First, some free kindle books. Warning: Prices change. PLEASE check the price BEFORE buying. Also, Amazon lists the Amazon Prime price in large size and below that the real size in fine print. So, if you aren’t Prime-handcuffed to Amazon, then please check the non-Prime price.
- The full list of new free kindle books at Amazon.
- Ryan’s Return by Barbara Freethy. Price: $0. Genre: Romance. Rated 4.5 stars on 27 reviews.
- The First Excellence – Fa-ling’s Map (Li Fa-ling Mystery Series) by Donna Carrick. Price: $0. Genre: Mystery, Excellent, Historical, Thriller. 376 pages. Rated 5 stars on 17 reviews. 376 pages. Superb Indie author – according to the reviewers. Wise men say … only fools rush in. But I can’t help fa-ling in love with this book.
- Drummer Boy: A Supernatural Thriller (Sheriff Littlefield Series) by Scott Nicholson. Price: $0. Genre: Suspense Thriller, Ghosts. Rated 4.5 stars on 37 reviews. 362 pages. All around in my hometown … they’re trying to track me down.
- Right Ascension (Edge of Apocalypse) by David Derrico. Price: $0. Genre: Technothriller, Thriller, The Year 3040, Mankind’s Place in the Universe. Rated 3.5 stars on 61 reviews. 216 pages.
- Sundial (Light Bringer Series) by C. F. Fruzzetti, M. I. Pearsall. Price: $0. Genre: Science Fiction, A Teenage Girl who’s Special. Rated 5 stars on 31 reviews. 330 pages.
- A Bella Street Mystery: The Secret Formula by Clare Havens. Price: $0. Genre: Women Sleuths, Fun Read, Fast Paced, Thriller. Rated 5 stars on 6 reviews. 168 pages.
- Vegas, Baby (Soul Searchers Series: Book 2) by Sandra Edwards. Price: $0. Genre: Romantic Suspense. Rated 4 stars on 13 reviews. 235 pages.
- Double Tap: The Lost Coast & Paris is a Bitch by Barry Eisler. Price: $0. Genre: Short Stories, Prequels to The Detachment. Around 40 pages each.
- Instant Karma: The Gateway to Your Destiny by The Angel of Good Fortune. Price: $0. Genre: Short Book on Instant Karma, Are You Ready. No reviews.
- Mighty Hammer Down (Legend of Reason Series) by David J. Guyton. Price: $0. Genre: Epic Fantasy, Political Drama, Gods and Wars. Rated 4 stars on 48 reviews. 404 pages.
- Note to Self: Don’t title the post ’20+ Free Kindle Books’ before actually going through the lists and seeing whether it’s a good day or not. Starts with Barbara Freethy and then drops off a cliff.
- Florida Heatwave by Michael Lister. Price: $0. Genre: Crime Stories.
- Locked Doors: A Novel of Terror by Blake Crouch. Price: $0. Genre: Police Procedural. Rated 4 stars on 27 reviews. 332 pages.
- The Art of Zen Meditation by Howard Fast. Price: $0. Genre: Zen.
- The Trophy Hunter by J. M. Zambrano. Price: $0. Genre: Woman Sleuths, When Big Game isn’t a Big Enough Thrill. Rated 4.5 stars on 7 reviews. 216 pages.
- Beatrice Beecham’s Fearsome Feast by Dave Jeffrey. Price: $0. Genre: Mystery, A Town of Secrets, A Girl who Loves Cooking, A CookBook and a Cry for Help, Fun & Intelligent, Adventure. Rated 5 stars on 7 reviews. 276 kb in size.
- Wolf’s Rite by Terry Persun. Price: $0. Genre: An Ad Exec, A Spiritual Awakening, Mystical Native Americans, Don Draper Meets Native American Wisdom. Rated 5 stars on 4 reviews.
- The Patriot Paradox (The Reluctant Hero Series, Book One) by William Esmont. Price: $0. Genre: Thriller, Technothriller, Conscience can be a Killer. Rated 4 stars on 38 reviews. 270 pages.
- Mirror Maze – A Norwegian Man’s True Story of Five Years in Mexican Prisons by Tom Brungar & Lisa Walker. Price: $0. Genre: True Story, Might be set for the Big Screen. Rated 4.5 stars on 9 reviews. 176 pages.
- The Peak Interview: New Insights into Winning the Interview and Getting the Job by Bill Burnett. Price: $0. Genre: Job Hunting. Rated 4.5 stars on 15 reviews. 174 kb in size.
- The Lost Ark by J. R. Rain. Price: $0. Genre: A Lost Professor, The Lost Ark, The Greatest Archaeological Discovery of all time. Rated 3.5 stars on 22 reviews. 371 kb in size.
- Be The Monkey – Barry Eislar & Joe Konrath Conversate by Jack Kilborn the Imaginary. Price: $0. Genre: Writing Skills, Monkeys & Frogs. 100 pages. Rated 5 stars on 14 reviews.
- Heaven’s Fire (Fairfax Family Series, Book 2) by Patricia Ryan. Price: $0. Genre: Historical, Romantic Suspense. Rated 5 stars on 20 reviews.
- The Gospel of Thomas: The Enlightenment Teachings of Jesus by Robert Wolfe. Price: $0. Genre: New Testament, Church History. Rated 4 stars on 4 reviews. 308 kb in size.
- Shot of Tequila by J. A. Konrath. Price: $0. Genre: Women Sleuths, Mystery. Rated 4.5 stars on 25 reviews. 270 pages.
- The Oil Market Czar by Gideon McLane. Price: $0. Genre: A CIA Analyst, A MI6 Engineer (Scottish), A Russian FSB Investigator, A Chinese Intelligence, The Oil Mafia. 148 pages. A Thriller. Do all the rivers of oil flow to the Sea?
We have a really great book for the Kindle Daily Deal:
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Price: $1.49. Genre: Literary Fiction, Science Fiction, A Fable for the Near Future, A Society where Women are tightly controlled, Atwood, Amazing. Rated 4 stars on 696 reviews. 325 pages. Haven’t read this one but have read Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood and Margaret Atwood is a special writer.
Next, a random guess at why Amazon likes random free books.
Random Free Books are like Slot Machines
- It’s Human Nature to like surprises.
- Anything is better than being bored to death by sheer predictability.
- Randomness provides that.
- Randomness in rewards provides that too.
- Amazon could easily have done genre specific email listings of free kindle books. It hasn’t because that would take away the surprise and take away the going to Amazon part. If a romance novel lover got a daily email listing the 3 very good free romance novels every day – She wouldn’t go to Amazon that day to search for more. Probably not.
- Amazon could easily have done quality control for free kindle books. It hasn’t because rewards are most satisfying if you put effort into it.
- Slot Machines = Rewards + Unpredictability. That’s exactly what Kindle Free Books are – rewards + unpredictability.
- Chances are – people would get tired of free kindle books if it was a guaranteed amount of good free kindle books per day. The terrible stuff makes the good stuff more appreciated. The working hard to scan through books make readers appreciate the books they do find to their tastes more. If you took 10 minutes to find a 4-star rated Science Fiction novel, then that’s going to seem more of a find than something in your email inbox that took you 5 seconds.
- Chances are – Amazon thought long and hard about how to set things up so that the free kindle books offered by authors turn into a random reward situation and also get people visiting Amazon more and more.
- At the end of the day – it’s free books. All that jazz about not looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Paradoxically, it’s in Amazon’s interest to make the process of finding free kindle books you like both unpredictable and not so straightforward. It might have planned it out or it might have stumbled into it. Whichever the case, it would be madness for Amazon to fix the problem since it leads to Kindle owners spending more time at Amazon.com and buying other things. It’s a treasure hunt run in a mall – the mall has no incentive to organize it in your back yard instead.
Filed under: free books Tagged: | free kindle books
Love the “note to self” above, I read all your posts line by line, not so much to pluck out a title I might like, more about enjoying your rare flip comments!
You are a joy to read, thank you!!
thanks Kathleen. It wouldn’t be fun to write the posts without you and other readers to write for.
A thought on your current and future apps…
A sideline to suggest. No royalties please,
A friend with a Christmas surprise of a kindle fire has only 2 downloaded books because she “misses the smell of a real book”. All she wants it to do is get her onto her Pogo dot com GAMES!!
Please Lord, some scratch-n-sniff stickers that can be applied to their kindle covers!
They can come in “new hardcover” and “musty old paperback”, maybe a limited edition “first day of the school year new”
Sign me the mother of 3 over-loved kindles (ages 4, 2 and 2 months), proud nana to 1,200+ kindle titles
What a great idea
If you title your posts with something like: Free books for 12/30/2011, it would make finding the posts again a lot easier. Either that or do a site map so that the blog would be easier to navigate. The search function doesn’t work very well.
If books that aren’t free are included, the title could include: “some paid kindle books and some paid physical books for 12/30/2011″. Since you’ve said that this site is about reading and not about selling kindle books, you could also include books from Barnes and Noble (which is the only place where I buy physical books), Books a Million, as well as sites such as Project Gutenberg where all of the books are free. I do not think such a blog already exists, so you could trump everybody by using the idea first. Plus it would add value to the blog by giving readers more options.
With Barnes and Noble, I take my physical body and put it into my physical car. I drive over physical roads to the physical Barnes and Noble store. I enter the physical building where I can browse physical books to my heart’s content. It’s rare that I get out of that physical store with only one physical book. Back when I was buying books to donate to a Christian school library that is out in the boonies of California, I usually left B&N with at least 20 books. B&N gave me a educator’s discount since the final destination of the books was a school library.
When I started donating books, the school library consisted of two shelves in a classroom. It eventually had to be moved to its own room. When other people became aware that the library was growing, they started donating books. The last that I heard, the library occupied four rooms. Maybe that will inspire others to donate books to school libraries which can only be a good thing for young readers.
Didn’t plan to write this much, but I’m doing my thinking with my fingers
Not going to add dates to the titles. Perhaps a site map.