Today Amazon offer to enrich your e-books collection by The Siege of Washington: The Untold Story of the Twelve Days That Shook the Union written by John Lockwood and Charles Lockwood just for $1.99.

On April 14, 1861, following the surrender of Fort Sumter, Washington was “put into the condition of a siege,” declared Abraham Lincoln. Located sixty miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the nation’s capital was surrounded by the slave states of Maryland and Virginia. With no fortifications and only a handful of trained soldiers, Washington was an ideal target for the Confederacy. The South echoed with cries of “On to Washington!” and Jefferson Davis’s wife sent out cards inviting her friends to a reception at the White House on May 1.

Lincoln issued an emergency proclamation on April 15, calling for 75,000 troops to suppress the rebellion and protect the capital. One question now transfixed the nation: Whose forces would reach Washington first: Northern defenders or Southern attackers?

For 12 days, the city’s fate hung in the balance. Washington was entirely isolated from the North–without trains, telegraph, or mail. Sandbags were stacked around major landmarks, and the unfinished Capitol was transformed into a barracks, with volunteer troops camping out in the House and Senate chambers. Meanwhile, Maryland secessionists blocked the passage of Union reinforcements trying to reach Washington, and a rumored force of 20,000 Confederate soldiers lay in wait just across the Potomac River.

Drawing on firsthand accounts, The Siege of Washington tells this story from the perspective of leading officials, residents trapped inside the city, Confederates plotting to seize it, and Union troops racing to save it, capturing with brilliance and immediacy the precarious first days of the Civil War.

Flick Kick Field Goal is a game for your Kindle Fire which could attract your kids and free your time for a while. One of advantages of this game is that you can get it free. But only today. Tomorrow it’s price will be different. So, do not lose your opportunity – click here.

Bring the fun and accessibility of flick football to your Android device with this casual sports title from PikPok Games. Try to make kicks from different angles and distances, and even take into account shifting wind speeds and directions. Choose from Sudden Death, Arcade, Time Attack, and Practice modes, then use the intuitive flick controls to begin playing right away. Easy to pick up but hard to put down, this classic time-killer is sure to appeal to casual gamers and die-hard football fans alike.

Today Amazon offer to buy  a very good book with great discount: “One More River” written by Mary Glickman just for $1.99 (instead of $11.69 yesterday). This book is the sweeping story of a father and son, and of the loves that transform them amid the turbulence of the American South.

Bernard Levy was always a mystery to the community of Guilford, Mississippi. He was even more of a mystery to his son, Mickey Moe, who was just four years old when his father died in World War II. Now it’s 1962 and Mickey Moe is a grown man, who must prove his pedigree to the disapproving parents of his girlfriend, Laura Anne Needleman, to win her hand in marriage. With only a few decades-old leads to go on, Mickey Moe sets out to uncover his father’s murky past, from his travels up and down the length of the Mississippi River to his heartrending adventures during the Great Flood of 1927. Mickey Moe’s journey, taken at the dawn of the civil rights era, leads him deep into the backwoods of Mississippi and Tennessee, where he meets with danger and unexpected revelations at every turn. As the greatest challenge of his life unfolds, he will finally discover the gripping details of his father’s life—one filled with loyalty, tragedy, and heroism in the face of great cruelty from man and nature alike.

A captivating follow-up to Mary Glickman’s bestselling Home in the Morning, One More River tells the epic tale of ordinary men caught in the grip of calamity, and inspired to extraordinary acts in the name of love.

Feeling a tad stressed? Need a little more artistic beauty in your life? Gravilux is a gorgeous, very Zen-like app for Android that will both entertain and soothe you whenever you use it.

Gravilux lets you touch a universe of simulated stars beneath your fingertips, exerting a gravitation-like force to twist them into an infinite variety of colorful new galactic forms. Just launch the app and start moving your finger across the screen. The stars will react, moving in slow waves and forming amazing shapes and fascinating effects. As these pinpoints of light float across the screen of your smartphone or Kindle Fire, you’ll be overcome with sense of peace and serenity.

Gravilux combines elements of painting, animation, art, science, and gaming. Before it became a mobile app, this kind of interactive art was only found in galleries and museums. Now it’s right on your Android, available to you anytime and anywhere.

The app gives you many options to tune to your liking. Start out by selecting classic black and white or vibrant color. In the color setting, you have a veritable rainbow of shades from which to choose.

Hit the Settings button and you can choose an attract or repel effect, adjust the brightness, determine the spacing of the stars, and more. You can also touch the Optimize option and Gravilux will adjust itself to your particular device. The app is specifically designed for your Amazon Kindle Fire, so you’ll enjoy an incredible experience with Gravilux on that device.

Hugely popular as an iPad app, Gravilux was created by Scott Snibbe Studio, a leader in the development of digital applications. You’ll want to reserve a prominent space on your home screen for this enchanting work of art for your Android.

“Apps like Gravilux awaken an ‘Avatar’-like sensitivity to electricity in the body, power in the palms, and general connectedness.” – New York Times

“Every once in a while, an app will come along that has no practical application whatsoever but is just SO COOL that you have to have it! Gravilux is that sort of app.” – iphoneapplicationlist.com

“Of the millions of apps out there, none quite capitalize on the sheer fun and beauty of interactivity the way that Scott Snibbe’s do.” – Cool Hunting

Today, within Daily Deal action from Amazon, you can can get Vaccine Nation written by David Lender and which cost only $0.99

This book is about Dani North, a filmmaker, who just won at the Tribeca Film Festival for her documentary, The Drugging of Our Children, a film critical of the pharmaceutical industry. When she is handed “whistleblower” evidence about the U.S. vaccination program, she has to keep herself alive long enough to expose it before a megalomaniacal pharmaceutical company CEO can have her killed. Excerpts from Trojan Horse, The Gravy Train and Bull Street, David Lender’s other thrillers, follow the text of Vaccine Nation.

Some words about the Author

David Lender writes thrillers based on his over 25-year career as a Wall Street investment banker. He draws on an insider’s knowledge from his career in international mergers and acquisitions with Merrill Lynch, Rothschild and Bank of America for the international settings, obsessively driven personalities and real-world financial intrigues of his novels. His characters range from David Baldacci-like corporate power brokers to Elmore Leonard-esque misfits and scam artists. His plots reveal the egos and ruthlessness that motivate the players in the business world, as well as the inner workings of the most powerful of our financial institutions and corporations.

Also you can get Glow Tic Tac Toe Ad Free – a game for your Kindle Fire or any other Android device for free.

It’s glow time! Play an illuminated version of Tic Tac Toe with this classic game for your Android device. Glow Tic Tac Toe features smart, simple gameplay and a distinctive look that’s easy on the eyes. Challenge a partner or take on the computer–you’ll find yourself playing again and again.

You’ve played plenty of Tic Tac Toe in your life, of course, but not like this. Neon-like graphics make the game board seemingly leap from your screen, offering a fresh, newly entertaining experience with this age-old favorite.

What makes Glow Tic Tac Toe really stand out, though, is what’s under the hood. The game’s AI (artificial intelligence) adapts to your playing style and makes moves that are highly unpredictable. So even if you don’t have a friend nearby to play with, you can enjoy a consistently challenging experience that evolves with each game.

In addition, the AI’s skill level can be adjusted on the fly, in the middle of a game. There are three difficulty levels to choose from, so you can crank up the challenge while you’re playing–or bring it down a notch if you get cornered.

If you like horrors you should look up at today’s offer from Amazon: The Best American Noir of the Century written by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler. The today’s price is only $1.99 If you compare with yesterday’s price $16.95 you will see that it is real good deal.

James Ellroy and Otto Penzler mined the past century to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir’s twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain’s “Pastorale,” and its postwar heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing from the past decade.

Some words about the Authors

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were international bestsellers. His most recent book is Blood’s a Rover.
Otto Penzler is the founder of the Mysterious Bookshop and Mysterious Press.

Also we would like to quote only one review: “Well worth its impressive weight in gold, it would be a crime not to have his seminal masterpiece in your collection.” –New York Journal of Books

“Learning to Draw is Fun” is a name for a game for your kids which you can get today only for free.

If Rembrandt and Picasso had smartphones as kids, Learning to Draw is Fun would have been their favorite app. If you want to teach your kids how to draw, try this easy and fun app. Learning to Draw is Fun allows kids to try their hand at 20 different pictures, and then gives them a full color palette to finish their masterpiece.

Art School on Your Android Device

First, the budding artist chooses which design to draw. Learning to Draw is Fun features twenty cute pictures including a butterfly, snowman, pig, flower, and birthday cake. The artist then follows four easy steps to reproduce the picture. You can erase the picture at any time.

Artsy Tools

Once the picture is done, the child can go to a full color palette to finish the picture. Choose from 15 different colors with six different brush stroke sizes.

Share the picture through e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter, or set it as a wallpaper. You can also get the details of the picture’s file size and resolution within the app.

Warning: This app may inspire your child to become an art major. But at least your kid won’t be drawing on the living room wall.

Today Amazon allow you to get The Land of Later On by Anthony Weller just for $0.99

Kip—a New York jazz pianist whose career was cut short by a neurological disease—returns from a failed suicide attempt with a vivid, detailed memory of his journey through the afterlife. Resembling the world as he knows it, but unlimited in space and time, it’s unlike any eternity he has contemplated. Its residents are those who choose not to reincarnate, which would erase all memory of who they once were. Kip has a quest: to find his beloved Lucy, a yoga teacher who shared his apartment for years but died of leukemia before he took his own life. Is she still here? Has she waited for him, or “gone back” to become someone else? In his odyssey across centuries and locales (Istanbul to the Marquesas Islands, India to Oklahoma and New Guinea) to find her, Kip is guided by Walt Whitman—who urges him to write this memoir on his return.

Some words about the Author

Anthony Weller was born in 1957. His books include novels—The Garden of the Peacocks, The Polish Lover, and The Siege of Salt Cove—and a travel memoir of India and Pakistan, Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road. He is also well known as a musician. His poems and stories have appeared widely. As a journalist he traveled through Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific, Central America and the Caribbean, for National Geographic, G.Q., Forbes, GEO, the Paris Review, the New York Times Magazine, etc. He recently edited two books of his father’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting. First into Nagasaki:The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War (introduction by Walter Cronkite) was named by Kirkus one of the best books of 2006, followed by Weller’s War: A Legendary Foreign Correspondent’s Saga of WWII on Five Continents.

Manage your personal finances in the most comprehensive manner with Money for Android devices. Track different accounts (wallets), record your transactions, budget your income and expenses, and keep full control of your personal finances.

Financial Planning in Three Easy Steps

Manage all your bills and arrange them via a calendar with bill reminders included in the application, and catch up with any deadline.

Do you have several credit cards, debit cards, and bank accounts plus cash? The Transaction Register is included in the application together with a list of all your accounts. OFX import is supported, so you can import your bank records to the Money app easily and instantly review your accounts, all on the same screen.

Plan all your income and expenses, and check with the available reports to determine whether your plans are accurate. Create reports for each item or category, or check a full report over time.

Elegant Organization
iBear’s Money offers 13 expense categories including car, miscellaneous, taxes, entertainment, and more. When you are ready to analyze your assets and liabilities, Money has four main tabs for reporting: Transactions, Balance, Budget, and Reports.

Money uses a beautiful, realistic design reminiscent of a leather organizer, creating a more personal user experience. Everything works as closely as possible to a real-world organizer with paper reports, making your finance management more intuitive and enjoyable.

Today Amazon, as usual, offers Kindle Daily Deals: “Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition” written by John Howard Griffin (Author), Robert Bonazzi (Author, Afterword), Studs Terkel (Author, Foreword), Don Rutledge (Photographer) and sold for $1.99 This American classic has been corrected from the original manuscripts and indexed, featuring historic photographs and an extensive biographical afterword.

Here are some reviews of this book:

It was a wonderful story that really opened my eyes to what life used to be like, and made me thankful that life has changed so much since then. — Aaron

I picked this up completely on a whim after hearing someone mention it online. It is absolutely an amazing work. To really get a feel for how far this country has come in 50 short years, and to really understand how far we have left to go, you need to read this.

As a white male, I’ve always been offended by the term ‘white privilege’, because it implies that I somehow didn’t work for what I have. But having read this, I can finally appreciate it. My ‘white privilege’ has nothing to do with me not working hard and not deserving the things that I have accomplished. I have worked hard, and I do deserve those things.
But these are things that blacks never had the opportunity to do. No matter how smart they were, no matter how well dressed, or well spoken, no matter how *white* they tried to appear to blend in, they would never be given the opportunity to prove themselves on their own merits. Their opportunities were taken away before they ever had a chance to even attempt to do grab them.

And while I can definitely appreciate how far we have come in a relatively short time, I am now able to see with a fresh new perspective the things that are still wrong with our thinking today. – Alex Malinovich

Galactic Striker is a game for your Kindle Fire which you can get for free, but only today.

Blast aliens into space dust, save your own skin, and make smart-alecky comments–all at once–in Galactic Striker, an arcade-style, accelerometer-based Android game. This exciting shoot-em-up adventure boasts 3D graphics and even comes with a fully developed comic-book style backstory.

In Galactic Striker, you’re Jack Panic, the world’s greatest (and cockiest) astronaut and hero. As the story begins, you’re called upon to protect Earth once again–this time from a renegade asteroid. But during this routine mission, you accidentally damage an alien mothership (oops) and insult their leader (double-oops), who subsequently teleports you to the other side of the galaxy (not cool, bro).

To get home again, you’ll have to shoot your way through waves of alien attacks and other deep-space obstacles. Tilt your phone to navigate your spaceship, and choose from an ever-expanding list of futuristic weapons as you fight your way through space. You’ll need your strongest firepower, steeliest nerves, and sharpest wisecracks to make it back to Earth.

Are you up to this massive challenge? Of course you are–you’re Jack Panic! (Let’s assume that “Don’t” is your middle name.)

A free, ad-supported version of this game is also available.

Even in holidays Amazon offers to come back to our workings days and thinking about our effectiveness and what we can do to improve it with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People written by Stephen R. Covey and sold for $0.99.

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, service, and human dignity — principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change was a groundbreaker when it was first published in 1990, and it continues to be a business bestseller with more than 15 million copies sold. Stephen Covey, an internationally respected leadership authority, realizes that true success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness, so this book is a manual for performing better in both arenas. His anecdotes are as frequently from family situations as from business challenges. Before you can adopt the seven habits, you’ll need to accomplish what Covey calls a “paradigm shift”–a change in perception and interpretation of how the world works. Covey takes you through this change, which affects how you perceive and act regarding productivity, time management, positive thinking, developing your “proactive muscles” (acting with initiative rather than reacting), and much more. This isn’t a quick-tips-start-tomorrow kind of book. The concepts are sometimes intricate, and you’ll want to study this book, not skim it. When you finish, you’ll probably have Post-it notes or hand-written annotations in every chapter, and you’ll feel like you’ve taken a powerful seminar by Covey. –Joan Price

Dreams are, as Freud said, the “royal road to the unconscious.” Now you can map these roads with Dream Journal Pro, a dream journaling app for Android.

The Stuff of Dreams

Dream Journal Pro allows you to record your dreams for convenient reference and analysis. Adding a new dream is as easy as tapping the button and then filling out the Dream Form. Highly detailed, this form prompts you to analyze your dreams guided by Jungian Dream Theory. You’ll enter information such as title, date, type (Lucid, Nightmare, Premonitory, Anxiety, Initial, and others), dream text, general notes, setting, age, feelings, and much more. You may gain considerable insight into your dream as you record this information. As time passes, your journal can become a valuable reference tool for interpreting new dreams.

Features and Other Stuff

Dream Journal Pro is packed with useful features. Night Mode darkens the screen to avoid disrupting your sleep but remains active so you can access your Dream Journal as soon as you wake. Backup and restore your dreams from your device’s SD card, and backup your dream database through e-mail. Find a particular dream with the convenient search feature and enjoy the security of keeping your dreams private with password protection.

Embark on the adventure of a lifetime. Journey into the landscape of your unconscious with Dream Journal Pro.

Today Amazon offer to your attention the following book: City of Masks (Cree Black) by Daniel Hecht just for $1.99.

Superb…A thoroughly satisfying, disturbing novel. -Cleveland Plain Dealer 
In City of Masks, the first Cree Black novel, parapsychologist Cree and her partner take a case in New Orleans’s Garden District that leaves them fearing for their own lives. The 150-year-old Beauforte House has long stood empty, until Lila Beauforte resumes residence and starts to see some of the house’s secrets literally come to life. Tormented by an insidious and violent presence, Lila finds herself trapped in a life increasingly filled with childhood terrors. It takes Cree’s unconventional take on psychology and her powerful natural empathy with Lila to navigate the dangerous worlds of spirit and memory, as they clash in a terrifying tale of mistaken identity and murder.

If it’s New Orleans and the novel’s main characters have been dead for years but are still walking around terrorizing people, it must be an Anne Rice adventure. But it isn’t–it’s the first in a new series starring a fascinating heroine, Seattle parapsychologist Cree Black, whose own murky past and special gifts make her the perfect choice to investigate a haunted house in the Garden District and the family that’s slowly being scared to death. Lila Beauforte has moved back into her ancestral home, now inhabited by ghosts who seem bent on driving her out. Cree, her senses more attuned to the presence of revenants than flesh-and-blood bad guys, shakes enough closets in Beauforte House to bring the skeletons out, solve mysteries of the past as well as the present, and fall in love with an equally appealing if more traditional investigator of the unconscious who may be able to help her free herself from her own emotional prison. She’s a smart, vulnerable, and attractive character in an unearthly and unusual thriller that starts off a promising new series with a howl and presages a long run on the bestseller list. –Jane Adams

Also you can download into your Kindle Fire Router. It is free for you, but only today.

Test your mental might with Router, a circuit puzzle game that’s fun for the whole family. Your goal is to connect identically colored points with continuous lines without any of the lines overlapping each other. Game controls are easy to master, but some of the puzzles will have you quite perplexed until you find the right solution to connect the dots. With multiple challenging chapters to solve and engaging game-play features, Router is a winner for puzzle lovers.

Router features nine different chapters, each full of more than a dozen puzzles that increase in difficulty as you progress. In each puzzle, you will connect the similarly colored dots with continuous lines by tracing your finger on the screen. More advanced levels will present you with more dots in new and unique positions. You will earn more points for making shorter connections. An undo button is provided if you make a mistake.

As you would expect, Chapter 1 starts off easy enough, but the difficulty soon picks up. Each subsequent chapter will require increased intellectual dexterity. Once you hit Chapter 3, you will be required to earn enough points in prior chapters to unlock more.

If your mental acuity is up to the task, you’ll be able to solve each puzzle with a perfect five-star score. For your efforts, you will be rewarded with a Star Point, which you can spend to gain Hints if you find yourself stuck in subsequent puzzles. With a worldwide leaderboard, you can see how your scores stack up with other players from around the globe.

Router brings you hours of brain-teasing fun along with smooth touch controls, which makes for a completely satisfying puzzling experience. Depending on your device, you can adjust the quality of the graphics as well as the sound volume and other game settings to ensure it suits your preferences.

What are you waiting for? Get puzzling!

New offer from Amazon: A Drowned Maiden’s Hair written by Laura Amy Schlitz just for $0.99

Maud Flynn is known at the orphanage for her impertinence. So when the charming Miss Hyacinth chooses her to take home, the girl is pleased but baffled, until she learns of her new role: helping to stage elaborate séances for bereaved patrons. As Maud is drawn deeper into the deception, playing the “secret child,” she is torn between her need to please and her growing conscience. It takes a shocking betrayal to make clear just how heartless her so-called guardians are. Filled with fascinating details of turn-of-the-century spiritualism and page-turning suspense, this novel from Newbery Medalist Laura Amy Schlitz features a feisty heroine whom readers will not soon forget.

Some details about the Author

Laura Amy Schlitz, the author of THE HERO SCHLIEMANN: THE DREAMER WHO DUG FOR TROY, has spent most of her life working as a librarian and professional storyteller. She has also written plays for young people that have been performed in professional theaters all over the country. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Reversi is a classic Game of wits for your Kindle Fire and other Android devices.

AI Factory’s Reversi brings the classic board game to your Android phone. Reversi sports a clean and intuitive interface, features 10 levels of difficulty, and provides an Undo button if you want to make a different move. Play against the AI or a human opponent.

Reversi is played on an 8×8 grid. The game begins with four tokens: two light tokens for the first opponent and two dark tokens for the second opponent. The tokens are placed next to each other at the center of the board.

You must place your token so that two of your tokens are on two sides of your opponent’s single token or line of tokens. The tokens between your two tokens are then flipped over to your color. Conversely, your opponent flips your tokens to his color in the same manner.

The object of the game, of course, is to end up with more tokens by the time game board is filled up. Reversi, much like chess and go, is a duel of cunning strategy and cold logic. The corners and edges of the board are crucial to the game. You should do your best not to give up these positions.

This Reversi app comes loaded with options. Choose from two different boards and tokens, and toggle the sound, screen transitions, and legal moves. Get suggestions from the AI on your next move, and keep track of your games against the AI at all 10 levels. Reversi also comes with the full rules.

We are well aware now what the big Apple announcement for January was: their new iBooks Author program.  It is a program that allows for easy creation of books, most notably textbooks, for free.  iBooks might have failed to kill the Kindle platform, even given the whole Agency Model collusion with publishers (the legality of which we’ll have to wait and see about), but that doesn’t mean they’re ready to give up.  After some experimentation with the new program I find myself conflicted.  I wanted it to be mediocre, but it’s not.  And therein lies the problem.

You see, there is a bit of a problem with the program’s EULA.  It won’t be a deal breaker for just anybody, but there is definitely important information to be aware of.  By using the iBooks Author program, you are agreeing that not only will anything you sell be available in Apple’s eBook store but also will never never be sold for the Kindle, Nook, or any other non-Apple device.

Before going into the subtleties of the wording, and there are a few arguments with varying degrees of merit that have been made toward the harmlessness of this clause, consider that this can definitely be read as a response to the recent Amazon effort to gain author exclusivity.  The only difference is that Amazon brings in authors with a chance at more money while Apple just quietly restricts their distribution rights with a clause that users not only never explicitly accept, but don’t even see unless they go out of their way.

That said, there are a few situations where I think this will be an extremely valuable thing to have.  If you are planning to create and distribute your work permanently free of charge, I have yet to find a more intuitive, affordable tool for making textbooks or manuals.  If your book was always intended to be marketed primarily to users of the iBooks store, this probably won’t have much of an impact on you.

Now, let’s acknowledge some ambiguities in the wording and clarify some of the many common points of contention:

Restrictions Only Apply To iBook Format:  FALSE

The definition of “Work” used in the EULA clearly indicates that anything generated using the software counts.  It does not matter if you export to PDF, for example.

Apple Is Stealing Author Copyrights:  FALSE

Anything you create is yours from the moment you create it unless you explicitly hand over permission.  What Apple is doing is telling you where you can sell it.  Using iBooks Author allows them to restrict distribution of your work, but otherwise seems to offer them no rights to it.

All This Applies To Is The Formatted Product, Not The Content:  AMBIGUOUS

Leaving aside the textbook for a moment and assuming we are talking about a book that is completely text based.  If you want to release a Kindle version, it would seem possible to just copy the text and reformat.  The wording of the EULA describes “Work” recursively as “any book or other work you generate using this software”.  This can, and hopefully would be, read to mean that only the final, fully formatted output is affected, but the ambiguity is troubling.

It Is Free Software, They Have A Right To Expect A Return:  TRUE-ISH

Nobody is forcing you to use this program.  It is being provided free of charge by Apple and provides far greater functionality than any other free program out there for the same purposes.  Most such restrictions are aimed toward restriction the active use of the software rather than restricting how a creator can manage their own work, though.  Neither illegal nor unprecedented, but odd and somewhat troubling.

Not A Consumer Targeted Software Anyway:  FALSE

This one comes up a lot.  Despite the large number of advertisements being done involving the cooperation of such publishers as Pearson and McGraw Hill in the iBooks Textbook initiative, there has been no indication that they are contributing work under the same agreement.  This is free software pointed at teachers and authors in the advertising (particularly the promo video).  It has bundled templates to simplify the work, a simple drag and drop interface, and tons of automation.  There is depth for those who need it, but definitely not aimed solely at experienced professional textbook publishers.

Apple Can Prevent A Finished Book From Ever Being Sold:  TRUE

All that is required for a book to be covered by these restrictions is that it be a product of iBooks Author.  Publication is neither automated nor guaranteed, and just because Apple turns you down does not mean that you are free to market your work through another platform or sell through your own means.

Apple Offers Better/Worse Royalties Than The Competition Anyway:  FALSE

Apple is effectively offering the same cut of all sales to authors as the vast majority of authors receive when selling for the Kindle and nearly the same (within 5%) as that offered to Nook sellers.

Now, I’m not about to claim that this is the most horrible thing ever done to authors or even that it is deliberately malicious.  Some have claimed that just as this is a 1.0 software, so is the EULA in early versions too and ambiguity will inevitably be removed.  If so, and there was no intent to deceive or control, so be it.  It is already a complicated enough process to get anything out of your eBooks that authors should be aware of what they are getting into, though.  I, for one, wouldn’t want to be locked out of the Kindle platform by accident when that’s where all the readers are.

This is good software.  Possibly great software.  But the limitations aren’t the same as you get when publishing a Kindle Edition, where all you need to worry about is not selling things cheaper elsewhere.  Under the current wording it seems to literally stop you from reaching an audience.  That’s just unpleasant, and something that people need to be aware of when deciding whether or not iBooks Author is for them.

Today Amazon offers to your attention a novel about a girl who will stop at nothing to achieve her dream of working as a swordsmith. The name of novel is The Copper Sign and it was written by Katia Fox. And the price is $0.99 compared with yesterday’s $7.99.

England 1161: Ellen, a blacksmith’s daughter, wants to become a swordsmith, but for a girl this profession is unimaginable. Forced to run away from home, she disguises herself as a boy and wins the opportunity to travel with a famous swordsmith to Normandy, where the sons of the greatest barons are trained to be knights. Under the assumed identity of Alan, Ellen is able to learn the trade and become familiar with court life. But when she falls in love with Guillaume, a brilliant knight, her secret is threatened and Ellen must run for her life. Across countries and time, Ellen struggles to achieve her dream of working as a swordsmith and eventually forging a sword for the king. It is a quest rich in intrigue, betrayal, and treachery. As epic as it is intimate, The Copper Sign is a passionate tour de force that will leave you breathlessly awaiting book two, The Silver Falcon.

Some words about the Author

Katia Fox, born in 1964, grew up in Germany and southern France, and started her career as an interpreter and translator. After the birth of her third child, she turned her attention to the English Middle Ages and started to research blacksmithing. That research directly inspired the first installment in her captivating trilogy set in medieval England, The Copper Sign. Katia Fox lives with two of her three children splitting her time between a small town near Frankfurt and Provence. She also visits England as often as possible to continue her research.

Translator Lee Chadeayne is a former classical musician, college professor, and owner of a language translation company in Massachusetts. He was a charter member of the American Literary Translators Association and has been an active member of the American Translators Association since 1970. His translated works are primarily in the areas of music, art, language, history, and general literature. Most recently this includes the bestselling The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch and The Copper Sign by Katia Fox.

Test your adventuring skills in Twist n’Catch, an action-packed game of puzzles and dexterity for your Android device. You’re the intrepid explorer Emmet Black, and your gig is treasure hunting. Travel the world over, discover exotic places, and bring back riches galore!

Accompanied by your faithful companion, Sergeant Cookie, you drop yourself into dangerous realms in search of diamonds and sapphires. Held in mid-air by nothing but a rope and your own self-confidence, your task is to find a way to collect gems while avoiding innumerable obstacles and traps.

There’s no shortage of fun in this test of skill and prowess. Solve more than 120 levels as you explore three full universes of adventure.

You’ll swashbuckle your way through Aztec temples, ancient Egyptian tombs, deadly pirates’ lairs, and much more, marveling at the exotic sights and steeling yourself against unknown terrors you have yet to face.

Do you have the courage to forge ahead where other adventurers have turned back? Will your rope twist at just the wrong moment? Will Sergeant Cookie toss his cookies? There’s only one way to find out. Good luck!

Today Amazon offer to your attention Tom Anthony’s high-octane military thriller follows a covert operation designed to take down terrorist insurgencies before their mission to create civil unrest in the tropical Pacific can be realized. The name of the book is Rebels of Mindanao. It is cost $0.99 but only today.

Al Qaeda terrorists are spreading silently throughout the globe wreaking violence on all who oppose them. Their newest target: the remote Philippine island of Mindanao. On the brink of civil war, success in Mindanao would trigger a chain reaction across the Pacific, threatening democracy and peace around the world.

Haunted by the failure of his last mission and the lost lives of his team, Thomas Thornton had hoped to escape his former life as a military operative, seeking the calm beauty of tropical Mindanao. When two West Point friends, now high ranking officials in the government and military, ask him to run one last op, he finds himself in the fray once more. Thornton recruits a hunter-killer team of Manobo tribesmen to begin covert actions against the insurgency. The mission: eliminate a Turkish warrior carrying millions in cash into Mindanao to finance an Islamic revolution. The deal: make the Turk and the cash disappear, no questions asked.

Some words about the Author

Also you can get KeepTrack Pro for free today only.

Organizing and tracking different areas of your life couldn’t be easier with KeepTrack Pro. Turn your Android device into a personal assistant that can help you stay on-time, meet your goals, and track what is important to you. KeepTrack Pro helps you get a handle on aspects of your life that require careful attention.

KeepTrack Pro lets you track any details you wish over time. Keep tabs on serious details, such as the medication you’re taking, and more whimsical details, such as how many buses you see each day. You decide what you wish to track, how often, and what to do with the information. The app’s clean interface makes it easy to create new fields and enter data into existing ones. Keep Track Pro also provides helpful graphs and statistics if you wish to examine what you’re tracking in greater detail.

To start, add a new task by identifying it with a name, selecting the values data type, setting a default value, name the value units, choose the increment/decrement amount, and identify the goal, if any. Choose from the following data values:

• Text: Free text, which is ideal for reminders, ideas, and more

• Boolean: Yes or No option to track simple questions, e.g., ‘did I work out today?’

• Marker: Includes a specific time so you can track occurrences

• Group: Perfect for using multiple data values to track your task

Once you’ve been tracking the items that are important to you, use the data to make improvements, adjustments, or to simply keep yourself informed. Click on a specific task to see the data breakdown. View a pie chart, statistics, and calendar. For those difficult to remember tasks, KeepTrack Pro features an alarm setting to remind you.

KeepTrack Pro makes it easier than ever to track information that is important to you in a way that works for you.

You can use your opportunity to get historical book about Roman Empire last days for $1.99. The name of the book is The Fall of the Roman Empire : A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and the book is written by Peter Heather.

The death of the Roman Empire is one of the perennial mysteries of world history. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Peter Heather proposes a stunning new solution: Rome generated its own nemesis. Centuries of imperialism turned the neighbors it called barbarians into an enemy capable of dismantling the Empire that had dominated their lives for so long. Heather is a leading authority on the late Roman Empire and on the barbarians. In The Fall of the Roman Empire, he explores the extraordinary success story that was the Roman Empire and uses a new understanding of its continued strength and enduring limitations to show how Europe’s barbarians, transformed by centuries of contact with Rome on every possible level, eventually pulled it apart. He shows first how the Huns overturned the existing strategic balance of power on Rome’s European frontiers, to force the Goths and others to seek refuge inside the Empire. This prompted two generations of struggle, during which new barbarian coalitions, formed in response to Roman hostility, brought the Roman west to its knees. The Goths first destroyed a Roman army at the battle of Hadrianople in 378, and went on to sack Rome in 410. The Vandals spread devastation in Gaul and Spain, before conquering North Africa, the breadbasket of the Western Empire, in 439. We then meet Attila the Hun, whose reign of terror swept from Constantinople to Paris, but whose death in 453 ironically precipitated a final desperate phase of Roman collapse culminating in the Vandals’ defeat of the massive Byzantine Armada: the west’s last chance for survival. Peter Heather convincingly argues that the Roman Empire was not on the brink of social or moral collapse. What brought it to an end were the barbarians.

Cubicle Golf is a game which can help you to spend some free time with a fun.

Tee Up at the Office
Golf is a great way to get a break from less important things–like work! But we all know it’s a long way from the office to the golf course.

Luckily, there’s Cubicle Golf. This fun and challenging game for your Android device provides an easy way to get a few rounds in without leaving your desk.

Beware the Water Cooler Hazard

Cubicle Golf features a full, 18-hole course that will test even the hardiest office golfer’s skills. Choose from two control options to suit your playing style. It’s easy to track scores at each hole, and you’ll even hear fun shot-by-shot commentary as you play.

Build team unity by playing the always-challenging Office Links. Take advantage of your co-workers’ strengths as you navigate the course: one colleague wields the driver, another the iron, another the putter, and one possesses the hallowed Secret Weapon.

But keep a wary eye out as you work on that handicap. Make sure you avoid Mr. Hazard (also known as your boss) if you want to keep playing!

No Golf Cart Required

Unlike the outdoor version, this golf game progresses quickly and is easy to learn. Also, and most important, it’s fun. Play through all 18 holes, improve your score, and blow off some steam. (Just make sure the boss isn’t looking.)

Today Amazon offer to buy Bound by Antonya Nelson for $1.99

Antonya Nelson is known for her razor-sharp depictions of contemporary family life in all of its sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious complexity. Her latest novel has roots in her own youth in Wichita, in the neighborhood stalked by the serial killer known as BTK (Bind, Torture, and Kill). A story of wayward love and lost memory, of public and private lives twisting out of control, Bound is Nelson’s most accomplished and emotionally riveting work. Catherine and Oliver, young wife and older entrepreneurial husband, are negotiating their difference in age and a plethora of well-concealed secrets. Oliver, now in his sixties, is a serial adulterer and has just fallen giddily in love yet again. Catherine, seemingly placid and content, has ghosts of a past she scarcely remembers. When Catherine’s long-forgotten high school friend dies and leaves Catherine the guardian of her teenage daughter, that past comes rushing back. As Oliver manages his new love, and Catherine her new charge and darker past, local news reports turn up the volume on a serial killer who has reappeared after years of quiet. In a time of hauntings and new revelations, Nelson’s characters grapple with their public and private obligations, continually choosing between the suppression or indulgence of wild desires. Which way they turn, and what balance they find, may only be determined by those who love them most.

FishPop is a fun fast-paced game with fish that pop when you touch them. It’s fun for all ages.

If you like to let your kids play with your expensive mobile devices then this is the game for you. Guaranteed to provide endless minutes of near silence interrupted only by the sound of giggles and popping fish.

How many fish can you pop before all the fish escape? Tens? Hundreds? thousands? Hit the Chum Can when it drops to lure in more fish. Pop the Jellyfish to slow everyone down. Don’t pop the Octopus unless you want a giant ink blot the fish will hide behind.

How many can you pop in 60 seconds? Keep popping the same type of fish for bonus.

This is nice calm mode where you can see all the fish and pop them or not. Great for toddlers trying to develop touchscreen skills. Before you know it, they’ll be texting Grandma.

Today Amazon offer to get Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure by Richard E. Byrd for $1.99

When Admiral Richard E. Byrd set out on his second Antarctic expedition in 1934, he was already an international hero for having piloted the first flights over the North and South Poles. His plan for this latest adventure was to spend six months alone near the bottom of the world, gathering weather data and indulging his desire ?to taste peace and quiet long enough to know how good they really are.? But early on things went terribly wrong. Isolated in the pervasive polar night with no hope of release until spring, Byrd began suffering inexplicable symptoms of mental and physical illness. By the time he discovered that carbon monoxide from a defective stovepipe was poisoning him, Byrd was already engaged in a monumental struggle to save his life and preserve his sanity.

When Alone was first published in 1938, it became an enormous bestseller. This edition keeps alive Byrd?s unforgettable narrative for new generations of readers.

Some words about the Author

Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd (1888-1957) was among the twentieth century’s most heroic public figures and one of history’s foremost explorers. Expeditions under his command mapped half of the Antarctic continent and three-quarters of its coast — more unknown territory than any other explorer since Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century.

Lame Castle is a game for your Kindle Fire. You can get this app for free today only.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a knight in possession of a toy horse must smash a bunch of lame-o castles.

Lame Castle is a fast-paced dash-and-run game with a lighthearted medieval theme. Mount your steed, grab your helmet, and dash and jump through tons of danger-strewn levels.

Gallop through 24 levels filled with deadly pits and obnoxious boulders. Try unique bonus objectives for each level, and shoot for a high score. At the end of each level, smash the lame castle of Wizzy the evil wizard, and garner the adoration of a generic pink princess.

Get lost in four endless modes, and enter a nightmare maze of poor castle architecture.

Use a simple touchscreen interface to control your knight. Jump, double jump, and long jump with the left side of your screen, or press the right side to attack. Hit both for a jump-attack!

Get ready to punt chickens, loot treasure chests, and smash rocks. Don’t stand idly by while lame castles remain intact!

Amazon offer Breathless by Jessica Warman for $0.99 within Kindle daily deals.

When Katie Kitrell is shipped off to boarding school by her distant father and overbearing mother, it doesn’t take her long to become part of the It Crowd. She’s smart, she’s cute, and she’s an Olympic-bound swimmer who has a first class ticket to any Ivy League school of her choice. But what her new friends, roommate, and boyfriend don’t know is that Katie is swimming away from her past, and from the schizophrenic older brother, Will, who won’t let her go. As Katie’s star rises, her brother descends deeper into insanity. And when he does the unthinkable, it’s all Katie can do to keep her head above water.

Amazon accompanies this book with following review:

Says 15-year-old Katie, “The only thing I really love is swimming. Sometimes I feel like I don’t really exist outside of the water.” When her parents send her to boarding school after her schizophrenic brother, Will, attempts suicide, Katie loves the escape that Woodsdale offers from her family: institutionalized and increasingly violent Will; her emotionally distant dad; and her alcoholic mom. She also loves the intensity of the school’s swim team, with its motto that “practice isn’t over until someone pukes,” and she begins a tender relationship with a gorgeous fellow swimmer, Drew, a devout Christian who, unlike most of their classmates, is still a virgin. After a misunderstanding leads to a lie, Katie tells her new friends that Will is dead. Only Katie’s roommate, Mazzie, knows the truth, and that shared secret begins the deep friendship at the core of this heartbreaking debut. Stretched over three years, the episodic novel, narrated in Katie’s raw voice, meanders occasionally in its focus. But Warman’s achingly realistic scenes and characters transcend cliché, and with rare, refreshing honesty and flashes of wry humor, she writes about the intimacy of boarding school, the anguish of family illness, finding a sense of self in sports and in life, and the small, mysterious, imperfect moments that add up to love in all its forms. — Booklist, starred review

EasyMoney is a personal finance app that combines an expense tracker, a checkbook register, a budget manager, and a bills reminder. EasyMoney provides a rich, detailed window into your finances. A simple and intuitive data entry system is combined with a wealth of easily accessible financial information. Input your bills and never lose track of payments. Analyze how and where your money is being spent. Set spending limits on a variety of customizable categories.

You’ll track expenses quickly and easily with the money manager. Business expenses, personal expenses, travel expenses, and more all can be tracked rapidly. You can even track income and expenses for multiple accounts in multiple currencies. Income and expense categories are fully customizable for greater budgeting flexibility. Also, split transactions are supported for more detailed income and expense tracking.

Interactive reports and graphs let you analyze income, expenses, cash flow, and balance over various customizable date ranges. That kind of analysis can be invaluable to budgeting. With EasyMoney you can set monthly budgets on specific accounts and/or categories and monitor them via color-coded budget health bars. You can also export captured data as QIF and CSV files to desktop money managers such as Quicken.

EasyMoney can be locked away from outsiders’ eyes with a four-digit security PIN. You can back up your data to your SD card and automate the backup process so that it occurs daily.

Whether you’re looking to make sense of your finances, or you just want to make sure you’re never late with a payment, EasyMoney is an ideal financial tracking tool.

Within today’s Kindle Daily deals Amazon offer The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks by Donald Harington for $0.99

Jacob and Noah Ingledew trudge 600 miles from their native Tennessee to found Stay More, a small town nestled in a narrow valley that winds among the Arkansas Ozarks and into the reader’s imagination. The Ingledew saga – which follows six generations of ‘Stay Morons’ through 140 years of abundant living and prodigal loving – is the heart of Harington’s jubilant, picaresque novel. Praised as one of the year’s ten best novels by the American Library Association when first published, this tale continues to captivate readers with its winning fusion of lyricism and comedy.

Harington has succeeded in creating one of the finest novels in recent years. – Library Journal

You don’t have to be from Arkansas to to appreciate this robust and rollicking novel… – Columbus Dispatch

About the Author

Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother’s hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by story-tellers. His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas. His first novel was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published twelve other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists. He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. He has been called “an undiscovered continent” (Fred Chappell) and “America’s Greatest Unknown Novelist” (Entertainment Weekly).

Pyramix is a game for your Kindle Fire. Today only you can get it for free.

Word game aficionados, meet your latest challenge. Pyramix, a “word enigma generator” for your Android device, is an addictive game that combines code-deciphering strategy with the simplicity of classic grid-based word games.

Drawing from a jumbled assortment of letters, try to find the right letter combinations to solve unique four-word puzzles. Play against a timer or work in untimed mode, and take in the mysterious-looking graphics and evocative sound effects.

The pyramid-shaped game board consists of four empty, horizontally-stacked rows. At the bottom of the board, you’ll see a mirror image of the top rows–but these rows contain jumbled letters. To build a word at the top, take any letter from the bottom and drop it in the space you choose.

Counters show the number of possible words for each row. Lights glow when a row is filled with a complete word. But remember, the more rows you fill, the harder the challenge gets! Be strategic and keep an eye on the counters as you create words. Good luck!

Today Amazon offer The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom: Movie Tie-In  by Slavomir Rawicz for $0.99.

Cavalry officer Slavomir Rawicz was captured by the Red Army in 1939 during the German-Soviet partition of Poland and was sent to the Siberian Gulag along with other captive Poles, Finns, Ukranians, Czechs, Greeks, and even a few English, French, and American unfortunates who had been caught up in the fighting. A year later, he and six comrades from various countries escaped from a labor camp in Yakutsk and made their way, on foot, thousands of miles south to British India, where Rawicz reenlisted in the Polish army and fought against the Germans. The Long Walk recounts that adventure, which is surely one of the most curious treks in history.

Here are some reviews on this book:

“I hope The Long Walk will remain as a memorial to all those who live and die for freedom, and for all those who for many reasons could not speak for themselves.”
—Slavomir Rawicz

“The Long Walk is a book that I absolutely could not put down and one that I will never forget…”–Stephen Ambrose

“A poet with steel in his soul.”–New York Times

“One of the most amazing, heroic stories of this or any other time.”–Chicago Tribune

“A book filled with the spirit of human dignity and the courage of men seeking freedom.” –Los Angeles Times

“Heroism is not the domain of the powerful; it is the domain of people whose only other alternative is to give up and die…. [The Long Walk] must be read—and reread, and passed along to friends.” –National Geographic Adventure

“The ultimate human endurance story…told with clarity, vivid description, and a good dash of romance and humor.” –The Vancouver Sun

“Essentially it comes down to some sort of inner tenacity and that is what is so gripping about the book because you know that this is actually about all of us. It’s not just some Polish bloke who wanted to get home. It’s about how we all struggle on every day. Somehow or other we find a reason to keep on going and it’s the same here but on an epic scale”.–Benedict Allen, explorer and bestselling author of Into the Abyss and Edge of Blue Heaven

Cookies & Milk is application for your Kindle Fire. Today only it is free to download and install at your device.

If you’ve got little helpers in your kitchen who love baking or if you simply have a sweet tooth to satisfy, the Cookies and Milk app brings the joys of (pretend) baking to your Android device. From sugar-loving toddlers to calorie-conscious adults, baking and indulging in a cyber-cookie just may be the sweet escape you crave.

Expand your children’s cookie palate by scrolling through your baking options first and settling on a choice. If you choose to bake cookies from scratch you’ll even be provided with the recipe. Choose from more than 10 delicious recipes.

Ingredients appear above the mixing bowl. Drag and drop each ingredient into the bowl and mix it up with the touch of a finger. Watch the ingredients transform into delicious dough.

Next, drag each dough ball onto the baking sheet until it’s full and put it into the oven. When the light comes on, the cookies are ready to decorate.

The responsive touch-and-drag interface makes it easy for young children to choose ingredients and toppings with ease.

Every kid knows the best part of baking cookies–eating them! Tap the cookie to take a bite, tap it twice, three times, four–uh oh, until cookie is no more.

• Great for children who love helping in the kitchen and playing pretend

• Responsive touch-and-drag interface makes navigating the app easy for toddlers

• Choose from more than 10 delicious cookie recipes

• Watch your little one mix until the ingredients turn to dough

• Great for sugar-loving kids to calorie-conscious adults (Fat free!)

The December numbers are in for Amazon’s rather controversial Kindle Owners‘ Lending Library (KOLL) and for some people they turned out to be quite good.  Right around 295,000 rentals were made of the approximately 70,000 titles available to be checked out in December alone.  Given the $500,000 fund allotted to compensate KDP exclusive authors for these rentals, that means approximately $1.70 per lent copy was handed out.  Things went over so well, in fact, that Amazon is throwing another $200,000 into the pool for January’s authors.  This will bring the total to be divided up to $700,000, though of course it will also quite possibly be divided among even more authors this time around.

Among the more notable success stories, we know that the top ten most popular KOLL authors put together nabbed over $70,000 from these rentals alone.  That is around a 30% increase over other monthly income from the same works.  The top earner was Carolyn McCray, author of a number of paranormal romance and mystery/thriller titles, who is quoted in the Amazon Press Release as saying that “KDP Select truly is a career altering program”.  Romance writer Amber Scott, 16yr old children’s author Rachel Yu, and the puzzle book producing Grabarchuk family made up the rest of the highlighted triumphs, with over $6,000 in KOLL related income apiece.

In these cases, obviously there has been no significant downside to the program.  The fact that participation in it requires exclusively making one’s work available exclusively to Kindle owners may have more of an effect on many others, however.  What the press release numbers do not tell us is the average income that an author managed to pick up this month, aside from the fact that it was a measurable percentage increase over participating authors’ usual monthly income from Kindle Store proceeds.  It would be interesting, if pretty much impossible, to compare how many authors saw a jump in profits compared to the number who actually lost income due to exclusivity.  It seems safe to assume that this was the case for at least some people.

As with anything related to self publishing, however, most of the success will have to come through some form of author driven advertising.  Random hits by interested browsers are nice, but word of mouth is frequently not enough to drive sales on its own even for a skilled and prolific writer.  The lending community opens the door to new readers, but so far is not arranged in such a way as to point readers toward any particular title.

Overall this success is a plus for any fan of the Kindle.  Owning one gains some ongoing perks in the form of book rentals, success stories among authors will surely lead to even more participants, and Amazon has immediately shown themselves likely to increase the compensation pool.  We’ll be watching the program here in months to come as the situation stabilizes.  You can’t really assume that holiday Kindle sales are having anything but a positive effect on everything related to the eReading line, so it might be the end of first quarter before we can say anything definitive about ongoing positive trends.  Still, off to a good note.

Today Amazon offer to buy Morgue Drawer Four by Jutta Profijt for $0.99.

This entertaining mix of thriller and fantasy, which was shortlisted for Germany’s Friedrich Glauser Prize, works a nice twist on a familiar theme. Car thief Pascha Lerchenberg is handed a couple of really big surprises: first, he’s murdered; then he awakens in the morgue to see his body being autopsied. As if that isn’t enough to drive a recently dead man around the bend, Pascha discovers that he can communicate with the coroner, Martin Gansewein (who is understandably gob-smacked when the dead man on his table begins talking to him). The nimbly translated tale follows Pascha and Martin—a decidedly mismatched pair—as they try to solve Pascha’s murder. Pascha’s first-person narration, including jaunty commentary on his post-death existence and his relationship with Martin, gives the novel an appealing extra dimension. Stories told by dead people tend to be either YA fiction or high-end literary fare—Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones comes to mind—but it’s rare to find a thriller using the technique. Fans of crime novels and out-of-body fantasies should have a very good time with this one. —David Pitt

Also Amazon offer to your Kindle Fire Galactic Blast. Today only it is free.

Blaze a trail through the starry night sky in this colorful arcade-style space shooter for Android. Galactic Blast fuses an old-school arcade aesthetic with fresh new multi-touch controls. See how high you can score as you fervently tap the screen to fire on incoming objects while guiding your starship out of harm’s way. Are you ready for an out of this world adventure?

Galactic Blast has you using sharp touch-screen controls to conquer each level as you fly through outer space. Use one hand to steer your ship and the other to fire at incoming objects like asteroids and bonuses. Make sure you collect the destroyed asteroid’s rubble along the way to add to your score. As you move through the level, discover and collect bonuses that will increase your play time or score and more. Your game ends if you are hit by one of the incoming objects.

Master each level and gain points along the way. Your endeavors are rewarded with stars based on your score. Earn one, two, or three stars for each level. Galactic Blast features several exciting ship upgrades to unlock by earning the corresponding achievements. Set off on your adventure and challenge yourself to get three stars on all levels and unlock all of the ships!

Within Kindle Daily Deals Amazon today offer SEAL of My Dreams by set of authors (Stephanie Bond, Elle Kennedy, Helen Brenna, Kylie Brant, Roxanne St. Clair, Cindy Gerad, Tara Janzen, Alison Kent, HelenKay Dimon, Jami Alden, Leslie Kelly, Jo Leigh, Marliss Melton, Gennita Low, Christie Ridgway, Barbara Samuel, Stephanie Tyler, Loreth Anne White) for $0.99

Honor, duty, courage, passion . . . the men of the Navy SEALs are a special breed of hero, and in these novellas by eighteen top romance authors the SEALs are celebrated not only as symbols of devoted service to their country but as the kind of men every woman wants to love. They’ll rescue a damsel in distress and her lap dog, too. They’ll battle hometown dramas and international bad guys. When it comes to giving away their hearts, they’ll risk everything.

All proceeds from sales of SEAL of My Dreams go to the Veterans Research Corporation, a non-profit fundraiser for veterans’ medical research.

Between them, the authors of SEAL of My Dreams have won dozens of writing awards including multiple RITAs from Romance Writers of America. Their nearly 600 published novels have sold at least 35 million copies worldwide. The SEAL of My Dreams roster includes many of the best-known authors in modern romance fiction. In addition, many have strong family connections to the servicemen and women of our nation’s military, and many specialize in novels featuring heroes and heroines from all branches of service.

This book has positive replies from readers. It has 4.7 out of 5 stars. Here are some of them:

“This book contains some great stories – many of them have stayed with me and I keep finding myself thinking about the characters.” — M. Heather Foeh
“This is an awesome anthology chuck full of great stories.” — Vanessa
“Out of the eighteen stories there was only one I wasn’t a huge fan of and one that based on a series I haven’t read…not bad odds.” — lauramelinda

Also within Appstore Deals Amazon offer to get Missile Defender – the game for your Kindle Fire. You can get this app for free, but only today.

Defend your city against an enemy bombardment in this touchscreen twist on the classic arcade game. Intercept missiles, upgrade your defenses, and play through limitless levels. See how long you’re able to hold out before your physical and psychological defenses crumble.

Incoming missiles rain down at night–tap on the screen and use the multi-touch feature to launch interceptors. Repairs and upgrades are available during the day, as you steel yourself for yet another fear-stricken night.

Missile Defender is in the style of a classic 80s arcade game. It features clean HD art work, multi-touch controls, upgradable missiles, and endless levels of gameplay–without the oppressive fear of a real-world nuclear brinkmanship. If you’ve enjoyed those old quarter-guzzlers, Missile Defender is sure to bring back great memories.

Prepare to get nostalgic as you defend civilization from anachronistic existential threats in Missile Defender!

Kindle Daily Deals: today Amazon offer to get The Highest Tide: A Novel by Jim Lynch for $0.99.

Miles O’Malley, 13-year-old insomniac, naturalist, worshipper of Rachel Carson, and dweller on the mud flats of Skookumchuck Bay, at the South end of Puget Sound near Olympia, Washington, is the irresistible center of The Highest Tide. He says, “I learned early on that if you tell people what you see at low tide they’ll think you’re exaggerating or lying when you’re actually just explaining strange and wonderful things as clearly as you can” and “People usually take decades to sort out their view of the universe, if they bother to sort at all. I did my sorting during one freakish summer in which I was ambushed by science, fame and suggestions of the divine.”

And what a summer he has! Miles, who is licensed to collect marine specimens for money, slips into his kayak late one night when he can’t sleep and begins his exploratory rounds. What he sees is not the usual collectibles. He hears a deep exhale, a sound of release, and comes eye to eye with a giant squid. But, there are no giant squid in Puget Sound or anywhere around it–and when they are seen by humans, they are always dead. His discovery is confirmed by Professor Kramer, a local biologist and Miles’s friend. Television cameras arrive, everyone wants to interview this small-for-his-age but very smart boy and the events of the summer begin to unfold.

Jim Lynch has an ability to tell a tale that glows on every page. He knows everything that lives in or near the water by name and habit. This knowledge and his sense of wonder at the natural world brings the reader very close to his story, both in its setting and its characters. One early morning Miles says, “…the water was so clear I could see coon-stripe shrimp … and the bottomless bed of white clam shells … Those shells, as unique and timeless as bones, helped me realize that we all die young, that in the life of the earth, we are houseflies, here for one flash of light.” Such insights are perfectly natural coming from Miles, whose interests are not garden-variety. He has a mad crush on the mixed-up 18-year-old girl next door, a randy age-mate named Phelps, and a deep friendship with Florence, the elderly woman his mother refers to as “a crazy witch.” Florence is a psychic of sorts and her powers come into play when she predicts an extremely high tide on a certain day.

All of these relationships and what is happening between Miles’s parents are part of this event-filled, life-changing summer. Early on, Miles says off the top of his head, when asked by a TV reporter why a deep-sea creature has found its way to his front yard, “Maybe the earth is trying to tell us something.” What the earth and the sea and the people in Miles’s life are all trying to tell him is what he susses out in the days that follow–before that high tide.

This absolutely luminous first novel has all the earmarks of a classic. The Highest Tide is destined to be read, re-read, and to remain on bookshelves for the enjoyment of generations to come. –Valerie Ryan

Amazon Appstore Deals: today only Amazon offer to get Touch Racing Nitro for $0.0.

Roaring engines. Hairpin curves. Spectacular crashes, spinouts, and rollovers. If you like auto racing, you’ve got to get Touch Racing Nitro for Android. It’s a gas.

Start Your Engines
Whether you aspire to be Michael Schumacher, Danica Patrick, or Jeff Gordon, you’ll love the nonstop 3D action and old-school sounds of this game. The graphics and swooping camera angles are very realistic and immerse you totally in the racing environment.

One thing that sets this app apart from other auto racing games is the touchscreen controls. Forget the virtual joystick–here you steer your vehicle by sliding your thumbs along the bottom of the screen. After spending some time in the Tutorial mode, you’ll get the hang of it and find this method much easier and more intuitive.

The Need for Speed

Touch Racing Nitro offers two main modes to choose from: Time Trial and Tournament. In Time Trial, it’s just you against the track and the clock, which is plenty challenging. You must navigate the twisting turns and tricky ramps as fast as you can without flipping or flying off the track. There’s a constant readout showing your time, miles per hour, and lap count. You can do the same track over and over and try to improve your results.

In Tournament mode, you’ll be battling opponents with intimidating monikers such as Hawks Eye and Speed Freak. Select Beginner, Driver, or Ace and pick a track and car. And you’re off! Battle for position, watch those curves, and look for nitro power-ups along the way. Can you beat the field?

Pole Position
As you improve your times and placements, you’ll unlock more cool tracks–up to 18 total. You’ll also get access to 12 different car styles (including buggies and monster trucks) and two other cup competitions. The app links directly to OpenFeint, where you can compare yourself against the world’s top drivers. Time to get out there and burn some rubber!

Today Amazon offer great deal: 35 Kindle Books from Ed McBain’s “87th Precinct” series just $0.99 each.

Master crime novelist Ed McBain’s “87th Precinct” is one of the longest-running crime series ever published and helped McBain earn the Mystery Writers of America’s “Grand Master Award” for lifetime achievement.

I think Evan Hunter, known by that name or as Ed McBain, was one of the most influential writers of the postwar generation. He was the first writer to successfully merge realism with genre fiction, and by so doing I think he may actually have created the kind of popular fiction that drove the best-seller lists and lit up the American imagination in the years 1960 to 2000. Books as disparate as The New Centurions, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Godfather, Black Sunday, and The Shining all owe a debt to Evan Hunter, who taught a whole generation of baby boomers how to write stories that were not only entertaining but that truthfully reflected the times and the culture. He will be remembered for bringing the so-called “police procedural” into the modern age, but he did so much more than that. And he was one hell of a nice man. –Stephen King 

Way back in the mid-1970s, when I was a new writer and police series were very big, my editor asked me to do a series called Joe Ryker, NYPD. I had no idea how to write a police detective novel, but the editor handed me a stack of books and said, “These are the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain. Read them and you’ll know everything you need to know about police novels.” After I read the first book–which I think was Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man–I was hooked, and I read every Ed McBain I could get my hands on. Then I sat down and wrote my own detective novel, The Sniper, featuring Joe Ryker. My series never reached the heights of the 87th Precinct series, but by reading those classic masterpieces, I learned all I needed to know about urban crime and how detectives think and act. And I had a hell of a time learning from the master. Years later, when I actually got to meet Ed McBain/Evan Hunter, I told him this story, and he said, “I would have liked it better if my books inspired you to become a detective instead of becoming my competition.” Evan and I became friends, and I was privileged to know him and honored to be in his company. I remain indebted to him for his good advice over the years. But most of all, I thank him for hundreds of hours of great reading. –Nelson DeMille

Word Ball is a game for your Kindle Fire. Today only you can get this application for free.

Can you become a Word Master? This fun app challenges your word-building skills in a fast-paced game for Android. Play with friends and beat the top scores. Test your limits by keeping the letters alive and reach the top levels. Gain achievements for different word-building categories. Word Ball will make you a “Word Master” in no time! Are you ready?

Brain-teasing Fun
Word Ball provides a fun brain-training exercise by making you focus and think on your feet while building words as quickly as possible. By concentrating on the letters as they shrink and bounce, the game allows your cognitive senses to react in a manner that reinforces word and pattern recognition. The game features high-resolution display graphics and includes an extensive dictionary with 175,000+ words, as well as an in-game word list.

How to Play
Your aim in Word Ball is to build words with the letters you’re given. As you play, the letters will bounce around the screen and shrink, making it more challenging as time goes on. In Classic Mode, you’re presented with 26 letters, and the game progresses at a normal pace. In Frenzy Mode, the letters shrink faster. Select Sprint Mode for a different challenge where you will create words out of nine letters for each level.

Points vary by letter and word length. The app’s settings let you turn sounds and music on or off and will show or hide game tips as you play.

Achievements and Medals
If you are a true wordsmith, you can kick the game into high gear and collect all of the Word Ball medals. You will receive medals for awesome plays (like making at least 25 six-letter words or 15 eight-letter words in one game). Brag about your skills on Facebook and Twitter, and climb the OpenFeint leaderboards. Note that the Leaderboards only apply to Classic Mode. There’s also a detailed breakdown of your statistics and score history.

Amazon offer today only His Last Duchess by Gabrielle Kimm by $0.99

The chilling story of Lucrezia de Medici, duchess to Alfonso d’Este, His Last Duchess paints a portrait of a lonely young girl and her marriage to an inscrutable duke. Lucrezia longs for love, Alfonso desperately needs an heir, and in a true story of lust and dark decadence, the dramatic fireworks the marriage kindles threaten to destroy the duke’s entire inheritance–and Lucrezia’s future. His Last Duchess gorgeously brings to life the passions and people of sixteenth-century Tuscany and Ferrara.

Here is a review on this book:

I have read other books about the Medicis. Many of them irk me just a bit with their concentration on sex and depravity. Yes, we all have noted that the Medici family was prone to some perversity but that is rally only a small part of the story of this truly amazing Renaissance family. The history of Florence and the Medici family is, perhaps, not complete without some portrayal of their odd familial sexual perversion but it need not be the focus of a book to be interesting. At least on my opinion – and although I don’t consider myself a libertine by any stretch of the imagination- neither am I prude.
This book was a happy exception to the rule about fiction based on the Medici family. My favorite thing about the book is that it poignantly depicts the beauty that was Florence during the Renaissance. As a reader I can almost smell the air, breath in the scents of cooking and flowers, walk through sun warmed porticos and wander through darkened, shuttered room where anything might – and sometimes does -happen. This is a well researched book that shines with the basis of fact that makes reading good historical fiction so enjoyable and satisfying.
The story takes the reader through 16 year old Lucrezia de Medici’s ill fated marriage to the wealthy & handsome Duke of Ferrara, Alphonso D’Este. Yes, there is some sex – but it a part of the story – not the story itself. That makes all of the difference for me as a reader.
The book is well researched, well written with subtlety blended plot lines that will have you routing for Lucrezia as the book nears the end. It’s a compelling read that I certainly think can’t fail to please. I thoroughly recommend this as a very readable, enjoyable, and illustrative book about this famous family.  —-Marie “ZQuilts” (Friday Harbor, WA, United States)

What’s Different is a fun educational game for young children (ages 3 and up). Join the adorable ladybug guide on a learning adventure that will keep your little ones thinking and guessing.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others
When you begin playing, you’ll see four objects, three of which are the same in some way and one that is different. There may be three birds and one dog, for example, or three people smiling and one frowning. Tap the image you think is different and, if you’re correct, the ladybug will fly in celebration of your success and you’ll pass to the next set.

If you’re not quite sure which image is different from the others, tap the hint button. Hints are available in five languages. Meanwhile, enjoy fun, vibrant graphics full of flowers, leaves, and landscapes, as well as amusing sound effects. Track your score as you play through 125 sets and have fun!

Keep Kids Engaged and Thinking
Even very young children can learn and have fun with this app. They can view a wide assortment of colorful images in the gallery section including musical instruments, tools, furniture, animals and birds, fruits and other foods, clothing, and much more. These images are a great way to teach your children object names. Kids can also pinch and drag images for zoom and bounce effects. Featuring high-end graphics and animations and a friendly interface, What’s Different is a great app for kids.

The trilogy “In Her Name” consists of three books: “In Her Name: Empire”, “In Her Name: Confederation”, and “In Her Name: Final Battle”. This is the recommended reading order.

Summarizing we can definitely say the books were very interesting to read. You can find out the plot of the books on the relevant Amazon page, but here we’ve decided to present only the positive and negative sides of these books.

Pros:

- The trilogy shows the strength of love, sacrifice, friendship, and honor.

- Rich description of characters, issues of personal identity, honor and friendship. The style of the author is very engaging, even emotional and exciting, so you can’t stop reading and only think what will happen next …

- The plot is good-structured.

- The happy end of the trilogy which is, at the same time, quite predictable after reading two thirds of the last book.

- Some parts of the plot are really worth thinking about. Consider this idea of the main hero, a teenage boy, who tells about his view of how to live in a routine world:

“Every day that you let yourself do just the stuff you have to do to get by, even when you’re so tired you can’t see straight, you die just a little bit. Not much, not so much that you notice that day, or even the next, but just a little. Your mind starts eroding, and you start forgetting about anything that you used to think was interesting or important, whether anyone else thought it was or not. Pretty soon, all the useless crap that we do here becomes more and more important to you, as if it really had some meaning… And the worst part is that you start not to care about anything or anyone, or even yourself.”

Cons:

- Harshness while describing some parts of the plot about the war, combats, or other brutal elements of the plot, which might not do for some people, for example children;

- Three books are quite bulky to read one after another (some parts of the plot are slightly stretched and lack the numerous changes that could take your breath).

- The first book is very likely to the American epic science fiction film “Avatar” by James Cameron. You’ll see a lot of similarities in the description of the alien race and their planet. So, some kind of déjà vu can probably pursue you while reading.

For all that, the trilogy is highly recommended to read!