Amazon's holiday content, free, or on special sale only during this week. A few deals are -were- only until midnight Christmas Day.

Special sales announced by Amazon for this holiday week

On Dec 24, I focused on the 40 Android apps worth $220 available for free "until" December 26.  I don't know whether Amazon means until December 26 starts (which is the normal meaning) or until the end of December 26.  In the past, they've stipulated 11:59pm on a given date or they've used the word "through" a particular day.  So, to be certain you get the apps you want from these, aim for the end of Christmas day.


For those just opening new Kindle tablets and e-readers or those who have not looked at the free and low-cost specials available at any given time, there are ongoing specials for a day or for a month (or unstipulated "limited time") at Amazon.  These are listed and linked to at the recent Free and low-cost Kindle books article.  There are a lot of varied free offerings included in that article.


Today-only through tonight, special Goldbox deal
The ongoing daily Goldbox page is featuring for today and tonight (Dec 25, 2014) this Gold Box Deal of the Day: Up to 50% Off Digital Music, Books, Movies, Games, and Apps


Amazon added a "Kindle Book Sale: Up to 65% off" page of books at $1.99 each, which appear to be from the Kindle-Unlimited feature.
  This one started December 25, 2014 and is "through January 25, 2015."
  Note that some at Amazon are clearer by using "through" a given date rather than 'until' (which can be misleading.)

What Amazon calls its Kindle Book Deals for the current day, including the Daily deals, Monthly Deals and Countdown Deals (had never heard of the latter).  These include books with up to 85% discount.

  Amazon's press release adds that: "Starting December 25th and running through the New Year popular Kindle books from best-selling authors will be up to 85% off, including titles from James Patterson, David Baldacci, Rick Riordan, Sandra Brown, Kristin Hannah, Jeff Kinney and Barbara Freethy."
  These will change, though, daily, as to what is featured, from what I can see.


Amazon Device Deals - Amazon's statement on holiday specials for its Kindle tablets and eReaders

' Amazon Device Deals
For a limited time, customers can get $20 off Amazon Fire TV (now $79), $25 off Fire HD 7 (now $114), $20 off [basic] Kindle (now $59) and $20 off Kindle Paperwhite (now $99). '

Amazon's new pages for gifting of Digital Content
There are now pages dedicated to
. gifting Prime Content and
. gifting Kindle books.
  The benefits that come with the gifting for the recipient are described in their statement from the holiday press release:

Customers can easily gift friends and family all the digital content they love.

Give the gift of Amazon Prime and customers automatically get access not only to
  fast, free Two-Day shipping on millions of items,
      but they can immediately start streaming
  tens of thousands of movies and TV episodes with Prime Instant Video,
  one million songs and
  hundreds of playlists with Prime Music,
  free unlimited Photo Storage with Cloud Drive,
  early access to select Lightning Deals and
  access to more than 700,000 books to borrow with the Kindle Owners' Lending Library.
Learn more and schedule your gift delivery at amazon.com/giftprime.

[The giftprime page clarifies that
    'If the recipient is already a Prime member, the gift can be exchanged for an Amazon.com Gift Card.
     The one-year gift membership does not automatically renew.' ]

Kindle books can be given as a gift to anyone with an email address, and
recipients can read a Kindle book gift on any compatible Fire or Kindle device, or free Kindle reading app.
Learn more at amazon.com/kindlegifting [which is actually Kindle book gifting].

Amazon Coins provide an easy way to give the gift of apps and games--simply choose the amount of Coins to gift, who[m] to gift them to and when to have them delivered.  Learn more at amazon.com/giftcoins.

And, in connection with Amazon Prime membership, Amazon's holiday week deals include the following in Amazon Prime Music, Amazon writes:

Prime members can also listen to a variety of popular holiday albums and songs on Prime Music without added cost, including the Christmas album from a cappella group Pentatonix--PTXmas (Deluxe Edition), Mariah Carey's fan-favorite and classic Merry Christmas album and the Christmas album from crooner Michael Bublé, among many more.

  Prime members can also explore a selection of hand-crafted holiday playlists on Prime Music including 50 Great Christmas Songs and Yule Love This as well as Prime Music Stations such as Holiday Classics, Holiday Favorites, Country Christmas and Relaxing Christmas for easy, ad-free holiday listening.

In addition, on [what's left of] December 25th, Amazon's Digital Music Store will offer top albums, including Ariana Grande--My Everything, Frozen (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), Imagine Dragons--Night Visions, OneRepublic--Native [+digital booklet], Sam Smith--In The Lonely Hour, and more for $3.99 as part of the Digital Gold Box Daily Deal at amazon.com/gp/goldbox.

Since I didn't get the Christmas Day Prime Music apps listed before the day but there are still 3 hours left on the East Coast and 6 hours on the West Coast, I'll stop here and get this up for those who are still exploring with their new tablets or eReaders.


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Kindle Touch 3G now available in 175+ countries. Kindle features vs Nook features - Update

Amazon is really in motion these days, isn't it.

  Now they've announced that the Kindle Touch 3G will be available in over 175 countries.  All this time, the UK had only the Kindle Basic (NoTouch/NoKeyboard) available for purchase there.

The heading on their Press Release:

' Kindle Touch 3G – the most full-featured Kindle e-reader – easy-to-use touch screen and free 3G wireless, no annual contracts or monthly fees and never pay for or hunt for a Wi-Fi hotspot

Now available in multiple languages – German, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and American and British English '

It's available today for pre-order from Amazon.

The Kindle Touch 3G will ship to customers beginning April 27, a month from now. Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G are also available today for pre-order from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.es and Amazon.it.  (Until recently, Kindles in Italy were ordered from U.S. Amazon.)

Update- A personal review or report cited today
KindleZen tweeted the link to this article, "The Right Tool for the Job: The Kindle Touch," this morning, giving his reasons for the title. [End of update]

X-ray Feature
I personally love using the X-Ray feature (now being made available on Kindle Fire also) on non-fiction books especially, but it's also useful to keep track of characters in novels as well.

  You can learn more about what X-Ray actually is or does, at What does X-Ray do? and with an example of my use of it in the book on Steve Jobs in the Tips post on Kindle Touch and its X-Ray Feature.

Kindle Touch features, beyond reading
The Kindle Touch (both in WiFi and in 3G/WiFi) comes with built-in speakers supporting text-to-speech when the publisher allows it, audiobooks, and mp3 files.

Now, I've been asked a lot about whether to get a Kindle or a Nook Touch.  I had bought a Nook Color on sight at my B&N (and used it daily for a year) but am not keen on the Nook Simple Touch because its many font faces and size choices displayed much lighter than what I'm used to seeing with the Kindle 3 Keyboard and Touch models.  B&N wouldn't allow me to photograph them side by side so I could have something more to go on than my personal reaction.  But the relative lightness was described in some magazine reviews and they've recently improved the darkness level, I read.  The darkness of fonts is important to me, and I was among those who posted about the lightness of Kindle 2 fonts (and was quoted in Wired on the problem for some Kindle users).

Nook and its "no ads" statement
It's said the Nook doesn't have ads, but almost half the Nook's Home screen is comprised of recommendations from B&N as to what you might like to read.  I'm one that doesn't want books I haven't chosen to buy, appearing on my home screen like that and, to me, they are ads, and others have felt that way.

Nook Touch advantages over Kindle Touch
 However, in response to those who ask, there are things many have preferred on the Nook (though The Nook Touch is NOT available globally nor can most people outside the U.S. buy Nook books -- which is not a small point especially when U.S. Nook owners can't buy Nook books for their devices while traveling outside the U.S.
  [ B&N was trying to change this.  Let me know if they did.]
  Update
  Commenter Geert responded that B&N changed this last year to allow US credit card holders to be able to buy from outside the U.S.  He added a note about SD card storage, so read the comments also to get that added information.

  .  The Nook has a wider bezel.  That may make it look squarer but it gives the hands more support in that you don't inadvertently touch the screen and turn a page that way.
  .  You can hold the Nook Touch and turn pages with one hand more easily, because it has page-turn buttons, while Amazon did away with the buttons.
  .  You can flip ahead more easily on the Nook, with a slider that lets you move ahead a certain amount.
  .  The Nook Touch, like the Kindle Touch, has "Real" page numbers matching a given print book version for thousands of books, but they also have page numbers that they create when there is nothing available with page numbers that would match a print book.  Many are comforted by having page numbers at all, as they're a more traditional reference than a 4-digit 'location' number (even if the latter is accurate in absolute terms no matter what the font size may be).

Why would anyone buy a Kindle Touch over the Nook Touch?
A couple of months ago, an Amazon Kindle forum member asked about this point:
  If the Kindle Touch 3G does not offer 3G access usable on any webpages beyond Free 24/7 Wikipedia access and the Amazon store, why should anyone not just buy a Nook then.
 (Never mind that no other e-reader offers free 3G access 24/7 to Wikipedia.)

  I didn't blog my response for months because I know that I'm biased on this.  But that's based on some quite real aspects of the two e-readers.
  So, here's a copy of what I posted at the time, in a format that replies to what the Kindle does have and can do that the Nook Touch can't.  Again, there's no pretense to being neutral, as the reasons given are the basis for the bias in my case.

' Zad,
Re your note that the new KTouch is [basically] the nook Touch and your question
  "What sets your reader apart now Amazon?"

I'm not Amazon but I've identified the following for a blog entry earlier:

1a. The Kindle has a web browser that works very well under WiFi.
1b. The Nook doesn't have a web-browser at all and B&N removed recently the vestiges of the hidden one that didn't really work, which is why B&N's comparison chart said the Nook didn't have a web browser.

2a. The Kindle has audio and music
2b. The Nook Touch doesn't.

3a. The Kindle has text to speech on most books and all personal docs
3b. The Nook doesn't.

4a. Kindle owners get 5 free gigs of storage space for personal documents (non-Amazon documents) [And these are now sync'd across various devices.]
4b. Nook owners don't. Nor do they have the free 5 gigs ALL Amazon customers get for storage of whatever legitimate [non-Amazon] documents and files they have.

5a. The Kindle can zoom any photo [or map] to full screen, within a book.
5b. The Nook Touch can't. (I can't do it on my NookColor books either.)

6a. Kindle owners who pay $6.58/mo. for unlimited free 2-day shipping of goods sold by Amazon itself get a bonus of access to instant video streaming of about 12,000 movies and tv shows -- older, but good ones, and some new ones from PBS and BBC -- for either their computers, their Kindle Fires if they have one, or even the TV, via a Roku or siimilar box.
6b. B&N offers no free streaming of media

7a. Kindle owners who pay that Prime membership also get now the bonus of being able to borrow one popular book per calendar month with no waiting period or due date.
7b. B&N doesn't have a program like that.

8a. Owners of the Kindle ereader can buy Kindle books when vacationing out of the country.
8b. Owners of the Nook ereader can't buy Nook books when out of the U.S.
    [Update: This was changed to allow this for U.S. customers using US credit cards.]


9a. 3G Kindle owners get free 3G web access to all of Wikipedia at any time, to look up information.
9b. The Nook Touch B&W has no web browser.

10a. Kindle owners get a personal web server page that shows their annotations for each book, backed up and displayable and transferrable to their computers.
10b. B&N hasn't made anything like that for the Nook.

- Andrys
http://kindleworld.blogspot.com '

Note that I didn't mention the X-Ray feature, which many find quite useful.

Nevertheless, look at the Nook Touch advantages above before making up your mind if you're trying to decide between the two (as many still are).



Kindle Touch 3G, US-only   Kindle Touch WiFi (US)   Kindle Touch WiFi-Only, outside US    Kindle Basic   (UK: KBasic)   Kindle Fire
Kindle Keybd 3G   (UK: Kindle Keybd 3G)   K3 Special Offers   K3-3G Special Offers   DX

---

Check often: Temporarily-free recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.  Liked-books under $1
UK-Only: recently published free books, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

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Kindle and Tablets / E-book Pricing Wars

Kindles and tablet computers will co-exist, for many reasons.  At least this is what most columnists are saying this week, who have experienced e-Ink screens and know by experience how easy those are on most eyes (compared to LCD screens) with more long-session, sequential reading as in books (vs web-surfing w/lots of eye relief).

  Besides reading the various colummns today, I noticed Amazon's new? Kindle at beach ad.  And it's a good one, highlighting the small-form and how easy it is to read in direct sunlight.  Others enjoy reading their iPods or iPhones under the covers at night which don't, like e-Ink books, need external clip-on lights that can upset those next to them.

CRUNCHGEAR ARTICLE ON IMPACT OF THE KINDLE APP FOR TABLETS
CrunchGear's Matt Burns asks: "Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers: Is it the king of ereaders?

  Unlike the Kindle for PC and Kindle for Mac, both of which are bare-bones in their Beta state, the new Kindle App for Tablets takes styling cues from Apple’s iBooks, he says.  And he adds:

' This is huge.  No longer can the iPad claim dominance on the color ebook world.  The upcoming Kindle tablet program will be able to run on presumably any PC tablet and still sync to the other Kindle apps, mobile or otherwise.  Knock “color ebook reader” off of the iPad’s list of Pros. The tablet race just got a bit more interesting.

  Content is king in the world of ebook readers and Apple should know that more than any company. The App Store, with its tens of thousands of apps, is one of the main reasons the iPad is guaranteed to be a success.
  The same thinking will drive the Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers program.  Consumers have been buying books from the Kindle Store since its launch in 2007 and Amazon keeps making those books more accessible by releasing Kindle apps for different platforms.

  Consumers own this content and expect to be able to access it no matter what device they are using because of Amazon’s precedent.  Now they can read their books not only on the Kindle itself, but also a BlackBerry, iPhone, PC, Mac, and soon nearly any tablet PC. '

  Now here's the thing -- though he doesn't say it explicitly in this article, others have pointed it out.

ARE THE E-BOOKS READABLE ON OTHER DEVICES?
  While, as he says, Kindle books can be read on the Kindle, the Blackberry, iPhone, iPod, PC, Mac, and soon any tablet computer AND sync'd between them --
  iBooks won't be readable on anything but the iPad, though I imagine they have to be making a corresponding app to read iBooks on the iPhone and iPod (optimized for the smaller size) and certainly eventually on a Mac computer.

THE FOCUS OF THE COMPANIES
  Apple's a hardware company first though, while Amazon's a book and other-content company first.  It's hard to imagine iBooks available for Blackberry or PC's, as Apple's main focus would be on selling iPads, iPods and iPhones (and, secondarily, data plans with AT&T and others) rather than e-books with all the hassles with publishers.

  Amazon's customer service for the Kindle is noted not only for its flexibility with respect to exchanges for any hardware/software kinks, it has the same standards for its Kindle books.  Will Apple?

  Unlike with Barnes and Noble's nook, you can return a Kindle book for a refund within 7 days if the formatting is sub-par or if there are missing pages or tables of contents without links.  Not so with the Nook -- its e-books are not returnable.
  If unsatisfied with. or not liking, a Kindle itself within 30 days of it being shipped you, you can return it (undamaged) in its box for a full refund.
  With the nook, it's 15 days.  What's the policy with the Sony?  What will be the policy with the various expensive tablets, including Apple's?  Amazon's been very secure in these areas.

Mann brings up another scenario.  He feels the availability of the Amazon Kindle app for Tablets "doesn't mean that it will ever hit the iPad.  Technically it’s up to Apple whether this app will run on the iPad and Apple’s track record doesn’t make its future look all that promising."

  He points out that iBooks will be a key feature of the iPad, just as Safari and iTunes are to its iPhone/iPod, but Apple has not approved the Firefox Mobile or Opera web browsers for them.  I think Amazon may have cleared it with Apple since its Kindle apps ARE on the iPhone/iPod.

  If not, there are various tablets coming out very soon, at least two of them far more capable than the iPad, which was intentionally somewhat crippled to keep its WiFi-only model priced low enough (no USB port, no multi-tasking, no SD slots, no webcam, no flash support -- no Hulu or ESPN video then).  The other models will have these and cost no more, or will cost less.  It wouldn't be good for Apple if Amazon books were available on other tablets but not the iPad.

CONTINUING E-BOOK PRICING WARS
As you'll have seen in earlier articles here, Apple has pushed for higher pricing via publishers setting selling-price rather than wholesale price, with Amazon/Apple to be acting as 'agencies' under the Apple plan.  Five of the six large publishers dove in, eager to get the guaranteed pricing, as Apple insisted in their agreements that no other bookstores would be allowed to sell at lower prices than theirs.

  Then Apple turned around and attempted (apparently successfully) to insert language into their own Agency plan with publishers, that would let Apple sell "hottest" titles at $9.99.  Note that "hottest" is synonymous, in the business, with the New York Times Bestsellers.

  Publishers (not Random House) who bought the Agency plan (and are trying to foist it on Amazon) HAD been getting $12.50 from Amazon on a $25 List-Price book, sold by Amazon for $9.99 (as loss-leaders), with the traditional wholesaler plan.

  Now, on books that sell for $9.95 at Apple, Jobs has publishers in a predicament because they would get only 70% of that $9.95 price -- or $7.00 rather than the $12.50 they would have gotten from Amazon under the traditional arrangement as opposed to Steve Job's "Agency" agreement.   How does $12.50 look against $7.00?

  Jobs might have negotiated a deal whereby the publishers who allow this would still get 70% of their desired pricing of $15 -- or $10.50, which would mean Apple would take a loss there (is this likely?) while the Publishers would get $2.00 less per sale than they would have with Amazon under the most favorable scenario for the publisher.

Now, again, who is setting the price?

UPDATE - Confirmation that Random House is Smarter on this
Random House is still not signed onto the Agency idea for the reasons cited in the linked article and wants to consult with stockholders and authors first:

  1. The agency model "lets the company take preset commissions on sales."
  2. "Apple would have the publishers put the price-tags as paid by customers, something which doesn’t seem to be [a] lucrative proposition to Random House executives."

"LEAK" ABOUT APPLE iBOOKSTORE PRICING ON NY TIMES BEING $9.99
The above speculations are due to AppAdvice's Alexander Vaughn "revealing" iPad iBooks pricing for the NY Times Bestsellers, in that he was at a preview of the iPad Bookstore and has a picture of the pricing shown at the presentation.  He does say it was a "not-so-NDA-complying preview."

  He reports that of the 32 e-books featured in the NYT's bestseller's section, 27 of them, including the entire top 10 are priced at $9.99.

Again, this means that Apple would pay the publishers $7 of the $10 OR if they applied the 30% to the publishers' WANTED selling price ($15), then they'd pay the publishers $10.50, losing money on each book.  Is that likely?

IN THE MEANTIME
Amazon would be making $3 on each NYT bestseller instead of losing $3.50 on each, using the 'Agency' plan Macmillan and others have been negotiating.

Gizmodo's Matt Buchanan writes about the "Supposedly Leaked" pricing and points out that the highest priced e-book of the 32 bestsellers mentioned is Poor Little Bitch Girl by Jackie Collins, going for $12.99 - but the Kindle counterpart is only $8.83.

So, who is (not) matching whom?  I think some are missing that Macmillan's new agreement with Amazon was to start April 1, not now (though people have noticed e-book pricing inching up).  So it's difficult to determine who is setting the price and matching whom in April.  And it would be very time-consuming to monitor and regulate between all the bookstores.  This is what the large publishers have bought into though, while attempting to set fixed higher pricing to be the same at all stores (per Apple).

WHY THE E-BOOK EXPLOSION
Authorlink discusses the new IDPF survey and points to a few articles on the explosion of e-books.  One is TBIResearch's headline by Rory Maher that Here's Why Amazon Will Win The eBook War: Kindle Already Has 90% eBook Market Share.  Read his article to see all the implications if Amazon continues to lead after the next half-year.

Authorlink also points to the main article about the e-book explosion by Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords, an already very influential e-book publisher, who sums things up with:

' Why are consumers going ga ga over ebooks?  Back in October, I blogged some of the reasons in my Huffington Post piece, Why Ebooks are Hot and Getting Hotter.  I listed several reasons, such as the proliferation of exciting new e-reading devices; screen reading rivaling paper; content selection; free ebooks as the gateway drug; lower prices; and great selection.

If we boil it all down to what really matters, it's about customer experience.  People who try ebooks are loving ebooks. '

And what many have left out of their predictions is the very real difference between reading books (not web images and short articles) on an e-Ink screen and on a larger LCD screen.

Then there is the $259 price for the 6" Kindle with which you can download a book immediately from almost anywhere with no web-data charge vs the $500 price for the iPad which will not have that downloadable-from-anywhere feature unless you pay $630 for the tablet plus a monthly fee for web data.

  But it's not an either/or. Many Kindle owners plan to buy the iPad also (or another tablet) for fast, colorful, portable web-browsing and fast email.

---

See the ongoing Guide to finding Free or Low-Cost Kindle books and Sources
Also, a page of links that confine searches to mid-range priced e-books. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
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(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
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Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!