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.

Whether you are trying to decide on your book group’s next selection or looking for good discussion questions to stimulate your strictly personal reading interest, you may find value in the Reading Group Guides, Free Excerpt Downloads, and other supplements that Amazon provides with many Kindle books.

Guides and excerpts are  generally provided as PDF files that can be read directly on some Kindles or converted to flowable Kindle-compatible text if you email the file to your you@kindle.com or you@free.kindle.com email address with “convert” in the subject line of the email. You can also download a free sample from any Kindle book at its Kindle Store product page.

Here are some recent selections with Kindle and other reading options for your fellow book group members:

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or The Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale
$10.88 in paperback; $9.99 in Kindle Store; unavailable at iBooks Store

• Reading group guide
• Download an excerpt

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
$7.16 in paperback; $5.50 in Kindle Store; unavailable at iBooks Store

• Reading group guide
• Download a free sample 
• Watch a trailer for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo
$21.98 in hardcover; $10.20 in paperback pre-orders for June 1 release; $14.27 in Kindle Store; unavailable at iBooks Store

• Reading group guide
• Download a free sample 

American Wife: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld
$10.20 in paperback; $9.75 in Kindle Store; unavailable at iBooks Store

• Reading group guide
• Download an excerpt
• Download a free sample 

Crazy Love by Leslie Morgan Steiner
$9.98 in remaindered hardcover; $10.79 in paperback; $9.99 in Kindle Store; $9.99 in iBooks Store

• Reading group guide
• Download a free sample

There are over a billion PCs in the world, and millions of the tablet computers that will be launched in the next few years will run on a PC platform. One other thing that they all have in common is that they will all run the Kindle for PC app with a free download and no Kindle required, which is why it is important for Amazon to keep improving the Kindle for PC app.

That’s what Amazon has done today with an announcement that Kindle for PC now includes the following features:

• Choose from three different color modes: read in white, sepia, or black color modes and adjust the brightness of the display from within the app
• View and edit notes and highlights marked on Kindle and Kindle DX
• Read books using full-screen mode of their PC

Meanwhile, the Kindle catalog continues to grow at an astonishing rate, and numbers 566,397 book titles as I type this. How fast is it growing? Since we don’t have a radar gun, we’ll rely on these two more interesting measures of the velocity of the Kindle Store’s growth:

• It’s growing so fast that the number of new titles added to the Kindle Store since the launch of the iPad April 3 is greater than the total number of titles reported to be in Apple’s iBooks Store.
• It’s growing so fast that Amazon’s own press office falls woefully behind in reporting on the size of the catalog. Today’s release claims that there are over 540,000 books in the Kindle Store, which is like, so May 5th.

Nothing in today’s release, however, about when Kindle customers will be able to subscribe to Kindle newspapers, magazines, and blogs through the Kindle for PC app or other Kindle apps.

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

Amazon Adds New Features to Kindle for PC Application

Customers using Kindle for PC can now edit notes and marks, experience full-screen reading mode, change the background color, and control the brightness of the screen
SEATTLE, May 19, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) –Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced new features for “Kindle for PC,” the free application that lets readers around the world enjoy Kindle books on their personal computers. Kindle for PC now enables customers to edit notes and marks, experience full-screen reading mode, change the background color, and control the brightness of the screen. With Kindle for PC, readers can discover and read from over 540,000 books in the Kindle Store — the largest selection of the most popular books that people want to read — including New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases from $9.99. Like all Kindle apps, Kindle for PC includes Amazon’s Whispersync technology, which saves and synchronizes a customer’s notes, highlights, bookmarks and last page read across their Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, PC, Mac, BlackBerry and, soon, Android phones, so customers always have their reading material with them and never lose their place.

“We have been working hard to enhance our Kindle application experiences and are thrilled to be adding new features to Kindle for PC,” said Jay Marine, director, Amazon Kindle. “Kindle for PC lets customers enjoy more than 540,000 books in the Kindle Store even if they don’t yet have a Kindle, and its the perfect companion application for the millions of Kindle and Kindle DX owners.”

Now Kindle for PC has even more features to enhance the Kindle book reading experience on a PC, including:

• Purchase, download and read more than 540,000 books, including 96 of 110 New York Times Bestsellers, plus tens of thousands of the most popular classics for free directly from their PC. Bestsellers such as “Backlash” by Aaron Allston, “Big Girl” by Danielle Steel, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot and “The Lost Symbol” by Dan Brown, and hundreds of thousands of other popular books are $9.99 or less in the Kindle Store
• Browse by genre or author, and take advantage of all the features that customers enjoy in the Kindle Store, including Amazon.com customer reviews, personalized recommendations and editorial reviews
• Read the beginning of books for free before they decide to buy
• Synchronize last page read between their Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, PC, Mac, BlackBerry and, soon, Android phone
• Access their entire library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon’s servers for free
• Choose from three different color modes: read in white, sepia, or black color modes and adjust the brightness of the display from within the app
• Choose from more than 10 different font sizes and adjust words per line
• View and edit notes and highlights marked on Kindle and Kindle DX
• Read books using full-screen mode of their PC
• Zoom in and out of text with a pinch of the fingers (Windows 7 users only)

Kindle for PC is available for download at http://www.amazon.com/KindleforPC.

For those who like to keep up with everything that is going on in the ebook revolution, a subscription to Kindle Nation Daily and a regular perusal of Teleread editor Paul Biba’s “Editor’s Pick of the Week” is a great start. We’ll try to make a regular point of sharing Paul’s picks here, but as of this morning we’re playing catch up with his picks from May 7 and May 15:

• 60,000 eBooks in the iBooks Store? 46,000? Imprecise O’Reilly Radar Post Could Brew a Tempest by Stephen Windwalker
• Amazon now tracking highlighted passages from Kindle users by Brad Vertrees
• A great little free dictionary to use with Kindle for PC app (Windows) by Andrys Basten
• Kobo Reader is here! by Joanna
• Feedbooks outstrips Apple in ebook downloads
• Murder, Mayhem and the Space Rocket: Pulp Adventures to Go! by Tony Bandy
• Amazon “collections” feature is detailed
• Are Agency Model Publishers Hanging Together or Playing for Their Own Edges? Latest Kindle Nation Price Survey Shows Decline in Titles Priced Over $9.99!
• Don’t diss Stanza and people who love e-books, Jeff—including us iPad owners by David Rothman
• Review – Camangi WebStation as an ebook reader
• Where to download free textbooks
• Parent vs. Reader, Round 3: Mom vs. ‘Thingie’ by Joanna
• iPad/iPhone e-book app review: Comic Zeal 4
• Flash rehash: The Drummer Boy Flash Mob at Amazon by Scott Nicholson
• Waves of Change in the Kindlesphere: How the Kindle Store is Evolving by Stephen Windwalker
• Radio Shack’s 1986 ‘Electronic Book’