Per MamaLiberty in comments, the Future of Freedom Foundation is offering two gun-rights ebooks FREE today and tomorrow.
The books are:
The Tyranny of Gun Control (various authors including Sheldon Richman and Jim Bovard) and
Freedom and Security: The Second Amendment and The Right to Keep and Bear Arms by Scott McPherson.
Get ’em while you can. The timing of this is perfect.
I am pondering, a bit, acquiring a Kindle. I don’t read as much as I used to. It’s difficult, for various reasons, to get comfortable with a book these days. Possibly, a better office chair would be a better use of money. OTOH, the Kindle White isn’t all that expensive, particularly the refurb. I wonder whether there would be a greater flexibility in reading postures which would make it worthwhile. Combined with the occassional free e-book, perhaps it’d even pay for itself over time?
Then I look at the CC balance. Granted, most of that is tires. Sigh. It wasn’t all that long ago I had it at zero.
I chose to buy an android tablet instead of the proprietary kindle device. I can download many different e-book formats to the tablet, including pdf files. The most troubling aspect of the kindle reader is that some serious evidence (I don’t have links… maybe Carl Bear can illuminate this) indicates that Amazon (and maybe others) can access this device and even delete some content.
In any case, I went for the versatility of the tablet and have not regretted it. I’ve had it for several years now, and it doesn’t owe me anything. If I ever decide to get a new one, the technology has advanced so far on them that I simply don’t see any advantage to buying a kindle that will only allow you to download from Amazon! Why would you do that? 🙂
Cool. On my iPhone. Thanks Claire!
Well, no kindle and no tablet, so apparently the ‘freebies’ aren’t for all of us. Too bad – I’d have downloaded and read both. Maybe I’m just a dinosaur, but I don’t see any valid reason to have a PC, laptop, smart phone, AND more stuff than that. Except that it seems lots of things are only published for Kindle now. I guess I won’t be reading those things.
And MamaLiberty, yes, Amazon has been accused by many of having deleted books from Kindle – it’s a capability they built in a few years back, and I recall reading the announcement and deciding I didn’t want to pay for an e-book they could take back. That’s like being robbed of the price. The most recent incident I’ve read about was deleting copies of the book Nobody Died at Sandy Hook from people who had paid for the book. There’s a post about it on The Memory Hole blog.
david — FWIW, there are ebook reading apps you can get for your regular PC. I personally still don’t like them because the pages scroll oddly on my small laptop screen. Also because of concerns about privacy and ebooks in general. But many people like the reader apps a lot.
No need to buy or own some other e-device to take advantage of free books.
I bought a Kindle years ago (it’s woefully out of date now, but still functioning) and I’ve downloaded both books to it. Thanks, ML! Now I just have to read them. The accumulated (virtual) stack of unread books is getting distressing.
E-books will never replace my love for the smell of slightly moldy paper, however, they are convenient for straight line reading (i.e. fiction) on long trips out of town (as long as electricity is at hand.)
The place they fall down miserably is in science/math/engineering where one likes to have his fingers marking 9 places while he ponders his lack of understanding. Now if you could open , say, 10 windows on a Kindle…
@ML: Thanks for that reminder. I had completely forgotten about that. That said, I think it doesn’t bug me to the extent it would’ve a few years ago. Yeah, I still dislike the principle of it, but lately, I’ve been in the mode of getting rid of stuff, including books, sadly, as I’m admitting to myself I won’t get around to a lot of them, and I don’t have space to store them all. And, from what I’ve read, it’s possible to copy the e-book off the Kindle. I should attempt to find out more about that. There are programs to take AZW and AZW3 files and convert them to e-pub.
The other thing I find attractive about the Kindle is the e-ink. I think I would find that much easier on my eyes than a tablet display.
In my ideal world, there’d be a Linux tablet with an e-ink display, and a native Kindle reader for Linux. I know that there are Android tablets, and Amazon does supply a native reader for that. But I dislike Android. That’s just one of my idiosyncracies. I wish Android had an app ecosytem modeled on the Debian packaging system, where I could download apps without needing to create an account at Google / Amazon / etc. That I know of (and I haven’t looked recently), the only really free app source is Fdroid. And I’ve noticed that some of the apps I’ve gotten from Amazon don’t work if they can’t contact Amazon. So boo!
Well, that’s a bit tangential. But thanks for the additional food for thought – I will ponder it.
My other “kicker” for jumping into the Kindle pool is that one particular friend of mine is a major user, and keeps bugging me to get one, so he can loan me books.
p.s. Yes, I know, the Kindle reader will, reportedly, run in Linux using Wine. At the moment, I’ve gotten rather fatigued with having to fiddle with stuff to get it to work. The “turn it on and it works” aspect is attractive.