Saturday 25 May 2013

J K Rowling




J K Rowling


 


How much did you paY


How a third of bestselling ebooks cost MORE than the same title in hardback


  • Consumers say that electronic versions should be cheaper because they cost nothing to produce
  • Ebooks make up around 15 per cent of books sold in the UK

HOW THE PRICES COMPARE...


The Casual Vacancy, JK Rowling, Kindle price: £11.99 Hardback: £9

Chronicles Of Downton Abbey, Kindle price: £12.99 Hardback: £10

David Mitchell: Back Story, David Mitchell, Kindle price: £12.99 Hardback price: £10

Between The Lines, Victoria Pendleton, Kindle: £12.99 Hardback: £12

The Life, Martina Cole, Kindle price: £10.99 Hardback price: £9

The Kingmaker’s Daughter, Philippa Gregory, Kindle price: £9.99 Hardback price: £8.86


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2211022/How-bestselling-ebooks-cost-MORE-title-hardback.html#ixzz2UITnYhrl

Friday 24 May 2013

The Price of e-Books


A US judge is confident that government evidence will prove Apple knowingly participated in a conspiracy to raise the price of ebooks, ahead of a trial due to start next month.

US District Judge Denise Cole is set to oversee the trial starting 3 June and this week gave her views during a pretrial hearing, and although she stressed her tentative view was not final, she believes the US government can prove Apple engaged in a price-raising conspiracy with five book publishers.

Apple is the sole remaining defendant in the case, after the five publishers accused of colluding with Apple to set ebook prices all settled with the US Department of Justice.

"I believe that the government will be able to show at trial direct evidence that Apple knowingly participated in and facilitated a conspiracy to raise prices of ebooks, and that the circumstantial evidence in this case, including the terms of the agreements, will confirm this," Cote said.

 

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/470945/20130524/apple-ebook-price-fixing-judge-comment-blow.htm

 

Penguin pays $75m to settle ebook price-fixing case

Wednesday 15 May 2013

The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald.




From  http://www.ereadingtrends.com/the-great-gatsby-ebook-is-free-dont-waste-money-buying-it/

 

The Great Gatsby eBook is Free – Don’t Waste Money Buying It!


Published


It irritates me to no end when I see big companies trying to capitalize off of a book being turned into a movie so they can rake in every little cent that they can squeeze out of consumers.

Unfortunately that is the case with The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Ever since it has been turned into a movie, ebookstores everywhere are trying to make as much money as possible off of what is a public domain ebook that is freely available (in most countries except the U.S.) to anyone who knows where to get it.

At Amazon, The Great Gatsby is currently the #1 bestseller in the Kindle store. That shows just how popular the ebook is right now. Amazon is charging $4.99, which isn’t half as bad as B&N who is selling it for a ridiculous $10.93. Sony has it for $9.62 and Kobo has it for $7.99. In my opinion that is way too much to pay for an ebook, much less one that was published in 1925 and is now in the public domain.

None of those ebookstores want you to know that you can simply go to Feedbooks.com and download The Great Gatsby for free in ePub, Mobi (for Kindle), and PDF formats. What I like about Feedbooks is their ebooks are nicely formatted, so there’s no reason to go spend $5-$10 elsewhere.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that everyone is trying to cash in on the success of the movie, but I still don’t like it. The same thing happened to George Martin’s A Game of Thrones, which used to sell for $6.99 in ebook form until HBO started airing the Game of Thrones TV series. Then it shot up to $9.99 and has remained there ever since.

The Great Gatsby eBook is Free – Don’t Waste Money Buying It! | The eBook Reader Blog.

http://www.feedbooks.com/book/5543/the-great-gatsby

Tuesday 14 May 2013

Dan Brown - Inferno






If you like Dan Brown – I don’t! If you have read one you have read them all.

This was obviously written with the hope it would become a movie!

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Sunday 12 May 2013

John Sandford - Silken Prey





The behind-the-scenes shenanigans of the political class provide a grim reminder: power is not only a potent aphrodisiac  it is a motive for murder. It's Davenport's job to unravel an ugly scenario of blackmail and murder without a scandal before an important election.

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Thursday 9 May 2013

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes



In Sterling, New Hampshire, 17-year-old high school student Peter Houghton has endured years of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of classmates. His best friend, Josie Cormier, succumbed to peer pressure and now hangs out with the popular crowd that often instigates the harassment. One final incident of bullying sends Peter over the edge and leads him to commit an act of violence that forever changes the lives of Sterling’s residents.
 
Even those who were not inside the school that morning find their lives in an upheaval, including Alex Cormier. The superior court judge assigned to the Houghton case, Alex—whose daughter, Josie, witnessed the events that unfolded—must decide whether or not to step down. She’s torn between presiding over the biggest case of her career and knowing that doing so will cause an even wider chasm in her relationship with her emotionally fragile daughter. Josie, meanwhile, claims she can’t remember what happened in the last fatal minutes of Peter’s rampage. Or can she? And Peter’s parents, Lacy and Lewis Houghton, ceaselessly examine the past to see what they might have said or done to compel their son to such extremes. Nineteen Minutes also features the return of two of Jodi Picoult’s characters—defense attorney Jordan McAfee from The Pact and Salem Falls, and Patrick DuCharme, the intrepid detective introduced in Perfect Match.
 
Rich with psychological and social insight, Nineteen Minutes is a riveting, poignant, and thought-provoking novel that has at its center a haunting question. Do we ever really know someone?

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Tuesday 7 May 2013

Helen Bryan – The Sisterhood





Menina Walker was a child of fortune. Rescued after a hurricane in South America, doomed to a life of poverty with a swallow medal as her only legacy, the orphaned toddler was adopted by an American family and taken to a new life.

As a beautiful, intelligent woman of nineteen, she is in love, engaged, and excited about the future—until another traumatic event shatters her dreams. Menina flees to Spain to bury her misery in research for her college thesis about a sixteenth-century artist who signed his works with the image of a swallow—the same image as the one on Menina’s medal.

But a mugging strands Menina in a musty, isolated Spanish convent. Exploring her surroundings, she discovers the epic sagas of five orphan girls who were hidden from the Spanish Inquisition and received help escaping to the New World. Is Menina’s medal a link to them, or to her own past? Did coincidence lead her to the convent, or fate?

Both love story and historical thriller, The Sisterhood is an emotionally charged ride across continents and centuries.

 

DownloadLink

Sunday 5 May 2013

Monday 29 April 2013

David Hewson - The Blue Demon




Twenty years ago, a mysterious group called the Blue Demon committed a series of bizarre and ritualistic crimes evoking the legacy of the lost race of the Etruscans, and leaving in their wake a group of dead students, a murdered couple, a cryptic message and a kidnapped child. Now, the leaders of the G8 are descending on Rome for a summit at the Quirinale Palace. But when a politician is found ritually murdered, seemingly by a strange young man dressed as an Etruscan god, detective Nic Costa suspects that the old case was never really solved. The Blue Demon appear to have returned - and planning, under the leadership of the fanatical Andrea Petrakis, to unleash a devastating sequence of attacks on the city. As Costa and his team start to dig deeper into the past, they find that there are still too many unanswered questions – and much more to the history of the Blue Demon than anyone wants to admit . . . 'Hewson is a daunting talent – a writer who is master stylist, who respects the audience’s intelligence and who effortlessly keeps the thrills coming a mile a minute’ Jeffery Deaver

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Sunday 28 April 2013

Edward Rutherfurd - Paris



The main player in the story is Paris itself. We learn about the building of the Eiffel tower, the Moulin Rouge, the impressionist painters and poets, the Palace of Versailles, the violence of the French Revolution, the couture clothing industry and countless more French associations. Paris's coat of arms contains a ship with the city's Latin motto," Whatever the storm, the ship sails on." Your visit to Paris will be clear sailing with splendid views.

 




Saturday 27 April 2013

C J Box - Breaking Point




The thrilling new Joe Pickett novel from the New York Times–bestselling author.

Critics called Force of Nature an“amazing” (Associated Press), “outstanding” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), “warp speed . . . showdown between good and evil” (The Denver Post). “This is the best Box I’ve ever read, and I’ve read them all” (Library Journal).

Breaking Point, however, takes Joe Pickett into uncharted territory. The question is: What will he do when he gets there?

It was always good to see Butch Roberson, Joe thought—a hardworking, upright local business owner whose daughter was friends with his own. Little did he know that when he talked to Butch that day in the forest, the man was about to disappear. He was heading into the mountains to scout elk, he said, but instead he was running. Two EPA employees had just been murdered, and all signs pointed to him as the killer.

As the manhunt organized itself, Joe heard more of the story—about the tract of land Butch and his wife had bought to build their retirement home on, until the EPA declared it a wetland. About the penalties they charged him when he balked, new ones piling up every day, until the family was torn apart . . . and finally, it seems, the man just cracked.

It was an awful story. But was it the whole story? The more Joe looks into it, the more he begins to wonder—and the more he finds himself in the middle of a war he never expected and never wanted. Powerful forces want Roberson not just caught but dead—and the same goes for anyone who stands in their way.

Every man reaches his breaking point. Joe Pickett may just have reached his.
 
 

Thursday 18 April 2013

David Baldacci - The Hit

 
 
 
Will Robie is a master of killing.
A highly skilled assassin, Robie is the man the U.S. government calls on to eliminate the worst of the worst—enemies of the state, monsters committed to harming untold numbers of innocent victims.
No one else can match Robie’s talents as a hitman…no one, except Jessica Reel. A fellow assassin, equally professional and dangerous, Reel is every bit as lethal as Robie. And now, she’s gone rogue, turning her gun sights on other members of their agency.
To stop one of their own, the government looks again to Will Robie. His mission: bring in Reel, dead or alive. Only a killer can catch another killer, they tell him.
But as Robie pursues Reel, he quickly finds that there is more to her betrayal than meets the eye. Her attacks on the agency conceal a larger threat, a threat that could send shockwaves through the U.S. government and around the world.

Saturday 23 March 2013

Jeffrey Archer – Best Kept Secret




1945. The vote in the House of Lords as to who should inherit the Barrington family fortune has ended in a tie. The Lord Chancellor’s deciding vote will cast a long shadow on the lives of Harry Clifton and Giles Barrington. Harry returns to America to promote his latest novel, while his beloved Emma goes in search of the little girl who was found abandoned in her father’s office on the night he was killed. When the General Election is called, Giles Barrington has to defend his seat in the House of Commons and is horrified to discover who the Conservatives select to stand against him. But it is Sebastian Clifton, Harry and Emma’s son, who ultimately influences his uncle’s fate. In 1957, Sebastian wins a scholarship to Cambridge, and a new generation of the Clifton family march onto the page. After Sebastian is expelled from school, he unwittingly becomes caught up in an international art fraud involving a Rodin statue that is worth far more than the sum it raises at auction. Does he become a millionaire? Does he go to Cambridge? Is his life in danger? Best Kept Secret will answer all these questions, but once again, pose so many more.

 

Harlan Coben – Six Years

 
In Six Years, a masterpiece of modern suspense, Harlan Coben explores the depth and passion of lost love…and the secrets and lies at its heart.
 Six years have passed since Jake Fisher watched Natalie, the love of his life, marry another man. Six years of hiding a broken heart by throwing himself into his career as a college professor. Six years of keeping his promise to leave Natalie alone, and six years of tortured dreams of her life with her new husband, Todd.
 But six years haven’t come close to extinguishing his feelings, and when Jake comes across Todd’s obituary, he can’t keep himself away from the funeral. There he gets the glimpse of Todd’s wife he’s hoping for…but she is not Natalie. Whoever the mourning widow is, she’s been married to Todd for almost two decades, and with that fact everything Jake thought he knew about the best time of his life—a time he has never gotten over—is turned completely inside out.
 As Jake searches for the truth, his picture-perfect memories of Natalie begin to unravel. Mutual friends of the couple either can’t be found, or don’t remember Jake. No one has seen Natalie in years. Jake’s search for the woman who broke his heart, who lied to him, soon puts his very life at risk as it dawns on him that the man he has become may be based on a carefully constructed fiction.
 Harlan Coben once again delivers a shocking page-turner that deftly explores the power of past love, and the secrets and lies that such love can hide.

Friday 8 March 2013

Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl

 
I did not finish this book found it to be at most mediocre – but here is what it says in a review.
Marriage can be a real killer. One of the most critically acclaimed suspense writers of our time, New York Times bestseller Gillian Flynn takes that statement to its darkest place in this unputdownable masterpiece about a marriage gone terribly, terribly wrong. The Chicago Tribune proclaimed that her work “draws you in and keeps you reading with the force of a pure but nasty addiction.” Gone Girl’s toxic mix of sharp-edged wit and deliciously chilling prose creates a nerve-fraying thriller that confounds you at every turn. On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy’s diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer? As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister, Margo, at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn’t do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet? With her razor-sharp writing and trademark psychological insight, Gillian Flynn delivers a fast-paced, devilishly dark, and ingeniously plotted thriller.

Tuesday 26 February 2013

Lawrence Block - Hit Me

 
A man named Nicholas Edwards lives in New Orleans renovating houses, doing honest work and making decent money at it. Between his family and his stamp collection, all his spare time is happily accounted for. Sometimes it's hard to remember that he used to kill people for a living.
 
But when the nation's economy tanks, taking the construction business with it, all it takes is one phone call to drag him back into the game. It may say Nicholas Edwards on his driver's license and credit cards, but he's back to being the man he always was: Keller.
 
Keller's work takes him to New York, the former home he hasn't dared revisit, where his target is the abbot of a midtown monastery. Another call puts him on a West Indies cruise, with several interesting fellow passengers-the government witness, the incandescent young woman keeping the witness company, and, sharing Keller's cabin, his wife, Julia. But the high drama comes in Cheyenne, where a recent widow is looking to sell her husband's stamp collection...
 
In HIT ME, legendary Edgar Grandmaster and New York Times bestselling author Lawrence Block returns to one of his most beloved characters. Welcome back, Keller. You've been missed. Aka Amazon.
 
 
 
 

Monday 25 February 2013

James Patterson -12th of Never


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Nicci French - Tuesday's Gone




In Tuesday’s Gone, a London social worker makes a routine home visit only to discover her client, Michelle Doyce, serving afternoon tea to a naked, decomposing corpse. With no clues as to the dead man’s identity, Chief Inspector Karlsson again calls upon Frieda for help. She discovers that the body belongs to Robert Poole, con man extraordinaire. But Frieda can’t shake the feeling that the past isn’t done with her yet. Did someone kill Poole to embroil her in the investigation? And if so, is Frieda herself the next victim?

 


 
 

Monday 11 February 2013

The Perks of being a Wallflower

 
From Publishers Weekly
A trite coming-of-age novel that could easily appeal to a YA readership, filmmaker Chbosky's debut broadcasts its intentions with the publisher's announcement that ads will run on MTV. Charlie, the wallflower of the title, goes through a veritable bath of bathos in his 10th grade year, 1991. The novel is formatted as a series of letters to an unnamed "friend," the first of which reveals the suicide of Charlie's pal Michael. Charlie's response--valid enough--is to cry. The crying soon gets out of hand, though--in subsequent letters, his father, his aunt, his sister and his sister's boyfriend all become lachrymose. Charlie has the usual dire adolescent problems--sex, drugs, the thuggish football team--and they perplex him in the usual teen TV ways. [...] Into these standard teenage issues Chbosky infuses a droning insistence on Charlie's supersensitive disposition. Charlie's English teacher and others have a disconcerting tendency to rhapsodize over Charlie's giftedness, which seems to consist of Charlie's unquestioning assimilation of the teacher's taste in books. In the end we learn the root of Charlie's psychological problems, and we confront, with him, the coming rigors of 11th grade, ever hopeful that he'll find a suitable girlfriend and increase his vocabulary.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Always make sure you have a good anti-virus program when you download anything from the internet!!!!!Show more
 

Saturday 9 February 2013

Lisa Gardner Touch and Go

 

Judith Riley - The Oracle Glass


"Absorbing and arresting." —New York Times

 

"Fascinating and factual." —Los Angeles Times

 

"Chilly, witty, and completely engrossing ... great, good fun." — Kirkus Reviews

 

"An outstanding historical novel of 17th–century France ... based on a real–life scandal known as the Affaire des Poisons, this tale is riveting from start to finish." —Library Journal

 

For a handful of gold, Madame de Morville will read your future in a glass of swirling water. You'll believe her, because you know she's more than 150 years old and a witch, and she has all of Paris in the palm of her hand. But Madame de Morville hides more behind her black robes than you know. Her real age, the mother and uncle who left her for dead, the inner workings of the most secret society of Parisian witches: none of these truths would help her outwit the rich who so desperately want the promise of the future. After all, it's her own future she must control , no matter how much it is painted with uncertainty and clouded by vengeance.
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David Hoffman - The Dead Hand

 
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
The first full account of how the Cold War arms race finally came to a close, this riveting narrative history sheds new light on the people who struggled to end this era of massive overkill, and examines the legacy of the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that remain a threat today.
Drawing on memoirs, interviews in both Russia and the US, and classified documents from deep inside the Kremlin, David E. Hoffman examines the inner motives and secret decisions of each side and details the deadly stockpiles that remained unsecured as the Soviet Union collapsed. This is the fascinating story of how Reagan, Gorbachev, and a previously unheralded collection of scientists, soldiers, diplomats, and spies changed the course of history.
 

Wednesday 23 January 2013

Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat

 
Translated into English by Michiel Heyns
A paralyzed Afrikaner woman, Milla, stricken with ALS that leaves her not only mute, but entirely dependent on her Black caretaker, Agaat. She reminisces about her life, her abusive marriage, and the son she loves. In the hands of a lesser writer Marlene van Niekerk's second novel, "Agaat." would surely have descended into saccharine melodrama. Instead, with poetic prose and a perfectly pitched narrative voice, van Niekerk weaves a complex intimacy between these two women, whose lives have been inseparably bound by knots so intricate they cannot even be undone by death. Agaat's attention, at times loving and others sadistic, speaks volumes, and it is in these scenes where "Agaat" most sings, enveloped in an achingly beautiful claustrophobia and  finely rendered.

Tuesday 22 January 2013

The Fifth Assassin - Brad Meltzer

 
Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2013: I consider myself a cagey reader, the literary equivalent of a wizened salmon, suspicious of fakery, wary of sloppy plotting and cliché, and ready to bail if I’m not lured in by page 50. So when Meltzer got his hooks in me by the end of page three, and never stopped reeling me in, I have to say I was impressed. I was also impressed that the hero of The Fifth Assassin (first introduced in The Inner Circle) isn’t a misanthrope cop or hard-drinking PI but a brainy archivist at the National Archives. Beecher White is a glorified librarian, for god's sake. But with a dash of Sherlock Holmes and a hint of Indiana Jones, White is a refreshingly quirky pursuer of justice, and his hunt for a would-be assassin—which takes us through history and through the secret spaces around Washington, DC—makes for a thrilling read, as well as a nice reminder that a page-turner can be smart, deeply researched, and just plain fun. --Neal Thompson

Monday 21 January 2013

Life of Pi

 
One boy, one boat, one tiger ...After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary and best-loved works of fiction in recent years.

Friday 18 January 2013

THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK »By Matthew Quick

 
 
This book will make you happy, though, because of the way it is written. Most of the chapter titles will make you laugh in a different way than the next. Mr. Quick's apt use of detail, allusions, and brilliant comparisons bring the story to life. That a chapter should be called "Like he was Yoda and I was Luke Skywalker training on Dagobah" is a very precious thing. Meanwhile periodic interludes such as advice from Pat's 'black friend Danny', and even the whole introduction of the death of Veterans Stadium as a new thing, bring bits of humor just when the story may seem to be becoming sad. The author has an eye for quirks and intricacies of language and a gift for conveying them in a readable yet still emotional and romantic manner. More than just the ease of identifying with Pat, Mr. Quick's simple, declarative prose, highlighted by brief, nostalgic-filled, almost Hemingway-like sentences, reels in the reader

Monday 14 January 2013

Patricia-Cornwell – The Bone Bed

 
Patricia-Cornwell – The Bone Bed
This one I read and no!  I did not like it. I don’t see the point of Scarpetta’s niece  taking over so much of the story…    When Cornwell started out her books were worthwhile now she obviously only writes to support her bank balance
 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261843/Patricia-Cornwell-Crime-novelist-suing-financial-manager-Anchin-Block-Achin-100M.htmlce.
 
A woman has vanished while digging a dinosaur bone bed in the remote wilderness of Canada. Somehow, the only evidence has made its way to the inbox of Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta, over two thousand miles away in Boston. She has no idea why. But as events unfold with alarming speed, Scarpetta begins to suspect that the paleontologist’s disappearance is connected to a series of crimes much closer to home: a gruesome murder, inexplicable tortures, and trace evidence from the last living creatures of the dinosaur age.
 
When she turns to those around her, Scarpetta finds that the danger and suspicion have penetrated even her closest circles. Her niece Lucy speaks in riddles. Her lead investigator, Pete Marino, and FBI forensic psychologist and husband, Benton Wesley, have secrets of their own. Feeling alone and betrayed, Scarpetta is tempted by someone from her past as she tracks a killer both cunning and cruel.
 

Friday 11 January 2013

Oliver Potzsch - The Beggar King

 
Oliver Potzsch - The Beggar King
Amazon Best seller for what it’s worth.
(So is Gone Girl which I casted aside after reading 20%, How on Earth could…..)
The Beggar King is the third in a series by Oliver Potzsch. The first is The Hangman's Daughter, which introduces Jakob Kuisl, the Hangman of Schongau, along with other main characters, his wife Anna Maria, children Magdalena, Georg and Barbara and the son of the town doctor, Simon Fronweiser. The second book is  The Dark Monk.
The year is 1662. Alpine village hangman Jakob Kuisl receives a letter from his sister calling him to the imperial city of Regensburg, where a gruesome sight awaits him: her throat has been slit. Arrested and framed for the murder, Kuisl faces first-hand the torture he’s administered himself for years. Jakob’s daughter, Magdalena, and a young medicus named Simon hasten to his aid. With the help of an underground network of beggars, a beer-brewing monk, and an Italian playboy, they discover that behind the false accusation is a plan that will endanger the entire German Empire. Chock-full of historical detail, The Beggar King brings to vibrant life another tale of an unlikely hangman and his tough-as-nails daughter, confirming Pötzsch’s mettle as a writer to watch.