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10 Last-Minute Ebook Gifts For Under $5
It’s time for the second gift list here at Opinions of a Wolf (see the first, 10 Non-book Gifts for Book Lovers here). I thought with Hanukkah next week and some holiday parties already happening that it would be interesting to provide a list of cheap ebooks. Ebooks make great last-minute gifts, as you can purchase them literally on your phone on the way to the party and have them arrive in your recipient’s email with them none the wiser that you waited until the last minute. Since you can schedule when the gift email arrives, no one needs to know that you scheduled it only 5 minutes ago. Ebooks are also great because you can find them for very cheap but a reader who loves ebooks doesn’t care how much the ebook cost. A book is a book is a book! I’m not just going to tell you a list of cheap ebooks though. I’m also going to give you a little reader’s advisory–tell you who the book would be best for. Without further ado, here is the list, in order of cost from least to most.
For the lover of YA who enjoys a touch of fantasy:
Initiate
$0
Dindi is about to undergo her people’s initiation test and ceremony that not only welcomes her to adulthood but also will determine whether or not she is a member of the Tavaedi. The Tavaedi are a mix of religious leader, healer, and warrior who cast magic spells by dancing. Since Dindi can see the pixies and other fae, she thinks she has a chance. But no one in her clan has ever successfully become a Tavaedi. Meanwhile, an exiled warrior, Kavio, is attempting to shed his old life and the haunting of his father’s wars and his mother’s powers. But he slowly discovers a deadly plot that brings him directly to Dindi’s initiation ceremony.
This is a unique piece of YA fantasy set in a tribal world inspired by Polynesia. The romance is light and slow-building, and the focus is primarily on growing up and becoming an adult. See my full review here.
For the urban fantasy reader without a lot of time:
Cursed
$0
London works for hire doing investigations mostly for parahumans, and her best friend is a vampire who keeps hoping she’ll consent to being turned. Her life isn’t run-of-the-mill, but it isn’t too bad either, until one day she gets Touched by a Sidhe and finds herself sucked into the Fey world bubbling just beneath the surface of the regular one.
This fast-paced novella is perfect for the reader without a lot of time who still wants to get some urban fantasy into their day. See my full review here.
For the lover of the style of classic scifi:
The Coin
99 cents
When Richard’s physicist professor uncle dies tragically in a plane crash and leaves him his coin collection, he is shocked to find a brand-new dime from 2012. The only thing is, it’s 1989. A note from his uncle states that the coin is important. Richard thinks the answer to the mystery might be in his uncle’s personal diaries he also left him, but he’s not a physicist and can’t decipher them. As the year 2012 approaches, Richard increasingly wonders what the coin is all about.
This novella is a fun new take on the storytelling methods of classic scifi. The science is strong enough to be interesting but not too challenging, and the result of the mystery is surprising. See my full review here.
For zombie fans who enjoy a touch of romance:
Hungry For You
$2.50
A collection of zombie-themed short stories and poetry with the twist that they all have to do with romantic relationships in some way, shape, or form.
This short story collection is different and fun simultaneously. It will appeal to zombie pans, particularly women. See my full review here.
For the reader of lesbian romance who loves fairy tale retellings:
Braided: A Lesbian Rapunzel
$2.99
A lesbian retelling of Rapunzel. Gray, a witch’s daughter, visits Zelda every day. The witch switched Gray’s fate into Zelda, so now Zelda is the one entwined with the spirit of the tree that the people worship. She must live on the platform and every day lower her hair for people to tie ribbons and prayers into. Gray feels horrible guilt over their switched fates, but she’s also falling in love with Zelda.
this is a fun retelling of Rapunzel, particularly if you’re looking for a non-heteronormative slant or enjoy a more magical feel. Note that this is part of a series entitled Sappho’s Fables, which consists of lesbian retellings of fairy tales. The novellas may be mixed and matched. See my full review here.
For the reader of women’s fiction with an interest in Scotland:
Emotional Geology
$2.99
Rose is a textile artist with bipolar disorder who for years found her medication dulled her ability to work. After a stunning betrayal that landed her in a mental hospital, she has moved to a quiet, extraordinarily rural island in Scotland in an attempt to control her illness with as little medication as possible so she may still create her art. Her life isn’t quite as quiet as she imagined it would be, though, with a warm neighbor, Shona, who introduces her to her brother, a teacher and poet.
This is an emotional, challenging, touching read for fans of contemporary fiction with a heart. See my full review here.
For the horror fan:
Gargoyles
$2.99
Amoreena is determined to be a doctor and help people. She’s a hard-working, scholarship student on the pre-med track in her third year of college. Unfortunately, her single mother just got diagnosed with metastatic cancer and lost her health insurance. With no time for a job and no money for the bills, Amoreena is grateful when she is approached by a surrogacy clinic to be a surrogate for $50,000 with payments upon successful insemination and each trimester. But after she’s successfully inseminated, Amoreena becomes increasingly concerned that something is not quite right with her baby.
If your horror fan loves Rosemary’s Baby and is particularly freaked out by evil pregnancies, they will love this book. See my full review here.
For the lover of noir and urban fantasy:
One Death at a Time
$2.99
Jack Strayhorn is a private eye and a member of Alcoholic’s Anonymous. Only, he’s not an alcoholic, he’s one of the vampires who meet in a secret vampire group that exists under the umbrella of AA to learn how to control their urges and feed on humans without killing them. He’s just returned to LA, his death site that he hasn’t been back to since he had to run in 1948 after becoming a vampire. When his current missing person case shows up dead next to a Fae politician, Jack gets dragged into a mixed-up underworld of Faes, werewolves, drugs, and a group of vampires determined to rule the world.
This is a delightful mix of urban fantasy and noir and is a strong first entry for a new series. See my full review here.
For the reader of thrillers and fans of Gone Girl:
I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead
$3.03
Tom Starks has not been the same since his wife, Renee, was brutally murdered with a baseball bat in a parking lot. He’s been struggling for the last three years to raise her daughter, who he adopted when he married Renee. When Renee’s killer is released after a retrial finds insufficient evidence to hold him, Tom becomes obsessed with dealing out justice himself.
This is a unique thriller, with its choice to cast the opposite of a bad-ass in the role of the main character. This grounds the typical revenge plot into reality, lends itself to more interesting, unique plot twists, and has the interesting aspect of a flawed, nearly anti-hero main character that the reader still roots for. See my full review here.
For readers of multi-generational family dramas and GLBTQ lit:
The Value Of Rain
$4.99
Charles hasn’t been home since his mother and uncle sent him away to an insane asylum at the age of fourteen after he was found in the embrace of his first love–Robert. Now, ten years later, his mother, Charlotte, is dying, and he comes back to take his revenge.
This is one of those genre-defying books. Shire explores the devastating effects of prejudice, hate, secrets, and lies throughout family generations, and that is something that is simultaneously universal and tragic. See my full review here.
I hope this list helps you find a read for yourself or a gift for another. Feel free to ask questions about any of these books or ask for recommendations for books for particular recipients in the comments!
Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale Finds
Smashwords is a website that lets indie authors sell their ebooks in multiple formats, including: kindle, epub, pdf, rtf, sony, palm doc, html, and javascript. It’s an interesting community with some pretty unique stories.
Since I’m an author with a presence on Smashwords, I became aware of their annual Summer/Winter Sale (so entitled to cover both northern and southern hemispheres). After agreeing to have Ecstatic Evil participate in the sale, I thought I’d check out the listing of all participating books to see if there were any that caught my eye. Here, then, is a listing of the ones that I found and downloaded for 100% off with the sitewide coupon code SSWIN.
Clear Heart by Joe Cottonwood
A love story for men about nail guns, wet concrete, and strong women. When carpenters work for bigshots – and fall for beautiful women – who gets nailed? “It’s funny, very tender, and enormously, tremendously human. In fact, Clear Heart just might be one of the most human books I’ve read in a long time.” —Colleen Mondor, Bookslut
The Veiled Mirror: The Story of Prince Vlad Dracula’s Lost Love by Christine Frost
Legend has it that the love of Prince Dracula’s life committed suicide during a siege in 1462. Author Christine Frost tells the story of Ecaterina, consort to Vlad the Impaler, the Romanian prince who served as the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The richly detailed story of Ecaterina is a romantic, supernatural, and adventurous view into one of history’s most notorious figures.
Callisto: Adrift by Erica Conroy
Stealing damning evidence from a certain covert ops section of Space Corps makes Jasmine a target. So what does she do? She runs. Hops the first civilian transport ship out of there, but of course the bad guys still find her. Luckily for her the dark and brooding half-human man on board, is a deft hand with a sword. Unluckily for him, helping her could be hazardous to his life!
Portrait of the Past by Kate Halleron
The year is 1880. Marguerite is an artist and former slave who is hired to paint a wedding portrait for a wealthy family. She soon finds that the family has close ties to her past from which she has constantly fled. Instead of fleeing again, she stays to paint a portrait of her former family, and in so doing she begins to understand the difficult choices her loved ones were driven to make.
The Silence of a Soldier: The Memoirs of a Bataan Death March Survivor by William J. Duggan
It was 1942. The fight for the Philippines was over. Japan was the victor. American POW’s sat beneath the burning April sun in the fields of Mariveles. At the point of a bayonet, 75,000 U.S. and Filipino POW’s carried sacks of rice, dried fish and ammunition for the Japanese move across the Philippines. Thousands died. Bub survived. This is his story.
Gone by Brian Alaspa
A group of employees trying to have a weekend of bonding in the woods. What they get, however, is a weekend of unrelenting terror. What is making them disappear one at a time? Why can’t they leave? Will any of them make it back or will all of them end up “Gone?”
Polly’s Wild Dance by Sidnee Elliot
After twenty-five years of dealing blackjack in Las Vegas, Polly Brilliant throws the cards in the air, sells everything she owns and makes a beeline to the Greek island of Kythira to paint, write, and forget about men. Or so she thinks.
The Preying Mantis by Andreas Louw
Since investigating the murders of young, female teachers by a serial killer, FBI Special Agent Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Roy has been having nightmares. When he contacts her, latent memories from her childhood starts resurfacing. Who is this man they call The Preying Mantis?
I’m excited by the finds for my personal TBR pile, although lord only knows when I’ll be able to get to them. *eyes size of TBR pile*.
In any case, if you love free books as much as I do, I encourage you to check out not only these titles but the page dedicated to the sale! As you can see from the titles I chose, the genres are incredibly varied, and I bet you will be able to find something that strikes your fancy.
My Tentative Journey With eBooks
A while back, I told you guys that I’m continuing my tentative steps into eBooks, but it hadn’t been very successful yet. I admit this is partly because I’m a broke-ass graduate student, and so I don’t exactly have the cash to shell out for what I see as an extravagance. Why get an eReader when I can get used books for under $5 a pop? (For why I don’t have time to use the local library, see this post). I’ve tried downloading eBooks that are available as pdf’s onto my computer, but I always made it only about as far through as a blog’s archives before losing focus. Or I’d have to leave it and come back the next day and be incapable of finding where I left off. I just can’t read a book on a computer. Nuh-uh. A computer is for article-length pieces. I just can’t get past the part where I’m looking at a computer to get lost in the story.
When I got my iTouch, I decided to venture in yet again. But I repeat that I’m a cheapskate, so I downloaded a couple of the various apps available for 99 cents that provide huge selections of out of copyright classics to read. Although I was able to focus on the screen, it reminded me a lot of my speed-reading classes in middle school, because the screen automatically fades at a certain point (I’m not sure how long), so I’d either have to keep tapping the screen to keep it from doing that or read insanely fast. The speed might not have been an issue if I wasn’t attempting to read classics, but I always read classics kind of slowly. I get wrapped up in the language and the world-building. Classics are about slow reading versus the fast reading of genre fiction for me. I got about 3 chapters into two different classics before giving up and stopping.
Well then people started talking about the iBook app, and since I love everything Mac, I decided to download it, but upon trying I found out that my iTouch is too old to support it, at which point I started browsing the eReader section of the app store and saw the Kindle app. For some reason, it had previously escaped my attention that the Kindle even had an app for Mac products. I vaguely remembered some book blogs mentioning that you can get some books for free in the Kindle store, and the app was free, and….do I really need to repeat what a cheapskate I am? Lol.
So I figured where am I most likely to read on my iTouch? That’s easy. On the bus when I can’t sit, need to hold on with one hand, and getting a book out of my bag is difficult. What would I like to read on the bus but am embarrassed to? Romance novels. So I found a free romance novel and downloaded it. The nice thing about the Kindle app, the main thing that made me start to relax into reading with it, is that the backlighting never fades. I’m not so caught up in beating the fading light that I’m incapable of getting lost in the story. So that was going fairly well, although I was still choosing to read my print book over the eBook whenever it was possible.
Then a certain book was released. A book in a trilogy that is honestly a guilty pleasure for me. (I’ll leave the reasonings for that for when I review the book next week). I had decided I wasn’t going to buy the book; I’d just read spoilers and be happy with that. But then the day of the release, I was getting frustrated at the complete lack of spoilers on the internet and while watching tv browsed to the Amazon store on my iTouch, and before I knew it, I’d bought the book. I didn’t feel bad about the price, because it was less than the price of a movie ticket, and I view guilty pleasure reads a lot like going to the movies. It’s brief entertainment, and I don’t need to hold onto it. Let it entertain me for a bit, and in most cases, I won’t ever come back to it (my dvd collection is very, very small).
I was still skeptical about my desire to read on the small electronic screen of my iTouch, but I figured worst case scenario I’d skim for the spoilers and read it in print when the hoopla settles down. I started reading it when standing on the bus in the morning, got a seat, and found myself wanting to keep reading on my iTouch over my print book. And then on lunch break I decided I’d rather see what happened in that story than in the one I’m reading in print and discovered how much easier it is to eat and read when you can just set the book down and the pages don’t close on you. Whoa. Then I found myself sitting on my couch reading the iTouch. Then last night in bed I suddenly realized I could turn out all the lights and still see to read because my book was lighting itself up. Whoa.
You guys….I have to admit….I like it. Now that’s not to say I don’t have my issues with it. For instance, nice as it is to read in the dark, sunny locations fade the screen so much that it’s sometimes nearly impossible to read. I also don’t like the thought of the battery maybe running out. (I may have obsessively recharged my iTouch yesterday. *looks askance*) I also don’t like how very small the iTouch screen is. I also would never ever want an electronic device just for reading. Part of the convenience on transit is having my music, videogames, and book all in one item. Having something like a Kindle or a Nook seems rather pointless to me. It’s one more device to carry. So what has a larger screen but does all that? The iPad. I think the iPad still has issues. Like I personally think it’s too big and too thick, (that’s what she said) but I think the next generation is going to solve those problems. So…yeah, I see myself doing some electronic reading in the future. But never on a device meant just for reading. I also only see the value in it for guilty pleasure reads. It works for me because of the way I read guilty pleasures. I read quickly, sometimes skimming, because the story is all about the excitement or the hilarity. It’s not about the deep thought. I can’t see me reading a book that changes my life on an electronic device. That just rings false to me. But reading a story that’s about consuming it once kind of like buying movie popcorn for the pure pleasure of chowing down the greasy, salty deliciousness? That makes sense to me. So that’s the role I see eBooks taking in my life. The reading equivalent of movie popcorn, and who doesn’t like movie popcorn every once in a while?
The Masterpieces App
I recently acquired an iPod Touch, which led to me downloading some apps. This means that the Oregon Trail app is competing with my current read for attention on my commute. One day though while browsing the app store, I found one called “Masterpieces.” It was around 20 books for 99cents.
I have no idea why I bought this. I have a distinct aversion to eBooks. I don’t care if that makes me an old fogey at the ripe age of 23; I much prefer holding the paper book firmly in my hand. Not to mention that I hate staring at screens for fun when I stare at them at work all day.
Today though my bus was abnormally full, which led me to standing and holding the pole with one hand leaving one hand free. Usually that’s enough to hold a book, but my current one has a broken binding and pages that have to be held in. I also couldn’t play the Oregon Trail with only one hand. All of a sudden, I found myself opening the Masterpieces app. Just as I had chosen a classic to start reading, a seat next to me freed up. Relieved, I sat down and pulled out my paper book.
I realized later though that although I was relieved to be able to read my paper book, I also was relieved when I was standing up that I had an option besides music to get me through the commute.
Maybe there’s a place in my life for eBooks after all.
My Publications
, is post-apocalyptic scifi.
You may check out a complete list of my publications here.
This work by Amanda McNeil is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
