These kids from a school in Florida created an amazing nature ebook for the iPad all about the creatures and plants to be found in Florida, which went straight to the top selling position from 26^th April to 7^th May. A very impressive performance I reckon.

With the perfectly sensible name of “Creatures, Plants and More! A Kid’s Guide to Northwest Florida” this ebook was created by the seventh graders at Woodlawn Beach Middle School with the help of their teacher Andrea Santilli, who had this to say about their work.

My kids have worked hard and I am extremely proud of them

I would have thought, having seen the kid’s work, this has to be something of an understatement.

Fully interactive.

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Here we have an online ebook source that has the most wonderful collection of all the greatest (and worst) pulp fiction from the 1940s and thereabouts in ebook form, and free too.

Thanks to a regular reader of this blog, Keri, I can tell you a bit about Munseys, a website that has collected all the best and worst of that extraordinary form of fiction known as Pulp Fiction.   Ebooks such as No Orchids For Miss Blandish by James Handley Chase, an English author’s attempt to write an American Detective novel.   A total failure, but none the less an ebook that is worth reading, as it occupies a special position in the history of this particular genre.

They have an amazing collection of these very rough and ready detective novels, mostly by American writers, and all with those superbly awful and garish covers we knew and loved so well.   Such as Blond Bait by Ed Lacy (Who?) and so on. These ebooks are not only a strange glimpse into the mind set of that period, just around the Second World War and the sort of reading that millions of people enjoyed, but also a chance to enjoy a style of writing that used to be immensely popular.

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If you have an ereader, you will know that in spite of all the fuss and shouting, the great bulk of ebooks cost around $1 to $9 each, even ones written by well established and famous Airport Book authors (the Tom Clanceys of this world I mean by this).

However, regardless of what model of ereader you happen to have, be it a Kindle, a Sony, a Nook or some completely unknown Chinese back street model, you have access to literally millions of free ebooks too if you want.

Obviously all those out of copyright ebooks that you can get at the two Gutenberg sites and similar are fine, but for obvious reasons they are all elderly to downright ancient ebooks, and whilst 19^th century writing may be your preferred reading, this is not the case for most readers I suspect. Thus it is useful to know that you can find an enormous range of contemporary ebooks for free on the net.

I don’t mean illegal download sites:

I am not talking about illegal downloads from Torrents, or any other form of illegal ebooks here, but ebooks that are being offered for a variety of perfectly good reasons by their authors for us to download and read.

Mostly this is to encourage us to buy the follow-up ebooks from these authors, or the next 15 volumes of a series, or simply to get their ebooks read by people, in the hope that they can then start to charge for their work once they have established a readership base. Sort of like Loss leaders in Supermarkets I suppose.

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I see on Nate Hoffelder always interesting and readable blog – The Digital Reader – that Sony have come back to their earlier offer of a free Harry Potter ebook if you buy their WiFi ereader.

As you may have noticed back in the early exciting days when Pottermore announced their existence and plans for selling all  the Harry Potter ebooks via their own website, Sony at the time announced that as part of the launch of that website, they would give anyone who bought a brand new Sony WiFi ereader a coupon to get Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for free from Pottermore.

Well, this didn’t happen as you know, since Pottermore took much longer to come to full life that was expected, months longer in fact.  So Sony withdrew that offer.  Well they really had no choice as Pottermore would not sell  or give away any Harry Potter ebooks until they had their site exactly how they wanted it to be.

Well, that happy situation is now with us, and Pottermore is going great guns and millions of ebook copies of the Harry Potter books are pouring through Cyberspace as the world buys the whole set in ebook form.

Sony try again……………

So, Sony in an attempt to boost sales of their WiFi ereader have reintroduced that offer.   Thus, if you now go out and buy one of these ereaders, you will get a coupon that will enable you to get your free copy of that ebook from Potttermore….  Joy unconfined say I.

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As you may know, Phoenix who publish and sell science fiction ebooks, have a policy of giving away one ebook each month for free, and this month is no exception to this policy – see below for details of this month’s ebook – but for the next few weeks you can download a free ebook each week from them, via Amazon as well.

For the next 9 weeks (from this week, which is 10th April 2012) you can download a free Sci Fi ebook from them via the Amazon ebook store.  Each week a different ebook.  An amazing offer and one that all lovers of Sci Fi should take them up on I would think.

Each Tuesday and Wednesday for the next 9 weeks you can follow the link below and get hold of your free ebook, many of which will apparently be offered with some form of additional promotion to make it even more attractive.

Important note:

Please make sure that you remember time zones when you try and get these free ebooks.  You have to go there when it is the relevant date in the USA, not as I tried to do yesterday, when I went to pick up this week’s freebie at 8 am on 24th April in the Philippines, which of course is still sometime in the middle of the night of 23rd April in the USA ……

DRM free ebooks:

For the duration of this promo, these specific ebooks will only be available via Amazon, as Amazon insist on exclusive selling rights to any ebooks they carry it seems, but those of you who do not have a Kindle need not feel left out, as all these ebooks will be DRM free, so you can easily convert them to ePub or whatever system your particular ereader uses using a program such as Calibre to convert them.

As a result of the policy of Amazon to have exclusive selling rights to these ebooks, they will not be available in any other format or via any other online ebook store for the duration of this promo, but as Phoenix tell me:

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Bookboon offers a wide range of free ebooks dealing with business, education and travel in 7 European languages.  All written specifically for them.

Legal downloads or not?

Lets get this  clear straight away, all these ebooks are completely legal, and free to download.  The way they do this is to accept advertisements in the body of the ebooks, quite large ones in fact, but not a problem I found when reading a number of the ebooks they offer.  Interestingly many of these ads were for very large multinational companies, which reinforce the fact that these ebooks are in no way illegal.

Very simple site to use:

Navigating and finding the ebook you are after is very simple here, for two reasons, the first being that they do not have a vast selection in each of the three main categories (Travel, Business and Textbooks), the second being that it is very well laid out I found.

Getting these ebooks:

This is simplicity itself, simply choose the ebook you want, and then you have to register with them (which might be a “no-do” for some who do not wish their details to be all over the web – though nothing to force you to give them your real details, it is the internet after all), after which you can simply download the ebook of your choice, and off you go.

All in PDF format:

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