Free Science Fiction Books for the Kindle rated 3 stars and above

All Promotional Free Ebooks from Barnes & Noble rated 4 stars and above

Books by (and about) the Bronte Sisters rated 4 stars and above

Sometimes you know exactly what you want to read, but for the times when you don’t, this should help you find your next ebook even more quickly.

Inkmesh bots now monitor the free ebook inventory at Amazon, Sony and Barnes & Noble every hour and keep the free ebook list at http://inkmesh.com/free-ebooks/ up-to-date. Some of these ebooks might not be free outside the United States, but they will still be the cheapest books you can find at these sites.

The results are sorted by ‘deal freshness’ – more recent free ebook offers are listed first along with the date when they were found. Expired deals are removed instantly, so the list on the free ebooks page is always current, at least on an hourly basis.

We will be adding more stores to this list soon; we also plan to allow email signups for free ebook alerts so you don’t have to keep checking the list every day (or every hour if you are so inclined). If there are other things you would like to see on the free ebooks page, let us know. Otherwise, go find your next free-read!

• Language Filters: A third of our visitors are from outside the United States, and the ability to filter results by language has been one of our most-requested features for a very long time. Not any more – you can now filter results by the most common languages in our index. English is still the predominant language, but we have thousands of ebooks in French, German, Spanish and Italian. We will introduce filtering on more languages as part of the planned advanced search feature.
• Improved Subject Browsing: We have completely overhauled the way we rank ebooks when you browse by subject. Subject searches are now even faster, and our new ranking algorithm gives much more importance to ebook popularity instead of focusing heavily on price as in the previous version. Users have already begun clicking through to many more ebooks as a result of this change, and we’re going to continue to improve it so you can find the right ebook even more quickly.
• UK Sites: We recently added UK ebook retailers Waterstone’s and WHSmith to our list – this should help our UK users with ebook price comparisons. Both these retailers display ebook prices in GBP on their sites, but to make comparisons easier we display their prices in USD using the latest exchange rate from Google. We plan to add more UK retailers and display book prices in other currencies soon.
• Where available, we now display the average rating and user review count for search results and on individual book pages. For most ebooks we have rating and review information from multiple sites; we select the site with the highest number of reviews for that book.

We hope you like these changes – feel free to leave feedback on our forum here, on Twitter, Facebook or over email. We look forward to hearing from you!

Another such company is Liquavista, a 2006 spin-out from Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven, Netherlands. The key to Liquavista’s display technology is electrowetting, a technique that uses electric fields to change how solid surfaces interact with liquids. Liquavista’s electrowetting displays consist of a layer of colored oil between a layer of water and a solid water-repelling surface. In this stable state, the layer of oil is visible to the viewer through the water. When a charge is applied, the layer of oil changes its shape, exposing the solid surface below and changing the perceived color of the 3-layered surface. Such manipulations are performed at the level of tiny pixels to create a full-color screen. The power consumption of Liquavista’s display technique remains low because the stable state requires a low constant charge and the solid surface below the layer of oil can be made reflective to maintain screen brightness without the need for a backlight like in LCD screens. Most importantly, the electric transformations that manipulate the layer of oil can be applied several hundred times a second, giving the technology the ability to render video.

In October 2009 Liquavista demonstrated a 6-inch device running video on a monochrome display with 64 shades of gray (compared to the Kindle’s 16). The official name of the monochrome technology is LiquavistaBright:

At CES this year, Liquavista displayed the color version of LiquavistaBright. The demo below compares a contemporary e-ink screen with LiquavistaColor technology.

At CES Liquavista also demonstrated a concept device called the LiquavistaPebble (video below), but few specifics were released beyond the description of the curved shape of the device.

While Liquavista’s technology sounds promising, the biggest challenge for the company isn’t technical. Pixel Qi has already announced a partnership with Notion Ink to bring a color e-reader to market this summer, and there have been strong rumors about the next Kindle using Qualcomm’s Mirasol color display. So far Liquavista have only announced a partnership with chip-maker Texas Instruments, who plan to use Liquavista in their ‘next-generation e-reader development platform’. There are reports that Liquavista-based devices will not be available before the first quarter of 2011, by when Pixel Qi and Qualcomm’s Mirasol may have made significant inroads into the ereading market.

E-ink based displays have played an important role in creating the current market for ereaders and continue to dominate the market as the screen technology of choice in e-readers from Amazon, Sony and Barnes & Noble. But e-ink (and dedicated e-reading products) might be forced into oblivion as new multi-function devices offer more bang for the consumers’ buck. Sri Peruvemba, vice president of marketing at E Ink, is still not convinced. “If I give one of these devices to my daughter and I know she’s going to make phone calls on it and surf the Internet on it, I’m not going to be motivated to buy it for her”.

If the lack of features like video and voice continues to be E Ink’s unique selling proposition, display innovators like Liquavista might have much to cheer about this year.

Blio, the new ereading software platform we told you about last week, launched their website this week. When it launches in February, the Blio reader will provide 3-D page turns, text-to-speech capabilities and a touch-enabled interface along with the access to 1.26 million ebooks, over a million of which appear to be free public domain ebooks. Blio will only run on Windows initially.

Borders announced a partnership with Spring Design to integrate their Kobo-powered ebook store with Spring Design’s Alex ereader later this year. Spring Design announced another partnership with Google that will not only allow Alex users to download and read free Google Books on the Android-based device but also allow direct access to ebooks on the Google Books website using the device’s built-in wireless capabilities.

DMC Worldwide announced plans to launch a new ’social ereading platform’ called Copia, consisting of a lineup of ereaders backed by an online store with integration with popular social network sites. The platform will go into private beta this month and is expected to launch this summer.

NewspaperDirect, an aggregator of news publications from around the world made over 1400 periodicals available on the Sony Reader and the Kindle this week. Registered users of NewspaperDirect-owned PressDisplay.com will be able to download available publications to their ereaders for a monthly fee (ranging from $10 to $30) or for a per-item charge of $0.99. The Kindle World blog has a hands-on review of their service. Calibre, a popular free ebook management application also enables users to download full news articles from over 300 sources to supported ebook readers including the Sony Reader and the Kindle.

The City of Cincinnati announced plans to purchase 10 Kindle DX units for the mayor and members of the city council, citing an expected $25,000 in annual savings due to reduced printing expenses. The plan was criticized by several officials including some members of the city council who called the purchase ‘ridiculous’ and ‘hysterical’.

That’s it for ebooks this week! We leave you with pictures of the Guardian, a new waterproof Kindle case from M-Edge.

We got a first look at Blio, cross-platform ereading software by inventor Ray Kurzweil. From initial reports, it appears that Blio ebooks will be PDF files with a new DRM scheme. The software will offer rich multimedia capabilities, making it a good choice for ereading on laptops and tablets but rendering it incompatible with eink devices like the Kindle. Blio will probably have Microsoft’s weight behind it, and will be unveiled at the CES on January 7.

The number of Kindle books available on Amazon.com crossed 400,000 and Amazon launched Bestseller Archives for Kindle books. The new feature allows users to look up Kindle bestsellers for any day, month or year dating back to November 2007 when the first Kindle was launched.

A January 26 unveiling of the Apple Tablet seemed even more certain this week as tablet rumors continued to increase. Apple has been talking to textbook publishers and newspapers, indicating special ebook reading features in the new device.

We expect to have a lot more to share next week as ebook industry announcements are made at the CES and elsewhere. Once again, wishing all of you a wonderful 2010!

Users began posting the first reviews of Sony’ new Daily Edition ereader, which features a 7-inch touchscreen and wireless access and retails for $400. While initial feedback was generally positive, there were concerns about the reader’s inability to access content outside Sony’s online ebook store. The Daily Edition is yet another attempt by Sony to gain market share against the Kindle, which allows users to download DRM-free ebooks from anywhere on the web using the built-in browser.

Amazon announced that daily sales of Kindle Books topped physical book sales for the first time ever on December 25. The Kindle was Amazon’s most-gifted item this holiday season, and continues to occupy the top spot on its electronics best-seller list. In another indicator of rapidly rising ebook popularity, O’Reilly Media posted statistics showing ebooks outselling physical books 3:1 on oreilly.com. While several O’Reilly ebooks are also available in the Kindle store, ebook purchases on oreilly.com are DRM-free and can be downloaded in multiple formats.

Borders CEO Ron Marshall said in an interview that Borders is not planning to build an ereading device like rivals Amazon and B&N, primarily because of the ‘cost and time’ it would take to do so. Borders owns a stake in Kobo, who have indicated plans to launch a dedicated reading device in 2010.

Amazon released KindleGen – a command line utility to convert HTML and ePub ebooks to the Kindle/Mobipocket format. The new utility runs on both Windows and Linux, and replaces Mobigen by Mobipocket, who were acquired by Amazon in 2005. A new version of Calibre, a popular open source utility to manage and convert ebooks was also released this week.

So that’s it for our final post of the year. We have a lot lined up for Inkmesh in 2010, as we hope to continue to make it easier for you to find your next great eread. Stay tuned, and have a wonderful new year!

Stephen Covey granted Amazon exclusive ebook rights to two of his books, including the top-selling ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’. In return for the exclusive deal that lasts a year, Amazon promised to market his ebooks aggressively and give him a much higher percentage of ebook sales. Simon & Schuster, the print publisher for these books, declined to comment on the deal but asserted ownership of ebook rights to all titles in their catalog. In a related development, Random House claimed retroactive ebook rights in a letter to literary agents, and were promptly snubbed by the Authors Guild.

Canadian ebook retailer Shortcovers relaunched as Kobo and announced a CAD $16 million investment from Borders USA and founding and majority shareholder Indigo, among others. Borders simultaneously announced plans to launch a Kobo-powerd ebookstore on borders.com next year, with a new eink device possibly in the works. Borders currently sells Sony Readers in their retail stores.

IDPF, the trade & standards association for digital publishing and the developer of the ePub standard announced election results for Board of Director positions including the role of president. George Kerscher, secretary general of the DAISY consortium, replaces Steve Potash of Overdrive as the new president. The new board consists of executives from several key organizations including Adobe, Random House, Harlequin, Internet Archive and O’Reilly Media. Amazon is notably missing from the IDPF’s current member list.

Google put up the first set of publications guidelines for Google Editions – the ebook store they plan to launch in 2010. Like Amazon, Google ‘reserved the right to sell a book at a price discounted from its list price’, indicating their plan to compete with Amazon and others on ebook prices. Google Editions purchases will be tied to a Google account and will be accessible through a web browser which will cache a copy of the ebook for offline reading. It is not clear if dedicated reading devices will be supported. Google will also offer the choice of securing ebooks with Adobe’s ACS4 DRM.

Amazon released the Kindle iPhone application in more than 60 countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom. The application was previously available only in the United States. A new version of Stanza, a popular iPhone reading application, was also made available in the app store this week. Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, was acquired by Amazon earlier this year.

Sony announced a partnership with News Corp to make the Wall Street Journal available on the Sony Reader, including the new Daily Edition which features wireless access and a touch screen. Additionally, a daily summary of news events will be available exclusively on Sony Readers. The Wall Street Journal is already available on the Kindle, but News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has previously expressed dissatisfaction with Amazon’s revenue splits for digital publications and their policy of not sharing subscriber names with content partners. Sony also announced partnerships with other content partners including the New York Times and Financial Times.

So that’s it for the first edition of Ebooks This Week. We would love to hear your comments below, on Twitter or on Facebook. Happy Holidays everyone!

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For the purpose of this analysis, we looked at ebooks that were available at the US websites of all three retailers – Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony, and included all titles with a valid sales rank (Sony does not assign sales ranks beyond fifty, so we pulled in all Sony ebooks that had sales ranks at the other two). We ended up with 11,604 top-selling titles available at all three vendors, and ran our numbers on this set. For the purpose of comparison, we also pulled in prices for these ebooks from the other sites we index, including Lulu, Fictionwise and HarperCollins. Ebook prices and availability vary over time and geographical boundaries, so what we found reflects the state of things for US consumers in the last week of November 2009.

The first thing that stood out was Amazon’s dominance. Out of the 11,604 titles we looked at, Amazon’s prices were lower than everyone else for 3,263 ebooks, and they matched the lowest price elsewhere for another 5,329 ebooks. Which basically means that Amazon had the best prices on 8,592 (or 74%) of the top-selling ebooks in circulation today. And the price difference wasn’t insignificant either – for ebooks that were cheapest at Amazon, Kindle prices were lower than the next best price by 15% on average.

Barnes and Noble was a clear (and distant) number two – they beat everyone else’s prices (including Amazon’s) on only 463 titles, but matched the lowest price elsewhere on 4,837 titles. The prices confirmed how hard B&N is trying to upstage Amazon at their own game, but if B&N is looking to win on ebook prices, they probably need to try harder.

The most interesting finding, however, was Sony’s poor showing, indicating an apparent lack of willingness to compete on pricing. Perhaps things will change when they introduce their ePub store, but for now, if you have a Sony Reader, you’re much more likely to find better prices for Sony ebooks at stores like Lulu, Diesel, eBookMall and even publisher sites like HarperCollins, all of which had lower prices than Sony’s eBook Store on hundreds of Adobe Digital Editions books. Sony beat everyone else’s prices on only 18 ebooks (that’s right, eighteen out of over eleven thousand) and matched the lowest price on only 423. The only saving grace for Sony seems to be their reader’s ability to read DRM content purchased from other ebook stores, unlike the Kindle which can only read Amazon’s DRM (though millions of DRM-free ebooks are available for both the Sony and the Kindle on multiple sites).

Some other stats we found interesting:

• There were only 398 free ebooks in the top 11,604. Looking at the lowest available prices for all titles, the average price was $6.88, and the median was $6.39.
• The average ebook price at the big three: $6.05 at Amazon, $7.96 at B&N, and $8.77 at Sony.
• Lulu, who only recently began selling ePubs in their ebook store, emerged as a surprise third-place winner. They matched the lowest price on 2,251 ebooks and beat everyone else on another 181.
• Fictionwise, one of the oldest independent ebook retailers until recently (when they were acquired by Barnes & Noble) were nowhere near as competitive, with lower prices on less than 50 ebooks. They do have club rebates, but to keep things simple, we did not consider those prices for this analysis.

The one line version of everything above: when it comes to ebook pricing, Amazon is currently the clear winner, Barnes & Noble is a distant second, but Sony doesn’t even seem to be trying. The landscape will continue to change as newer ebook vendors like Lulu (and Google) attempt to lure readers away from established players, and retailers and publishers experiment with new pricing models. It will be interesting to see how the Nook performs in comparison to the Kindle, and if Sony’s Daily Edition can shake things up in 2010. We will continue to follow ebook market trends on this blog, and would love to hear your comments and questions about ebook pricing via email, twitter or in the comments below. Stay tuned, and Happy eReading!