But first, a word from … Today’s Sponsor

Ultimate Unauthorized Harry Potter Quiz Book: 165 Questions Ranging from The Sorcerer’s Stone to The Deathly Hallows by Graeme Davis – $2.99

Here’s a Harry Potter quiz book like no other. It asks questions which will develop your appreciation of the Harry Potter books and the Harry Potter phenomenon. Some of these questions are easy, quite a few are fiendishly difficult, but all are thought-provoking.

What better way to get kids or grandkids interested in Kindle reading than to use your Kindle to engage them in a Harry Potter quiz?! But no promises here that you won’t get hooked on the game yourself….

[Incidentally, the publisher tells us that although this is the “ultimate unaithorized” Harry Potter quiz book, this book has been cleared by Rowling’s attorneys — all the questions pertain to “real  facts” or literary criticism as opposed to “fictional facts”, which is what got the HP Lexicon people in trouble.]

And if you enjoy this one you’ll probably want to check out the diverse catalog of ebooks for all generations of  Kindle users from publisher Nimble Books LLC.

Click here to download Ultimate Unauthorized Harry Potter Quiz Book: 165 Questions Ranging from The Sorcerer’s Stone to The Deathly Hallows (or a free sample) to your Kindle, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, Android-compatible, PC or Mac and start reading within 60 seconds!

Each day’s list is sponsored by one paid title. We encourage you to support our sponsors! Authors, Publishers, Kindle Accessory Manufacturers: Interested in learning more about sponsorship? Just click on this link for more information: Click here to sponsor a Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alert! *     *     *

Free Listings!

Rorey’s Secret (Country Road Chronicles #1)

How Zappos Shoes In Success

Face of Betrayal (Triple Threat Series #1) – Thriller
by Lis Wiehl and April Henry

The Goddess Of Fried Okra – Contemporary Fiction

Marketing in the Moment: The Practical Guide to Using Web 3.0 Marketing to Reach Your Customers First

Your Credit Score, Your Money and What’s at Stake (Updated Edition): How to Improve the Three-Digit Number That Shapes Your Financial Future

If you enjoy a great suspense page-turner at the great price of, well, no price at all, then you won’t want to tarry about picking up the two pre-orders featured in today’s Free Book Alert. One of them expires Thursday and the other lasts just a few weeks longer….

A Nail Through the Heart: With Bonus Content by Timothy Hallinan

Harper Collins Pre-Order for July 30, 2010 – Suspense

Revenge of Innocents by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg – Mystery and Thrillers

Once Around The Track by Sharyn McCrumb – NASCAR Romance

Calling Home by Janna McMahan – Fantasy Debut

Seducing Jane Porter

Erotica by Adair, Dominique

Daniel X: Demons and Druids, by James Patterson and Adam Sadler – Free Preview

Not only is James Patterson the bestselling ebook author of all time with over 1.1 million copies sold, but he and his marketing team get it. Instead of whetting readers’ appetites with just a chapter or two, Patterson has been making a regular practice of providing real, meaty previews like this one — at 768 locations it’s longer than Stephen King’s expensive novella Billy Blockade. The full novel comes out July 26 and you can pre-order the full novel here, but you don’t have to wait until then to start reading the first few chapters by clicking here.

Bright of the Sky (Entire and the Rose, Book 1)

by Kay Kenyon – 4.3 out of 5 stars (27 customer reviews)

Starred Review. At the start of this riveting launch of a new far-future SF series from Kenyon (Tropic of Creation), a disastrous mishap during interstellar space travel catapults pilot Titus Quinn with his wife, Johanna Arlis, and nine-year-old daughter, Sydney, into a parallel universe called the Entire. Titus makes it back to this dimension, his hair turned white, his memory gone, his family presumed dead and his reputation ruined with the corporation that employed him. The corporation (in search of radical space travel methods) sends Titus (in search of Johanna and Sydney) back through the space-time warp. There, he gradually, painfully regains knowledge of its rulers, the cruel, alien Tarig; its subordinate, Chinese-inspired humanoid population, the Chalin; and his daughter’s enslavement. Titus’s transformative odyssey to reclaim Sydney reveals a Tarig plan whose ramifications will be felt far beyond his immediate family. Kenyon’s deft prose, high-stakes suspense and skilled, thorough world building will have readers anxious for the next installment. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Now that Amazon has released a remarkably full-featured Kindle Wifi model for just $139, the $50 price differential between that model and the $189 Kindle 3G places an elegant value-proposition accent on the Kindle’s wireless connectivity. If you think that either of these Kindles is worth $139 as an ereader, that just leaves this question:

Would you pay $50 one time, with no monthly fees or AT+T contracts, for wireless connectivity that would allow you to check email, scores, stocks, weather and any text-intensive website from just about anywhere for the rest of your life?

Well, I thought so. Click here to pre-order your $189 latest-generation wireless Kindle 3G with no monthly fees or contracts for shipment on August 27.

Importantly, from the perspective of those of us who might occasionally want to use the Kindle’s web browser, the new Kindle 3G model comes with:

• a faster, more navigation-friendly, vastly improved but still absolutely free web browser based on WebKit, the open-sourced Web browser engine that is also the basis for … wait for it … Apple’s Safari web browser;
• a new Article Mode feature within the updated web browser that, similar to Instapaper, simplifies most web pages to text-based content reading;
• an automatic toggle between 3G wireless and wi-fi connectivity that makes use of the best, fastest network available once you’ve synched it up with your home, office, or local coffee shop’s wi-fi interface;

 And the first two of these features also come on the new Kindle Wi-Fi.

We’ll be reporting more about this big news in the coming days, but for now it’s a special honour to be able to say “Welcome” to our fellow citizens of Kindle Nation from across the pond.

Amazon’s thriving UK store is launching its own in-country UK Kindle Store at this moment, and that should do away for good with some annoyances like special duties added to ebook prices and all that sort of rot.

With these same new Kindles shipping daily out of the UK Kindle Store beginning August 27, we should see a continuing increase in the catalogue of Kindle ebooks available for the Kindle in the UK. The total UK catalogue recently surpassed 400,000 Kindle titles, and this screenshot of recent bestsellers makes it evident that — here’s a shocker — the late Mr. Larsson is doing just as well in Britain as he is doing stateside.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t confess that we’re especially excited because we expect this “Blogs are not available in your country or region” wall to be torn down right quick so that Kindle owners in the UK can begin enjoying their own daily dose of the #1 Kindle blog in the world, Kindle Nation Daily.

Can Canada, Japan, China, Germany, and France be far behind?

Cheerio!

They’ve gotta be kidding, right? $139 for a brand new Kindle with more features than ever, other than 3G wireless?

“If you don’t need the convenience of 3G wireless, we have an incredible new price point — $139 for Kindle Wi-Fi,” Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement this evening. “Kindle Wi-Fi has all the same features, same bookstore, same high-contrast electronic paper display, and it’s even a tiny bit lighter at 8.5 ounces. At this price point, many people are going to buy multiple units for the home and family.”

So, call it the Kindle for Kids, the Student Kindle, or the Family Kindle, but at $139 there are going to be millions of buyers for the new Kindle Wifi that Amazon released a moment ago. And Jeff Bezos is probably correct in envisioning that there will be hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of multi-Kindle homes.

Like the new $189 Kindle 3G, the $139 Kindle Wi-Fi is available now for pre-order and will ship on August 27.

It comes with all the new features available on the brand-new third generation Kindle 3G, except for the wireless 3G itself. Instead, this $139 model comes with wi-fi connectivity only, which may be a case of “addition by subtraction” for some of our sons and daughters who are trying to read their homework assignments or summer reading list choices with a minimum of distraction.

Here’s what you’ll find on the Kindle Wi-Fi:

Major Performance Improvements:

• the new Pearl e-ink technology providing 50 percent better contrast, unveiled with the Kindle DX Graphite, due to lighter background and darker, clearer fonts;
• the classic Kindle 6-inch display in a super-thin Kindle body that’s 21 percent smaller and, at just 8.5 ounces, 16 percent lighter;
• a 20 percent faster screen refresh or page-turn speed;
• more than double the storage space from the 1,500 books accomodated by the Kindle 2 to a 3,500-book capacity that equals that of the Kindle DX; 
• The longest battery life yet for a Kindle or any other ereader, according to Amazon: one month with the Wi-Fi turned off (we are awaiting clarification from Amazon on battery life with Wi-Fi turned on.

Equally important, reading gets easier than ever for all of us, and especially for the visually impaired or anyone with vision issues, with several new accessibility features:

• Text-to-speech is now augmented with new voice-guided text-to-speech enabled menus that allow us to navigate on the Kindle without having to read menu options or content listings and item descriptions on the home screen. The new Voice Guide audible menuing feature handles all of that.
• New hand-built, custom fonts and font-hinting make words and letters more crisp, clear, and natural-looking, including a very clean new san serif font.
• Amazon is also releasing a brand new lighted Kindle cover, sold separately for $59.99, that includes an integrated retractable LED reading light that never needs batteries and hides away into the cover when not in use. It lights the entire Kindle display without glare and draws its power directly from the Kindle’s battery through the new gold-plated conductive hinges that connect the Kindle to the cover.
• For those of us who like to read quietly in bed, the new Kindle features quieter page turns. As someone who had actually shifted to a smaller font some evenings so that those little next-page clicks wouldn’t disturb my sweetheart quite so often, I have to say that I love the subtlety of this kind of improvement, which demonstrates to me the extent that Amazon really drills down on usability issues. My only concern on this one is that, in touting it, Amazon’s press release goes distinctly off-message in claiming that “quieter page turns means you can read all night without disturbing your partner.” Someone in the PR department needs to read the memo on how the Kindle lets you read yourself blissfully to sleep while certain backlit devices that will go unnamed keep you up all night.

Hardware Changes. In addition to the first-time availability of a graphite case for a 6-inch Kindle, there are a few hardware changes that should enhance usability:

• The Home and Back buttons and the 5-way controller are on the front of the Kindle now, as opposed to the right edge, which makes the right edge a bit less busy and cluttered.
• The form factor of the 5-way controller itself has been transformed from the joystick-like fixture on previous models to a clickable pad surrounded by a clickable four-sided directional border, somewhat similar to a trackpad. This should result in fewer unintentional “delete” commands from the Home screen, if nothing else.
• Both the 5-way controller and the unit’s hardware keyboard appeared to me to perform better, with clearer and more immediate tactile feedback, than the input hardware on previous Kindle models. But I only worked with the new model for about half an hour, so I have nothing quantifiable to share with you on this.

When you do connect with Wi-Fi to use the Kindle Wi-Fi’s web browser, you can expect:

• a faster, more navigation-friendly, vastly improved but still absolutely free web browser based on WebKit, the open-sourced Web browser engine that is also the basis for … wait for it … Apple’s Safari web browser; and
• a new Article Mode feature within the updated web browser that, similar to Instapaper, simplifies most web pages to text-based content reading.

The $50 price differential between this model and the $189 Kindle 3G places an elegant value-proposition accent on the Kindle 3G’s wireless connectivity. If you think that either of these Kindles is worth $139 as an ereader, that just leaves this question:

Would you pay $50 one time, with no monthly fees or AT+T contracts, for wireless connectivity that would allow you to check email, scores, stocks, weather and any text-intensive website from just about anywhere for the rest of your life.

Amazon has launched the Kindle 3, and it’s available for pre-order right here and right now as the Kindle 3G! The new model adds performance, improved design, and attractive new features at the same sweet $189 price that tripled the sales of the previous model in recent weeks, and it will ship on August 27.

Also, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement, “If you don’t need the convenience of 3G wireless, we have an incredible new price point — $139 for Kindle Wi-Fi.” We’ll focus on the $139 Kindle Wififeatures in a moment or two in a separate post.

Major Performance Improvements.  One indication of just how popular and successful the Kindle has been for Amazon over the past 33 months is that with each generation, the continuing improvement of the Kindle has kept it true to the initial product vision of a dedicated ebook reader. The Kindle will never be an iPad killer, but it doesn’t need to be. This new Kindle may look at first blush like a case of incremental improvements over the Kindle 2 as you run through the list of new features individually. Then when you take a step back or try it out for a while — as I had a chance to do a few days ago — it’s clear that the overall impact of its performance enhancements makes the total package more desirable and satisfying — as a dedicated ebook reader — than ever.

Big changes include:

• the new Pearl e-ink technology providing 50 percent better contrast, unveiled with the Kindle DX Graphite, due to lighter background and darker, clearer fonts;
• the classic Kindle 6-inch display in a super-thin Kindle body that’s 21 percent smaller and, at just 8.7 ounces, 15 percent lighter;
• a 20 percent faster screen refresh or page-turn speed;
• a choice of two case colors, the classic white or the new graphite case that I’ve found very attractive with the new Kindle DX;
• more than double the storage space from the 1,500 books accomodated by the Kindle 2 to a 3,500-book capacity that equals that of the Kindle DX; 
• interactive PDF viewing with notes and highlighting;
• The longest battery life yet for a Kindle or any other ereader, according to Amazon: one month with the wireless turned off, and 10 days with the wireless turned on;  

There are also dramatic improvements for those of us who want to get more usefulness out of the Kindle’s web browser:

• a faster, more navigation-friendly, vastly improved but still absolutely free web browser based on WebKit, the open-sourced Web browser engine that is also the basis for … wait for it … Apple’s Safari web browser;
• a new Article Mode feature within the updated web browser that, similar to Instapaper, simplifies most web pages to text-based content reading;
• an automatic toggle between 3G wireless and wi-fi connectivity that makes use of the best, fastest network available once you’ve synched it up with your home, office, or local coffee shop’s wi-fi interface;

Equally important, reading gets easier than ever for all of us, and especially for the visually impaired or anyone else with vision issues, with several new accessibility features:

• Text-to-speech is now augmented with new voice-guided text-to-speech enabled menus that allow us to navigate on the Kindle without having to read menu options or content listings and item descriptions on the home screen. The new Voice Guide audible menuing feature handles all of that.
• New hand-built, custom fonts and font-hinting make words and letters more crisp, clear, and natural-looking, including a very clean new san serif font.
• Amazon is also releasing a brand new lighted Kindle cover, sold separately for $59.99, that includes an integrated retractable LED reading light that never needs batteries and hides away into the cover when not in use. It lights the entire Kindle display without glare and draws its power directly from the Kindle’s battery through the new gold-plated conductive hinges that connect the Kindle to the cover.
• For those of us who like to read quietly in bed, the new Kindle features quieter page turns. As someone who had actually shifted to a smaller font some evenings so that those little next-page clicks wouldn’t disturb my sweetheart quite so often, I have to say that I love the subtlety of this kind of improvement, which demonstrates to me the extent that Amazon really drills down on usability issues. My only concern on this one is that, in touting it, Amazon’s press release goes distinctly off-message in claiming that “quieter page turns means you can read all night without disturbing your partner.” Someone in the PR department needs to read the memo on how the Kindle lets you read yourself blissfully to sleep while certain backlit devices that will go unnamed keep you up all night.

Hardware Changes. In addition to the first-time availability of a graphite case for a 6-inch Kindle, there are a few hardware changes that should enhance usability:

• The Home and Back buttons and the 5-way controller are on the front of the Kindle now, as opposed to the right edge, which makes the right edge a bit less busy and cluttered.
• The form factor of the 5-way controller itself has been transformed from the joystick-like fixture on previous models to a clickable pad surrounded by a clickable four-sided directional border, somewhat similar to a trackpad. This should result in fewer unintentional “delete” commands from the Home screen, if nothing else.
• Both the 5-way controller and the unit’s hardware keyboard appeared to me to perform better, with clearer and more immediate tactile feedback, than the input hardware on previous Kindle models. But I only worked with the new model for about half an hour, so I have nothing quantifiable to share with you on this.

The only negative, hardware-wise, for me, is that this new Kindle takes after the the Kindle DX in having done away with the dedicated number row at the top of the keyboard in favor of an ALT-enabled number row that does double-duty with the QWERTY row. Will I get used to that? Of course.

Which leads me to what was my first take on this new Kindle. In some ways, it could be the love child of the Kindle 2 and the relatively new Kindle DX Graphite, but we parents always want more for our children than we’ve had for ourselves, and so it is with the new Kindle.

Click here to pre-order your $189 latest-generation wireless Kindle 3G with no monthly fees or contracts for shipment on August 27.

(Note: this story was to be embargoed until 11 pm EST, but we are releasing it now that the new Kindle page is live.)

With all the focus in the past week on the new $9.99 Kindle exclusives of 20 contemporary classics from Andrew Wylie’s new Odyssey Editions imprint, some of the voracious readers of Kindle Nation may not have noticed that another innovative publisher, Rosetta Books, has been quietly building an equally impressive and highly attractive catalog of Kindle Books, most of them priced at $7.19 and lower.

Click here for a great list of inexpensive contemporary classics from Rosetta Books.

Here’s a list of some of the authors represented, which includes some of our favorite authors:

• Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
• Pat Conroy
• Ian McEwan
• Donald Westlake
• Ed McBain
• Ron Paul
• E.M. Forster
• Ray Bradbury
• W.P. Kinsella
• Aldous Huxley
• Susan Sontag
• Ben Bova
• Harry Harrison
• Mark Harris
• Poul Anderson
• James Leo Herlihy
• M.C. Beaton and Marion Chesney
• Harry Kemelman
• Ruth Rendell

Now that’s backlist. and that’s just a taste! Kudos to Rosetta Books, which has been trailblazing in this area of connecting backlist authors with readers for several years.

And finally, a snarky footnote: I checked iBooks to see if some of these titles might also be listed there. A few, perhaps, but just a few. When I typed “Pat Conroy” into the iBooks search field, iBooks gave me back a rather telling response, I thought:

I listened to a podcast interview the other day with innovative Smashwords.com founder Mark Coker, and as always I found him to be an interesting, imaginative guy who is attempting to do important things. He mentioned that his company has been experiencing some formatting difficulties getting its titles accepted in the Kindle Store, but that it is continuing to work with the Kindle team on the issues and has experienced some success selling independent authors’ works on other platforms including iBooks, Kobo, and the Nook.

So I was surprised to find this morning that there are about 60 Smashwords titles available now in the Kindle Store. The vast majority are erotica, available for the most part at very low prices, and let’s just say they are not for the faint of heart. Although I haven’t sampled any of them as of yet, the array of titles suggests that many of them concern themselves with incest.

Those preoccupations did not match my sense of the overall Smashwords catalog when I’ve visited its website, and without getting into this too deeply it made me wonder if the thematic concentration might have the effect of creating some unintentional and perhaps unwanted branding for Smashwords.