Assistant Director Angela Turner, told me about a website that will be of interest to anyone who uses a Kindle e-reader and likes a bargain. It’s called Pixel of Ink, www.pixelofink.com, and it’s devoted to steering Kindle users to free and discount priced e-books.
The people who maintain Pixel of Ink search the Amazon Kindle site for free and discounted e-books and then they provide links for obtaining those titles. Along with daily specials, they also provide catalog listings for various genres, such as romance, historical fiction, mystery, nonfiction, Christian and children’s books.
Often, authors, novice to famous, will make limited copies of new books available online free to increase demand for their works. Series authors make the first book in a series free or discounted to entice readers. Pixel of Ink is an easy site to use, but I suggest you do open and read the “start here” section of the website that can be found in the right corner of the blue banner at the top of the home page. There you can read directions for finding and acquiring the e-books you’d like to download. It’s important to read this page. The price of e-books and the availability of free e-books can change from day to day, even hour to hour and the “start here” section of the home page will tell you how to make sure the book you want to download is still free or discounted.
Pixel of ink is also a great site for anyone who is a fan of self-published or indie press books. Take a look. Angela says she has more than 200 books loaded on her Kindle, now, some of them popular bestsellers that she got absolutely free.
For those of you who like to listen to audio books, John Campbell from the Engine House Deli told me about a wonderful website for free audio books. It’s called LibriVox, http://librivox.org/, and its banner proclaims it is dedicated to “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.” That means if you’d like to listen to a classic, you can listen to it free from LibriVox.
Librivox offers classics like Moby Dick, the Brothers Karamazov, Pride and Prejudice, and the poems of Dorothy Parker, free. I even found audio recordings from the ballad collections of Francis James Child, which I highly recommend. They are some of the Ur-songs of our region, sung or recited, on these recordings, by people who love them, not performers. You will not find that at Amazon — I looked.
You can access LibriVox books through podcasts e-mailed to you three times a week, or by downloading audio files to your computer, or you can subscribe to LibriVox through an iTunes account (they are still free through iTunes). John Campbell tells me he’s been using the service for years, that it works flawlessly and that the readers are wonderfully entertaining. I’ve tried it and he’s right.
During February’s gloom, wouldn’t it be fun to set up an afternoon or evening of ghost tale podcasts or recordings of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany and M.L. James?
Speaking of eerie tales for a February evening, at 2 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. today, our Kentucky Picture Show will be showing the film adaptation of Stephen King’s eerie novel about a famous writer who wrecks in a blizzard to be captured by his No. 1 fan — who’s ticked about his plots!
Yep, the movie’s free and so are the snacks and beverages. You could miss this movie, but then you’d be miserable.
