Regularly I send an email out to our family members who own a Kindle. We share an account together. I keep them updated on the new books available in the account. Here is the email I sent them yesterday:
Dear Dad, Jillian, Tim, Jessica, Dave, Jennifer, and Mike
(Also Todd, Jonathan and Mary Kay!)
It's been two weeks since I last updated you on our family's Kindle Club. Easter has been a busy time for me. I know you all understand.
I've been enjoying several books all at the same time. Thanks Todd and Jennifer for the recommendation of the Hunger Games trilogy. Just finished book one (Hunger Games) and have downloaded book #2 - Catching Fire. Good reads! I've also been listening to The Lincoln Lawyer (thanks Dad for the recommendation) as well as In The Plex (Jonathan - I think you would enjoy this Audible book about Google.)
I just returned from Todd's house. He asked me about the family Kindle Club and how it worked out for us. I told him I thought it worked really well. I update everyone on their balances and they get the money to me when they can. (Though at the moment you are all prepaid! Thanks!) I love the sharing of books with one another. I think Todd (and Amy and Bethany) are thinking about coming in with us. That would be terrific as far as I'm concerned!
Kindle Club Numbers. Here are a few interesting details of our club. We currently have 636 books in our archives. 455 of these have been purchased for free. Included in our list of books are 12 business, 7 cookbooks, 24 fantasy, 20 westerns, 20 romance, 33 mystery and thrillers, 65 science fiction, 6 children, 15 historical fiction, 46 Christian fiction, 16 textbooks and 62 classics. In addition we now have 68 Audible titles. We also have Bibles, theology and 90 other nonfiction books. It's becoming a great collection!
Library Feature Coming. Last week Amazon announced that before the end of this year they would make a new Library Lending feature available. Soon we will be able to borrow books from over 11,000 libraries! (Jonathan, this could be the answer to your concerns for Grayden if he somehow managed to get his own Kindle some day - He has $7 saved up so far for his own Kindle!) If anyone want to know more about this new library feature, you can read about it in the Kindle forums:
Here are the books that have been added to the archives since our last update. (In the email I provide photos of the books along with links to the the books on Amazon. The links don't copy over from my email and I don't want to take the time to link them all again. You can easily search for any title on Amazon's Kindle website.)
Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games)
Collins, Suzanne
Price $8.40 / Paid for by Mark
Science Fiction, Adventure
Every year in Panem, the dystopic nation that exists where the U.S. used to be, the Capitol holds a televised tournament in which two teen "tributes" from each of the surrounding districts fight a gruesome battle to the death. In The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, the tributes from impoverished District Twelve, thwarted the Gamemakers, forcing them to let both teens survive. In this rabidly anticipated sequel, Katniss, again the narrator, returns home to find herself more the center of attention than ever. The sinister President Snow surprises her with a visit, and Katniss’s fear when Snow meets with her alone is both palpable and justified. Catching Fire is divided into three parts: Katniss and Peeta’s mandatory Victory Tour through the districts, preparations for the 75th Annual Hunger Games, and a truncated version of the Games themselves. Slower paced than its predecessor, this sequel explores the nation of Panem: its power structure, rumors of a secret district, and a spreading rebellion, ignited by Katniss and Peeta’s subversive victory. Katniss also deepens as a character. Though initially bewildered by the attention paid to her, she comes almost to embrace her status as the rebels’ symbolic leader. Though more of the story takes place outside the arena than within, this sequel has enough action to please Hunger Games fans and leaves enough questions tantalizingly unanswered for readers to be desperate for the next installment.
In the Plex (Digital Audiobook)
Steven Levy
$15 monthly credit / Paid for by Mark
Business, Nonfiction, Audible
Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes listeners inside Google headquarters - the Googleplex - to explain how Google works.
While they were still students at Stanford, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation with another, as two of Google's earliest employees found a way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars from Internet advertising. With this cash cow (until Google's IPO, nobody other than Google management had any idea how lucrative the company's ad business was), Google was able to expand dramatically and take on other transformative projects: more efficient data centers, open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube), cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more.
The key to Google's success in all these businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking. After it's unapologetically elitist approach to hiring, Google pampers its engineers with free food and dry cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses, and gives them all the resources they need to succeed. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every hire.
But has Google lost its innovative edge? It stumbled badly in China. And now, with its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. Some employees are leaving the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. Can the company that famously decided not to be "evil" still compete?
No other book has turned Google inside out as Levy does with In the Plex.
This edition of In the Plex includes an exclusive interview with Google's Marissa Mayer, one of the company's earliest hires and most visible executives, as well as the youngest woman to ever make Fortune's "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" list. She provides a high-level insider's perspective on the company's life story, its unique hiring practices, its new social networking initiative, and more.
A Fool Again: A Novella
James, Eloisa
Price $0.00
Novella / Romance
A Fool Again is the story of Genevieve, who once made a dash to Gretna Greene to marry, but was caught by her father. Now, a few years later, she attends the funeral of her elderly husband (not the man she ran away to marry) and who does she see but The One Who Got Away! Can they make their love work this time around or will Genevieve be A Fool Again?
The Duchess's Tattoo: Thoughts on THE AMERICAN HEIRESS
Goodwin, Daisy
$0.00
Short story / Historical fiction
"Anyone suffering Downton Abbey withdrawal symptoms (who isn't?) will find an instant tonic in Daisy Goodwin’s The American Heiress. The story of Cora Cash, an American heiress in the 1890s who bags an English duke, this is a deliciously evocative first novel that lingers in the mind." --Allison Pearson, New York Times bestselling author of I Don’t Know How She Does It and I Think I Love You
"For daughters of the new American billionaires of the 19th century, it was the ultimate deal: marriage to a cash-strapped British Aristocrat in return for a title and social status. But money didn’t always buy them happiness." —DAISY GOODWIN IN THE DAILY MAIL
Traveling abroad with her mother at the turn of the twentieth century to seek a titled husband, beautiful, vivacious Cora Cash, whose family mansion in Newport dwarfs the Vanderbilts’, suddenly finds herself Duchess of Wareham, married to Ivo, the most eligible bachelor in England.
In "The Duchess’s Tattoo", Cora Cash is desperate to be a fashionable lady of society. Despite her title and her wealth, she finds that English society is not that welcoming to "The American Duchess." When Cora spies a distinctive snake tattoo on her mother-in-law’s wrist, she decides that she must have one as well.
It is up to the talented tattoo artist to save "The American Duchess" from herself.
In addition to the short story, "The Duchess Tattoo", this also contains a letter from the author, Daisy Goodwin, on writing THE AMERICAN HEIRESS, an excerpt from "Titled Americans", an authentic quarterly publication from 1890 which listed all of the eligible titled bachelors still on the market, and an excerpt from AN AMERICAN HEIRESS, a moving and brilliantly entertaining debut novel coming from St. Martin’s Press in June.
Do the Work
Pressfield, Steven
$0.00
Business, Nonfiction, Self-improvement
Product Description: Could you be getting in your way of producing great work? Have you started a project but never finished? Would you like to do work that matters, but don't know where to start?
The answer is Do the Work, a manifesto by bestselling author Steven Pressfield, that will show you that it’s not about better ideas, it’s about actually doing the work.
Do the Work is a weapon against Resistance – a tool that will help you take action and successfully ship projects out the door.
“There is an enemy. There is an intelligent, active, malign force working against us. Step one is to recognize this. This recognition alone is enormously powerful. It saved my life, and it will save yours.”
Available in both a 5-pack and 48-pack for you to share, as well as a special collectible edition, Do the Work may be just what you need to get out of your own way.
Deadworld
Duncan, J.N.
$0.00 / Price now back up to $4.36
Fantasy
She's as tough as anything haunting Chicago's streets. But to deal with an inhuman power that won't stay buried, this FBI agent needs help that comes at an immortal price. . .
Jackie Rutledge has seen her share of supernatural killers. But her latest murder case is what recurring nightmares are made of. Brutally exsanguinated human victims, vanishing-into-the-ether evidence, and a city on the edge of panic mean that she and her psychic partner, Laurel, are going to need more than just backup . . .
So Jackie is fine with any help rugged P.I. Nick Anderson can give--even if that includes the impish ghost and sexy vampire who make up his team. But Nick is hiding secrets of his own. And Jackie's investigation has plunged them both into a vengeful game reaching back centuries--and up against a malevolent force hungry for more than just victory. . .
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From the author: Hello, readers! A little bit here about Deadworld in the hopes that I can encourage you to give it a try. I like to consider this story a paranormal thriller. Unfortunately, this is not a shelving category for books, and so it is classified as an Urban Fantasy. You'll likely find this book in the sf/f section of your bookstore.
Personally, I love stories with supernatural elements in them. As a writer it always sparks my imagination to wander in all kinds of directions. The possibilities truly are limitless here. The title for my story comes from my pondering what lies beyond the world of the living. What happens when we die? While this is not the focus of the story, it certainly forms the backdrop from which the ongoing story develops. This book is the first in a series, which will look into this world beyond, and how it might interact with our living world.
Jackie Rutledge is the protagonist for these novels. She's hard-nosed, a little abrasive, and struggling to cover a part of herself that threatens to undermine the tough, FBI agent lifestyle she has been leading. I like characters who have to really work to succeed. While this can obviously play out in the effort to take down villains, which it does in this story, it's more intriguing to me, to have characters struggle emotionally. And Jackie does, trust me.
So, if you desire to read a bit of thriller, crime fiction, paranormal, and an emotionally struggling heroine, I hope you'll give Deadworld a try, and subsequent books in the series too! Deadworld #2 will be out Oct. '11. Thank you. Enjoy!
The Message NT w/ Ps and Proverbs Burg Leather
Peterson, Eugene H.
$0.00 / Price now back to $6.36
Bibles
In this contemporary English version of the New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs, Eugene Peterson strives to convey the earthy truths of the original Greek and Hebrew texts. As he explains in his introduction, there were two levels of language in the Greek-speaking world, "formal" and "informal". The one was for use in official documents, epic poetry, and philosophy, the other for shopping lists and personal letters--the common idiom of everyday speech. "This is the language used throughout the New Testament ... a rough and earthy language that reveals God's presence and action where we least expect it, catching us when we are up to our elbows in the soiled ordinariness of our lives and God is the furthest thing from our minds."
It is in the spirit of this "soiled ordinariness" that Eugene Peterson translates John 1:14 (NIV: "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us") to "The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood." Likewise, in Romans 8:3 where the NIV renders "For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering," The Message reads, "God went for the jugular when he sent his own son.... In his son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all." Peterson offers no pretense of elevated language or intellectualism, only the insistence that God is relevant in 20th-century work-week and weekend lives.
This kind of translation is not a new enterprise, however. Tyndale--the man singularly responsible for our English translations of the Bible--is purported to have said in a dispute with opposing clergy, "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost." We're simply glad someone of our own generation chose to do the same. --Benjamin Gebhardt
Tales of the Revolution: True Stories of People who are Poking the Box and Making a Difference
Seth Godin
$0.00
Business / Management
Early in March, The Domino Project published Seth Godin’s Poke the Box. We Immediately received stories about people taking initiative in their own lives - doing things differently at work or with their families, taking initiative in places they were scared to. Prompted by the number of inspiring stories we received, we launched Tales of the Revolution, profiling examples of passionate self-starters who regularly went above and beyond to make a difference by doing. This free Kindle edition is a sampling of the hundreds of stories we received. Each one could be just the right inspiration for you to keep poking.
The Heart of Memory: A Novel
Strobel, Alison
$0.00
Christian Fiction
When beloved Christian writer and speaker Savannah Trover becomes gravely ill, she has to face the sham that her faith has become. Days before her heart transplant, she vows to change her ways and she renews her relationship with Christ. But when she awakens from the surgery, Savannah discovers that her faith has left her completely. Savannah's husband, Shaun, is concerned about his wife's odd behavior---and even more concerned about the secret he's keeping from her. If she doesn't bring down their ministry, then he might, losing his family in the process. A stranger may hold the answer to Savannah's recovery, but is Savannah strong enough to return to her old way of life? Can Shaun right his wrongs before word gets out? And do either one of them remember how to be who they once were---or who they want to be?In this latest relational drama from Alison Strobel, readers will explore the difference between emotional faith and life-giving truth as Savannah wonders if she can ever trust her heart again.
A Chunk of Hell
Sidor, Steven
$0.00
Sample / Short Story / Horror
After serving in the Pacific, Rick Conner returned from the war and opened a detective agency. He finds things, and his services don’t come cheap. An old buddy from the Corps points him toward a job. But his new client, the eccentric millionaire Lazlo Belzoni, puts Conner immediately on guard.
Belzoni claims to be a doctor but seems more of a mystic. He’s looking for a stone that was stolen from him. It’s supposed to be some kind of relic. Conner is skeptical, but what’s it to him as long as the good doctor pays top dollar. Rick finds the stone. And the moment he lays his hands on it, the game changes. He goes from hunting a thief to being hunted himself.
What’s stalking him is far worse than he ever could’ve imagined.
“A Chunk of Hell,” Steven Sidor’s prequel to his stunning new novel Pitch Dark, is a runaway train of a story that will draw you into an adventure that has only just begun.
Heir To The Everlasting
Daugharty, Janice
$0.00 / Though price is back up to $9.99 now
Family Saga, Literary fiction, Historical fiction
The Pulitzer-nominated author of EARL IN THE YELLOW SHIRT turns her acclaimed talents to an epic story of three generations of Southern women at Big Eddy, the home place they love. HEIR TO THE EVERLASTING begins at the turn of the last century with the beautiful, determined Pinkie Alexander, strong-willed matron of the Alexander clan. Come Hell or the high water of the south Georgia river which gave Big Eddy its name, Pinkie will ensure the survival of her family on their beloved land--a place where the family cemetery guards the spirit of the past, and where secrets, as well as the dearly departed, are buried. Follow the lives, loves, mysteries, deadly feuds and steely courage of the Alexander women through a full century of joys and sorrows. HEIR TO THE EVERLASTING showcases the culture, language and daily travails of their time and place with vivid storytelling skills and Janice Daugharty's love for "the working words."
Freckles
Stratton-Porter, Gene
$0.00
Children's fiction
In Freckles a homeless waif finds his deliverance in the primeval Limberlost swamp. Maimed and abandoned as an infant, Freckles seeks a chance to prove his worth. He is given that opportunity as the guard of the precious timber of the Limberlost.
About the Author - American novelist and photographer. Many of Porter's works became best-sellers and are famous for their vibrant depiction of natural life. She began her career as a photographer but later turned to fiction. --This text refers to the Library Binding edition.
Almost Perfect (Perfect Trilogy)
Ortolon, Julie
$0.00
Romance
Three longtime friends are dismayed to discover that a fourth friend, author of a self-help book, has used them as examples of how women let fear prevent them from achieving happiness. They make a pact to face their biggest fears, and Maddy takes the plunge. Her husband's cancer forced her to put her dream of becoming an artist on hold, but now that she is widowed, she accepts an invitation to be the arts-and-crafts director of a summer camp in New Mexico. The director is her old flame from high school who she dumped when he proposed. Joe has never forgiven her, but one look at her wild red hair and funky clothes, and he is smitten all over again. Maddy and Joe have sexy fun, but trying to achieve emotional intimacy is as easy as walking across a field of land mines. How do they get over their past and create a future? Find out in comedic romance writer Ortolon's funny and compelling story of two unforgettable characters.
13 Little Blue Envelopes with Bonus Material
Johnson, Maureen
$0.00
Fiction, Travel, Adventure, Feel Good
Don't miss New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson's fun, romantic, and hilarious European adventure, 13 Little Blue Envelopes, now with an excerpt from the sequel, The Last Little Blue Envelope.
Inside little blue envelope 1 are $1,000 and instructions to buy a plane ticket.In envelope 2 are directions to a specific London flat.
The note in envelope 3 tells Ginny: Find a starving artist.
Because of envelope 4, Ginny and a playwright/thief/ bloke–about–town called Keith go to Scotland together, with somewhat disastrous–though utterly romantic–results. But will she ever see him again?
Everything about Ginny will change this summer, and it's all because of the 13 little blue envelopes.
