Free Kindle US Edition of Martha Wells' The Cloud Roads

[boundbooks]

edit - 12/29/2011: A commenter let me know that the promotion is over, so the price is back to regular price.

Via the author's journal, marthawells:

If you don't already have it, the Kindle US edition of The Cloud Roads is still currently free: here.

I haven't read the book myself, so here's a summary from Amazon :)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Moon's world is populated by many different intelligent species (none of them human), and he has never known which one he belongs to. Orphaned at a young age, he's wandered from tribe to tribe, hiding a dangerous secret. Like the universally hated Fell, whose only aims are slaughter and conquest, Moon can fly—which leads to predictably violent cases of mistaken identity. When he does find his own people, the Raksura, life doesn't get any easier, since their internal politics are vicious, and they too are in imminent danger from the Fell. Cue hairsbreadth escapes and feats of derring-do, as Moon helps his new family evacuate their doomed colony and then rescues a group of kidnapped children. Wells (The Gate of Gods) merrily ignores genre conventions as she spins an exciting adventure around an alien hero who anyone can identify with.

Comments

[laceblade]

Question for you, or anybody else: When there are cheap or free "Kindle editions" of books, and I get them through Amazon.com, will I be able to read it on my Kobo? I know I can do so with .mobi files from like, AO3, but when I was poking around at Amazon.com yesterday, I got confused because it didn't seem to be an option.

[boundbooks]

Hm. I don't know! :(

I hope someone else can chime in and answer this!

[laceblade]

Thinking about this for more than 30 seconds....I guess if the book is free, it would be a good one to try out! Bwahaha. I will report back!

[boundbooks]

Haha, I guess you'll be chiming in on your own question! XD

[laceblade]

Possibly not! I'm in a black vortex at Amazon.com! Googling the issue brings me to pages where I can...buy an Amazon Kindle (doh!).

I'll keep poking at it; if I can't figure it out, I'll summarize what I did.

[arduinna]

You may need to have a Kindle device to download the book to, but they offer a lot of free ones, not just the e-reader itself.

here's the full list of Kindle-for-whatever. Download whatever one matches your computer system and link it to your amazon account, and you should be able to download Kindle books to it.

The book will probably be DRMed to be Kindle-only, but there are ways around that; see this post for info and links

[laceblade]

Step 1 helped a lot!

When following the instructions at this post, I was cruising along until step #11, configuring the plugins. None of it made any sense to me whatsoever.

This sounded like me: c. If you have Amazon Kindle ebooks that were downloaded to the copy of Kindle for Mac or Kindle for PC that was installed on this computer, you do not need to add anything extra into the customisation fields
so I didn't customize any plug-ins.

I restarted Calibre to make sure the plug-ins were in effect.

Then I tried to "add a book," and am unable to find the damned book anywhere on my computer - unless I open my newly-downloaded "Kindle reader for the PC" and read it in there.


I'm sure this is my fault - I find computers incredibly frustrating.

[arduinna]

Hm. It should be under My Documents | My Kindle Content. (Or I think "Documents | My Kindle Content" on Windows 7.) That's the default directory for books to download to.

ETA: forgot to add, the extension will be .azw, not .mobi

[laceblade]

Ahh! I had been searching for .mobi's, so that's why I couldn't find it.

Thanks for the exact file location, that helped, too! It's in Calibre! Thanks for your help!

[arduinna]

Oh, good! Glad it worked. :)

[elf]

Whether you can read it on a Kobo depends on whether it's DRM'd, and Amazon doesn't provide that info. (They're really big on "you can read it on any device that works with our program! And that's all that's important!")

Some of the free ebooks (maybe many of them? because the agency publishers aren't participating?) released as part of the library program are not DRM'd; the only hassle is sorting out how to get the book from Amazon to a device that Amazon doesn't approve of. That, I can't help with; I know it'd involve installing the Kindle-for-PC program to download the file, and I've got no idea where those get saved on the hard drive.

If it's got DRM, you'd need a script that strips the DRM before it can be read on a different device; that's where the Apprentice Alf blog comes in.

[voidampersand]

I have read The Cloud Roads and it is excellent. The worldbuilding is extraordinary, with an vast number of diverse landscapes and creatures. The fantasy elements are subtle, logical and well thought out. Great characters, and an interestingly quirky hero in Moon. Definitely worth reading.

[scifisentai]

Just a heads up that this isn't available to people in the UK and might not be for others outside North America, otherwise I would be all over this.

[havocthecat]

FYI, it's back up to $7.99. :( That was fast.

[boundbooks]

When I spotted it on the author's blog, I think it might have been the tail end of the promo. =/

I'll edit the post to reflect that the deal's over.