Every week I update our family members on their Kindle books. We each keep our own Kindle, but we share an Amazon account together. I keep track of who buys what. The cool part is that we can share the books with one another. Not only does it save us money, but it gives us something to enjoy with one another. Here is this week's email.
Dear Dad, Jillian, Tim, Jessica, Dave, Jennifer, Mike, Nancy, Patty, and Cheryl:
Wow! What a week for the Kindlesphere as well as for our own little Pierce Family BookClub. Three new Kindles have been made available to us by Amazon - at surprisingly low prices. So far our little band has ordered 3 of them! Patty and Cheryl, no excuses now for both of you not to have your own Kindle device. We've also added 8 new titles (or 13 - depending on how we count them) to our Kindle archives - Read below for details!
New Kindles. This weekly email to you doesn't have room to tell you all the details about the new Kindles that are available. Go to the Amazon website to view all the new info. I'm hoping that Grayden, Patty and Cheryl will now be able to have their own Kindles. Here's the short story on each. #1) The Kindle 3's, which most of our club owns, is now redubbed the Kindle Keyboard. That makes sense because it's the only Kindle now with a physical keyboard. What is new is that the special offers version - the one with the ads as screensavers - have been knocked down in price to $99. You'll still pay $139 for the WiFi version is you don't want commercials on your Kindle.
#2) The Kindle. Plain, straightforward reading device. And priced at the low, low price of $79! Nothing fancy here. Just the beautiful E-Ink screen we've all come to know and love. No keyboard. No touchscreen. You read and move around with a 5-way controller at the bottom of the device. You won't want to do much typing with this one, but for reading on a budget it will be a thing of beauty. One more thing this basic Kindle won't have is any audio or speakers. If you want to listen to your books, which I love, this one won't do. The storage on the $79 version is half the others at 2 gigabytes, enough to store 1,400 books. Using the free WiFi you will also be able to download free books from the library. This one is shipping right now. The $79 is for the Special Offers version. You'll pay another $30 for one without commercials.
#3) Kindle Touch. This one is exciting. As the name suggests you move around this model by touching the screen. And, like the others, the WiFi Special Offers version is only $99. ($139 without Special Offers.) This was too good a deal for Jillian to pass up. She was still within her 30 purchase window on her Kindle 3, so she called the great customer support at Amazon. They gave her a RMA number and she shipped off her brand new K3 back to Amazon. She ordered the new K-touch and saved herself $40! Unfortunately she won't receive it until late November. In the meantime she will be borrowing mine for her school books and I'll read everything on my iPad Kindle app.
We're told that this new Kindle Touch is 8% lighter and 11% smaller. The touchscreen works with a tap, not a swipe, so the reader can use only one hand. This Kindle also includes a new X-Ray feature that lets readers "explore the bones of a book." With a single tap, readers can see all the passages across a book that mention ideas, fictional characters, historical figures, places or topics that interest them, as well as more detailed descriptions from Wikipedia and Shelfari, Amazon’s community-powered encyclopedia for book lovers.
#4) Kindle Fire. This is the one I'm so excited about... and Tim too I'm betting! Both of us have ordered this new $199 tablet and are waiting for November 15th deliveries. This 7-inch tablet is half the size of the iPad. In addition to being a backlit eBook reader, this will also give us access to 18 million movies, songs, magazines, popular Androic apps and games. Not only will this be a fabulous media content device, but it will be a direct portal to everything sold on the Amazon website. Someone described it this week as today's electronic version of the Sears Roebuck catalog of yesteryear.
New Books. We've added 8 new titles to our archives this week. They are listed below. One of those titles, The Twighlight Saga, actually includes 5 books. Also Jillian was the first to add a library book to her Kindle, The Paris Wife, which I haven't included below because it will expire and then be removed. Still it's great that she figured it out. It does work! 11,000 libraries are now accessible on your Kindle device. What a great new feature!
Mercury Falls by Robert Kroese
Purchased by Mark
Price $0.99 (Kindle Daily Deal; price back to $7.99 now)
Contemporary, Science Fiction, End Times, Christian, Humor - hard to define
I have to admit I'm excited about this one. I plan to read while I'm on vacation. Looks intriguing to me.
The Apocalypse is nigh in this whimsical, riotous debut. Christine Temetri, a freelancer for a popular religious news magazine, is tired of endless assignments covering cults incorrectly prophesizing the End of Days. When she talks her boss into giving her a better assignment, she doesn’t anticipate it will actually lead her back to a cult leader: the charismatic Galileo Mercury, who turns out not to be a cult leader at all, but a bona fide angel. Mercury is more interested in playing ping pong and drinking beer than he is in being involved in the upcoming Apocalypse. But when he and Christine escape a bit of divine retribution and end up saving the life of the Antichrist, a sulky gamer named Karl Grissom, they find themselves drawn into a miasma of heavenly intrigue and double-crossing. Lucifer himself is determined to find a loophole in the Apocalypse Accords, and Mercury and Christine are the only ones who can stop him. Clever, inventive, and original, Kroese’s hilarious romp has cult favorite written all over it.
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Purchased by Mark
Price $0.99 (Kindle Daily Deal; price back to $3.99 now)
Science Fiction, Literary Fiction
"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane." So reads the tombstone of downtrodden writer Kilgore Trout, but we have no doubt who's really talking: his alter ego Kurt Vonnegut. Health versus sickness, humanity versus inhumanity--both sets of ideas bounce through this challenging and funny book. As with the rest of Vonnegut's pure fantasy, it lacks the shimmering, fact-fueled rage that illuminates Slaughterhouse-Five. At the same time, that makes this book perhaps more enjoyable to read.
Breakfast of Champions is a slippery, lucid, bleakly humorous jaunt through (sick? inhumane?) America circa 1973, with Vonnegut acting as our Virgil-like companion. The book follows its main character, auto-dealing solid-citizen Dwayne Hoover, down into madness, a condition brought on by the work of the aforementioned Kilgore Trout. As Dwayne cracks, then crumbles, Breakfast of Champions coolly shows the effects his dementia has on the web of characters surrounding him. It's not much of a plot, but it's enough for Vonnegut to air unique opinions on America, sex, war, love, and all of his other pet topics--you know, the only ones that really count.
Signs and Wonders by Alex Adena
Purchased by Mark
Price $0.99
Christian Fiction, Inspirational
One of my new Twitter friends is Alex Adena. I became interested in his book from my friendship with him. By the way, he guarantees I'll be uplifted by reading it; he promises to refund my buck if I'm not inspired. I don't think I'll be collecting! This is another book I hope to read during my vacation week.
Annie Grace grew up as the daughter of a faith healing crusader who told her she could perform miracles. But 25 years later, after she has inherited her late father's ministry, Annie's only remaining conviction is that she is a fraud -- a fear she must face when the district attorney confronts her about the ministry's past. As a pesky television reporter hounds her and a U.S. senator subpoenas her to testify before Congress, Annie is forced to reveal the truth to herself and to the world. When she does, mysterious things begin to happen. What is the meaning of these signs and wonders?
Pumpkin Cookbook by Goosebury Patch
Purchased by Mark - for Jennifer and Jillian
Price $0.00
Cookbook, Lifestyle and Home
I've learned that both Jennifer and Jillian want anything free that has to do with cooking. Especially if it has anything to do with pumpkins! Ha! Both seemed to be thrilled with this addition. Fun to bring joy at the price of only a click!
Get a taste of Gooseberry Patch in this collection of over 20 favorite pumpkin recipes! Pumpkins are as versatile in the kitchen as they are in your home…start the morning with Pumpkin Coffee Cake, amaze the kids with The Great Pumpkin Stew, and invite friends over on a chilly October evening for some warm Pumpkin Cobbler.
Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving... by John Medina
Purchased by Mark
Price $1.49 (Kindle Daily Deal; price back up to $7.16)
Psychology and Counseling, Self-Help, Leadership
Multitasking is the great buzz word in business today, but as developmental molecular biologist Medina tells readers in a chapter on attention, the brain can really only focus on one thing at a time. This alone is the best argument for not talking on your cellphone while driving. Medina (The Genetic Inferno) presents readers with a basket containing an even dozen good principles on how the brain works and how we can use them to our benefit at home and work. The author says our visual sense trumps all other senses, so pump up those PowerPoint presentations with graphics. The author says that we don't sleep to give our brain a rest—studies show our neurons firing furiously away while the rest of the body is catching a few z's. While our brain indeed loses cells as we age, it compensates so that we continue to be able to learn well into our golden years. Many of these findings and minutiae will be familiar to science buffs, but the author employs an appealing style, with suggestions on how to apply his principles, which should engage all readers.
Age Smart by Jeffrey Rosensweig and Betty Liu
Purchased by Mark
Price $0.00
Health, Mind and Body; Aging
Americans are embracing an entirely new way of aging: one that's based on staying productive, staying active, and staying young in body and mind. Jeffrey A. Rosensweig and Betty Liu share strategies for bringing together all the elements of a long, happy, fulfilling, connected life. Starting today, you'll learn how to take advantage of the latest sciences of health and longevity... leverage today's most powerful techniques for protecting your financial security... find or keep the work you love... pursue a path to deepen your own personal spirituality, whatever form it may take. No Pink Pants is packed with easy-to-use tips and guidelines for everything from your portfolio to your medical insurance. The heart of the book: intimate interviews with individuals celebrated for what they've learned about getting better with age: powerful role models ranging from Jimmy Carter to Helen Gurley Brown, Robert Mondavi to C. Everett Koop. Learn from their experiences; then use this book's easy worksheets to take control of your own future!
The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell
Purchased by Mark
Price $1.99 (Kindle Daily Deal; price back up to $7.19 now)
Scandinavian, Mysteries and Thrillers
At the start of this Swedish version of the station-house police procedural, set in the Skane district in the south of Sweden, Det. Kurt Wallander, who has just returned from an idyllic vacation in Rome, joins the hunt for the missing Holger Eriksson, an elderly poet. Finding the man's corpse in a ditch, impaled on sharpened bamboo stakes, brings Wallander back abruptly to the realities of crime in modern Sweden. While Wallander and his colleagues investigate the murder, another man is found dead in the local woods, making it clear that they have a brutal serial killer on their hands. The killer plans each murder carefully to ensure that the victim suffers for several days before dying. Who could hate these innocent-seeming men so much as to want to torture them to death? The police detectives must delve deeply into the victims' lives to find out what links them together and what might have made them a deadly enemy. Mankell takes the reader slowly and meticulously through the long investigation's progress, including frequent reversals. The policemen are constantly overworked and exhausted, but they make acute deductions and chase down every lead relentlessly. Mankell is a talented writer, and the translation by Steven Murray is graceful and colloquial, but the narrative is so bleak and brooding that it certainly qualifies as the darkest of Swedish noir.
The Twilight Saga Complete Collection by Stephenie Meyer
Purchased by Jessica
Price $46.99
Science Fiction, Fantasy, Love & Romance
Jessica is a big fan and wanted the entire collection available on her Kindle. She tells me that the prices of the individual books would have added up to much more than what she paid for the collection.
Reviews "Meyer has, like one of her vampires, turned into something rare and more than merely human.... People do not want to just read Meyer's books; they want to climb inside them and live there." -Time
"A literary phenomenon." -The New York Times
"[Stephenie Meyer is] the world's most popular vampire novelist since Anne Rice." -Entertainment Weekly
Product Description This stunning set, complete with five editions of Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, and The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella, makes the perfect gift for fans of the bestselling vampire love story. Deeply romantic and extraordinarily suspenseful, The Twilight Saga capture the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires.
Ok boys and girls. That does it for this week's email. Hope you are reading and enjoying life to the fullest! Have a GREAT week! I know I will!
Love you all, Mark
