose George, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters 
• Carol Burnett, This Time Together: Laughter and Reflection
• Cheryl Forberg, The Biggest Loser: 6 Weeks to a Healthier You: Lose Weight and Get Healthy For Life! 

• Check on this book at amazon.co.jp

By Stephen Windwalker, Editor of Kindle Nation – © Kindle Nation Daily 2010

File this one under “Go figure.”

This is a story about a traditional paperback version of a book about an ebook reader … translated into a language that does not even render on the ebook reader … by an author with zero name recognition in the country where the translated book is to be sold … at a time when the company that manufactures and sells the ebook reader has not even committed publicly to a Japanese version of the ebook reader. 

I’m no Joe Konrath, but it is a story that is turning out well in its own way.

One Friday morning in December I awoke and checked my email inbox to find an unsolicited message from Kaori Shibayama, a literary agent with The English Agency (Japan) Ltd. in Tokyo. He was contacting me on behalf of Nikkei Business Publications to offer me a nice advance for the paperback rights to a Japanese translation of my book, The Complete User’s Guide To the Amazing Amazon Kindle 2.

Or, to put it another away, it was as if I had been walking down the street and Michael Anthony had stepped out from behind a building to offer me, not a million dollars to be sure, but a perfectly nice advance for a project that (1) I had never thought about, and (2) would require no effort on my part beyond sending digital and print copies of the book and signing my name a few times. After all, I had already written the book in English and my sales had already topped 100,000 copies in various formats and editions.

Suffice it to say that Mr. Shibayama is now my Japanese agent, and Nikkei Business Publications is my Japanese publisher. Over the course of several months of very pleasant communications between Mr. Shibayama and his colleagues and myself and my excellent Japanese translator Dr. Akira Kurahone, I have been paid the advance and the project has come to fruition. The book is available for pre-orders at the Nikkei Business Publications website and on Amazon’s website in Japan, and is supposed to be released next Monday, May 24 (although the Amazon.co.jp website says May 20, which is tomorrow).

I first noticed the pre-order sites four days ago, on Sunday. By Monday, the book’s sales ranking was in the top 2,000 in Amazon’s Japanese sales rankings, and today it has mostly been in the top 1,000.

Somewhat more astonishingly, if I may hazard to rely on Google Translate, the Nikkei BP website now says that the book has sold out of its first printing “because of the flood of orders,” and will be back in stock on June 1.

I don’t wish to overstate the significance of any of this; after all, Nikkei BP’s print run was modest, only about 4,000 copies to start with. A good chunk of those copies have presumably been ordered by Japanese retailers who have full return rights, so we won’t count our chickens here.

But as I said: This is a story about a traditional paperback version of a book about an ebook reader … translated into a language that does not even render on the ebook reader … by an author with zero name recognition in the country where the translated book is to be sold … at a time when the company that manufactures and sells the ebook reader has not even committed publicly to a Japanese version of the ebook reader.

It’s nice news for me and my publisher, but even better news for Amazon and its Kindle team, if they are listening.