For your Kindle, here are a few deals -
- Honeymooning: A Cypress Hollow Yarn Short Story by Rachael Herron. Price: $0. Genre: Short Story, Contemporary Fiction, Romance, Perhaps Knitting. Found courtesy Happy Reader Joyce.
- Stalina by Emily Rubin. Price: $1. Genre: Fiction, Contemporary Fiction. Rated 4.5 stars on 12 reviews. This is doing very well – It also happens to be an Amazon Encore title.
Rubin’s first novel about a Russian woman’s adventures in America after the fall of the Soviet Union is teasingly matter-of-fact and cat-claw smart. As Stalina immigrates to the U.S., lugging a suitcase full of sexy bras in hard-to-find sizes she plans to sell, we learn of her difficult childhood in Leningrad, where her Jewish parents named her after Stalin in the cynical hope that a namesake would be protected. At once pragmatic and romantic, Stalina became a chemist and an “engineer of aroma” for the KGB.
- The Heat (The Big Bad Wolf Series) by Heather Killough-Walden. Price: $1. Genre: Romantic Suspense, Vampires, Romance. Rated 4.5 stars on 20 reviews.
Lily St. Claire is a simple, if beautiful Southern girl who has no idea what she is in for when she decides to move back to her home town in Louisiana after a decade of being away. But between the two very different alpha werewolves who instantly begin fighting to claim her as their mate and the serial killer who has her in his sites, she’s about to find out.
The stream of free books has dried up. It’s rather disheartening.
Is Apple the only company that will have a successful app store going forward?
Peter-Paul Koch at QuirksBlog has a very good post on The Future of App Stores.
He wonders whether eventually the web will take over, and whether no successful app store apart from the Apple app store will exist. He presents his argument extremely well, and on a longer time-line it’s quite possible that this is exactly what happens.
On a shorter timeline – Well, it’s easy to see a world where each set of devices, and each niche has its own successful app-store. Already we have Facebook winning the Social Network App Store wars – helped by the fact that it was the first social network to embrace apps.
If you consider eReaders, we will definitely see one out of Kindle App Store and Nook App Store come up with killer apps. Perhaps even both. Whichever eReader/Reading Tablet out of Kindle and Nook Color has the better apps, gets an advantage and sells more.
The question is whether any other company will be able to achieve the level of success Apple has achieved and that’s where Mr. Koch’s argument suddenly becomes very persuasive. Developers aren’t restricted by device type or niche – they can go to whichever store they feel has the best opportunities and which treats them well. That is the real reason Apple’s App Store has such a huge advantage.
Another thing working in its favor is that Apple has gathered up a lot of customers of good intent. Amazon and B&N have also probably done the same – especially since Amazon doesn’t promote openness. In theory, there ought to be a strong future for eReader App Stores. After that, it comes down to execution.
Filed under: free books Tagged: | kindle book deals
