Cheap is good; free is better

It's a new month and there are new specials available for eBook readers. (And I use “readers” to mean both the people and the devices that they use.) Over at the Dear Author blog, I found a notice that Warner Forever—an imprint of Hachette Book Group which publishes romance titles—is offering several titles at the special price of $1.99 during the summer. Four titles are available in June and can be found at the discounted price in both the Amazon.com and Sony eBook stores.

If you are into romance novels, check out one or more of these titles:

• A Hint of Wicked by Jennifer Haymore
• My Wicked Enemy by Carolyn Jewel
• Between the Sheets by Robin Wells
• Too Far Gone by Marliss Melton

And Orbit Books (another imprint of the Hachette Book Group) is offering one title every month for only $1. June's book is Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan. I'll probably pick that one up, but may wait just a bit. After all, for a couple of days, Amazon sold the May book—Once Bitten, Twice Shy by Jennifer Rardin—for $0.00. If I can pick up this month's book for free, I'm not too proud to click the “Buy Now with 1-Click” button.

Of the 156 books I have purchased for my Kindle from Amazon.com, 82 of them were free and 21 more were under $2.00. And these were not classics and out-of-copyright books such as those I downloaded from MobileRead, the majority of them were current-release titles whose publishers were offering for free as a promotion—usually to get readers to start into a series and like it so much they'll buy the rest.

Last night I picked up two more free books for my Kindle from Amazon.com, and snagged the same two titles from Sony's eBook store for my Sony PRS 505. The first was For Love of Mother-Not by Alan Dean Foster. This book is the fifth in Foster's “Pip & Flinx” series, but it is the first in the chronology. It was written as a prequel to fill in some—but not all—of Flinx's background. Starting with The Tar-Aiym Krang in 1972, the series has finally come to a conclusion with the publication of the fourteenth book, Flinx Transcendent, which wraps up all the storylines that fans have been following for over 30 years. All fourteen books in the series are available for the Kindle, which is great news. Not only do I want to read the end of the series, but I'd like to start over and read it all the way through.

The second book I picked up for free was Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold, the first book in the Magic Kingdom of Landover series. Originally published in 1986, it's clear that this freebie is being offered as a tie-in to the forthcoming publication of the sixth book in August 2009. Right now, only the first and third books are available in a Kindle edition. I'm hoping that by the time A Princess of Landover is released in August, the rest of the series will be available in electronic editions in the various eBook stores.