Free books (ebooks, Kindle)

[thistlechaser]

My once-a-month offering of books to review from a publisher (see end of post) seems to have upped to twice-a-month. Once more, none of the books they offered were ones I wanted to read, but some had some mighty amusing covers, plus there was the usual collection of free-on-Amazon offerings.

Checked Out By Sharon St. George, made me stare at the cover, but the blurb is even more amusing.



Rodeo cowboy Cody O’Brien sneaks away from Timbergate Medical Center the night before his testicle surgery and is found dead in his horse trailer. Aimee’s colleague and friend, Cleo Cominoli, suspects the woman urologist scheduled to do Cody’s surgery is somehow mixed up in his death. Cleo’s fiancé is scheduled for prostate surgery by the same woman, and she pleads with Aimee to help her investigate before her intended becomes another victim.

Cover #2 is more than a little NWS, so I'll stick it behind a cut.



While the title, Giving It Raw, may sound like porn, supposedly it's not. With that cover though...

The free ebooks are apparently sometimes not available for free outside of the US, so heads up on that.

If Only to Love You -- Romance
Blue Moon (The Blue Crystal Trilogy (Book One) 1) -- Supernatural horror
Tapas, Carrot Cake and a Corpse (A Charlotte Denver Cozy Mystery Book 1) -- Mystery
THE SECRET HOUR (Killing Time Book 1) -- Paranormal romance
A Lady of Esteem (Hawthorne House): A Novella -- Romance
Finding Love Again (A Clean Country Romance) -- Romance

---

After reading the awful reviews on those free items, and noticing that more than half are self-published, I had to wonder: Why would a publisher be sending me links to free books not published by them? So I did some googling. Turns out these monthly/bi-monthly emails come from some kind of service, not a publisher: They charge authors $25 to be listed in these emails.

I considered taking this and my other 'free books' posts down, because do I really want to help some service advertise? But... I guess free books are free books. Does it matter if an author paid $25 to get a link to his books into my/your hands so long as we get it for free? (Not a rhetorical question!) I think it doesn't matter, so I'm going to post this.

You know, I would think Amazon would offer a service like this: A list of ebooks it currently has available to download for free.

Edit: Well here we go. Top 100 free books. Not a list of all the free ones, but it's a start.

Comments

[bacchuslives.livejournal.com]

Wow, quite a cover indeed... There's an old adage that it could represent, but that's an extreme version. A listing of freebies would be nice, but it doesn't surprise me that they don't. Given that they're in the business of selling them.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Yeah, good point. Amazon has no real reason to want people to take the free books over paid ones.

[postingwhore.livejournal.com]

So what exactly is Giving It Raw about? :p

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Based on the blurb, it was about the effects of HIV on the author and the men he knew. It seemed like it was possible it could be interesting, but something about the blurb turned me off, so I gave it a pass.

Here it is, if you're interested:

So much about Giving It Raw: Nearly 30 Years with HIV is raw — the sex, the emotions, the loss — that there are moments you want to move away from the unflinching honesty, close the book, not so you can avoid his frank and deliciously graphic recollections of sexual encounters over the last several decades as a gay positive man, but so you too don’t find yourself remembering the same visceral loss and haunting loneliness, the moment in time where despair and shame and hedonism were the only antidotes to the bodies piling up around us. Shedding that shame, in part becoming the man he is through BDSM, fetishes, and rough trade, is what Ibáñez-Carrasco writes of so eloquently (the title being a clear nod to this past and present), but this is not a book about sex, not a work of erotica. It’s a tragicomic confessional, a history lesson, and an intellectual treatise on sex, love, family, and a virus that’s killing fewer but still too many.

[ashmedai.livejournal.com]

Haha! Those books shouldn't only be free, they should pay people to read that stuff.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Haha based on some of the reviews, you have the right of it!

[doxxxicle.livejournal.com]

https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/free-ebooks

I'm subscribed to get emails about free or discounted ebooks in certain genres. It's a great service.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Outstanding! Thanks!