By Steve Windwalker
We invest a fair amount of our time on free book listings here at Kindle Nation, but every now and then we also like to share some suggestions that might lead our readers down the path to money well spent. After all, the greatest readers in the world cannot subsist on free books alone.
Here are a few items that you may not want to miss!
- Kindle Nation fave Imogen Rose has just brought out the third book in her Portal Chronicles series, entitled QUANTUM (Portal Chronicles Book Three)
. She’ll be a sponsor next week, but I didn’t want to wait until then to let you know. It’s so new that it hasn’t even been fitted with genre categories on its Kindle page or added to Imogen’s Author Central page, but it already has four 5-star reviews. If you pick it up here for $3.99
- Old friend Stewart Acuff, then 22, sat down with me for our first conversation in a mutual friends’ back yard at a 4th of July picnic one year when we were both young bucks and asked me to help him make a tough decision involving the conflicting claims of time between a commitment to teach Sunday School in the Baptist church where his Daddy was the pastor and the fierce urgency of getting his community organizing career started “now.” In the 33 years since then he has become one of the country’s best known organizers for social and economic justice, and that passion for change has continued to share space in his heart with the strong faith and passionate patriotism that were so evident in that first conversation. Now he’s written a remarkable book that weaves it all together with the same pitch of fire and brimstone that he learned at his Southern Baptist pastor Daddy’s knee. If you remain idealistic about our future and the value of work and the workers who do it, you’ll want to check out the Kindle edition of Getting America Back to Work
from Tasora Books, readable on a Kindle, iPad, BlackBerry, iPod Touch, iPhone, PC, Mac, or an Android device like the Galaxy Tab. (Disclosure: I’ve already told you Stewart is my friend. In fact he is one of my best friends on the planet. We go to each other’s weddings, all of them. But what I didn’t say above is that I didn’t have an answer for him back on July 4, 1977. In a bit of a “render to Caesar” cop-out, I referred him to his Maker.)
- On the other side of the political coin, George W. Bush apparently does not need any help from me to become a bestselling author. Can I get a “Who knew?” here? Regular readers may have already grokked that I’m not totally charmed by the concept of the “enhanced ebook” or by the former owner of the Texas Rangers, and I am going to be up front about the fact that I have not read the book. Maybe I should, and maybe I will. But I have looked at the photographic artifacts and audio/video presentations in the $9.99 “deluxe edition” of the 43rd president’s Decision Points memoir
to be able to say with some authority that this edition makes an eloquent case for the usefulness of these enhanced ebook editions for certain kinds of publishing niches, including, without putting too fine a point on anything, history, biography, and children’s books. We may not have been offered a deluxe edition of the Bush presidency, but the deluxe edition of Decision Points
- I’m not quite ready to jump off the fence and declare that this would be money well spent, but you may have noticed that I’ve mentioned the Samsung Galaxy Tab a time or two. I don’t have one yet, and I am still on the fence, but I must say that as an early adopter this looks like the most compelling choice yet among Android tablets, and it may be a truly worthy competitor for the iPad. I am looking seriously at the carte blanche wireless option being offered by T-Mobile, since wi-fi is sufficient for me 99% of the time and the only time I would expect to need 3G or 4G wireless would be when traveling. David Pogue has a pretty puffy review here, and of course it is worth a special mention that the Galaxy Tab comes with the Kindle Android App already onboard. By the way: I’ve been saying that I expect Amazon to release a tablet-like big brother for the Kindle with color touch around March of next year, but I suppose another approach would be for Amazon simply to let other manufacturers (like Apple and Samsung and Dell) manufacture what in effect could also be color touch tablet Kindles. That strategy is certainly working very well so far.
