Focus on Freading: World Travel

Where do you want to travel? The Freading book catalog now contains several hundred guide books from Lonely Planet. These include eBooks across the entire Lonely Planet range including Country guides, Region guides, City guides, Discover country guides, and even the Pocket guides. Started in 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel guide publisher with guidebooks to every destination on the planet, as well as an award-winning website, a suite of mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet's mission is to enable curious travellers to experience the world and to truly get to the heart of the places they find themselves in.

Lonely Planet Africa provides up-to-date information on where to go, what to see, and what to do if you're planning a trip to Africa. Or take a virtual trip without leaving your home. In this book you can take a refreshing dip at Victoria Falls, explore the ancient pyramids of Egypt, or take a walking safari in South Luangwa National Park; all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Africa and begin your journey now!

Focus on Freading: Ellery Queen

As I was browsing the newest entries in the Freading catalog, I knew immediately which books I wanted to bring to your attention in this first Focus on Freading post. I saw that a number of books by Ellery Queen were showing up on the New Arrivals page. “Ellery Queen” is the name of a famous fictional detective and the pen name of Fredric Dannay and Manfred Lee, cousins who wrote over 30 novels and myriad short stories starring their eponymous character. In addition to the novels written by and featuring Ellery Queen, they also lent the name as a house name for novels by other writers and published under the pseudonym of “Ellery Queen”.

Now, through Freading, libraries and their patrons have access to 39 novels and 5 short story collections by Ellery Queen. These are recent reprints by Mysterious Press, distributed by Open Road Media. Start at the beginning with The Roman Hat Mystery, originally published in 1929, and read through to the detective's last appearance in A Fine and Private Place from 1971.

Book descriptions below provided by the publisher.

Introducing Focus on Freading

Introducing a brand new weekly feature at Reading in Texas. I want to bring attention to Freading, an ebook service for libraries. I'm thrilled that my library has a subscription to Freading since the catalog contains many outstanding authors and much more of the “backlog” that other services that focus primarily on recent best sellers.

So, each week, I'll highlight books which have caught my attention at Freading.com. Sometimes, the featured books will be new additions to the online catalog. And sometimes they'll be hidden gems.

Now, I'll be up front with you. I primarily read mysteries, science fiction, and fantasy. I read almost no non-fiction and I'm not fond of romance, chick-lit, erotica, westerns, and military fiction, so these categories may not be represented very often. But, I'll try to pull myself out of my comfort zone from time to time and highlight books that aren't my usual oeuvre. And most of the time, the books will be ones that I have not yet read—but which are winding up on my “To Be Read Soon” list.

Freading and Kindle Unlimited

Last week when I logged into my library's Freading.com web site, I saw a bunch of new books from Open Road Media, including the Cadfael medieval mysteries. Most of those books are tagged "coming soon", though. A quick search online found that the Cadfael books will be released on 5 August, so I'm anticipating that their status on Freading will change on that date. Even nicer this week, I found that many books from RosettaBooks have been added to the catalog, and almost all of those are available right now. And, RosettaBooks is carrying a number of well-known authors such as Barbara Taylor Bradford, M. C. Beaton, Kurt Vonegut, Ben Bova, Harold Robbins, and Harry Kemelman.

On 18 July, Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited, a subscription service. One thing I've discovered about Freading and Kindle Unlimited is that there is a major overlap between the books which are available from the two different channels. Freading doesn't cost ME anything, because my library pays for the service. Kindle Unlimited will cost me $9.95 per month after a 30-day trial period.

Granted, the catalogs for the two are not identical, but as I said, there's a great deal of overlap between the two. Freading has the price advantage, but doesn't allow me to read on my Kindle device. I'm lucky enough to have a second reader (a BeBook mini) which is supported by Adobe Digital Editions, so I have reasonable access to the books from Freading. The advantage of Kindle Unlimited is that it supports my Kindle reader, but the downside is the price. I think that for now, I'm going to pass on Kindle Unlimited and get the books I want to read from Freading.

New books at Freading - 2014.07.14

This morning I took a quick glance at the new arrivals at Freading.com and found some very interesting titles had been added to the collection. The newest books still show "Coming Soon", so it may be a week or so before the books get loaded to the server. For now, it's fun to just look at the catalog and think which books one might want to borrow.

For the middle school set, the first eight books in Bonnie Bryant's Pony Tails series will soon be available. Horse-crazy girls will enjoy meeting May, Jasmine, and Corey; three girls with only one thing in common. They love ponies. The series goes on for eight more volumes, so let's hope that they show up at Freading as soon as possible. In the meantime, get started with Pony Crazy and move on to May's Riding Lesson, Corey's Pony is Missing and the rest of this series recently added to the Freading site.

Also for the middle school set—and maybe of more interest to the boys— are the Boxcar Children series. Now, these books have been available at Freading for quite some time. What's new is that Spanish translations of several of the books are now listed as "coming soon". It looks like their availability on Freading is tied to their publication date of 29 July. If so, then at the end of the month, Spanish readers can check out the first three books in the series: Los chicos del vagón de carga (The Boxcar Children), La isla de las sorpresas (Surprise Island), and El misterio de la casa amarilla (The Yellow House Mystery).

P.S. You can find the English editions of the Boxcar Children books here .

Adult readers may enjoy the Alan Graham Mysteries by Malcolm Shuman. This five volume series features archaeologist Alan Graham tackles both ancient and contemporary mysteries in Louisiana's Bayou country. And, these books show consistently high ratings at Goodreads.com. Start with Burial Ground and continue on through the rest of the series.

Teens aren't left out, either. You may want to check out fantasy novels The Zodiak Collector by Laura Diamond and Twell & the Army of Powers by Kate O'Leary.

Lastly, a group of books from Intercollegiate Studies Institute, A Student's Guide to ... offer a college-level survey of various broad topics—covering both fundamentals as well referring the reader to additional published books on the subject. Consider checking out A Student's Guide to Music History, A Student's Guide to Natural Science, A Student's Guide to Philosophy, or A Student's Guide to U. S. History, among many others.