Tools | ReadCheaply.com

I just discovered this site recently thanks to a fellow member of my book club. Once you sign up with ReadCheaply, you will be prompted to choose your favorite book genres. Once set up is complete, you will receive regular emails listing books you can purchase cheap or free from Amazon and other retailers. My emails usually have between 5 and 10 offers. Almost every email has a few free books.

I've been surprised by some of the books I've found. And I only buy the free ones! Most of the time, the books are by authors I've never heard of, but many of them have turned out to be awesome! I've even come across a few free popular books. I'm often disappointed with free books because they are often of poor quality. Not so here!

ReadCheaply isn't only for readers. If you are an author and are currently running a deal on your book, you are able to post the promotion on ReadCheaply and they will include the book in their emails.

Definitely try this out. If you end up wanting to opt out, you can easily do this at the bottom of any email you've received from them. If you want to change your genre settings, you can also do this from the footer links.

Tools | Calibre

I am starting a new post series about the different tools, programs, websites, and other such things that are useful in all things ebook and audiobook. I'll start off this week with Calibre.

Calibre is the most awesome program I've found for viewing, managing, and organizing ebooks. I've tried a few other programs, but none of them had the versatility of Calibre. If you've been reading ebooks for a while, it's likely you've already discovered this program and its awesomeness. In which case, I'm sorry for presenting you with such a boring post, but for those of you who are just starting with ebooks or haven't found this program yet, I highly recommend using it!

Books Should Be Free!

Many of you have probably heard of Project Gutenberg. If you haven't, it's a website that offers free and legal downloads of books with expired copyrights (so classics). Fewer of you have probably heard of LibriVox. Again for those who haven't, volunteers take the copyright expired books and record them as audiobooks free for everyone to download. Awesome right?

There is one more website I would like to mention--BooksShouldBeFree. This website takes the content of both and matches them together. Ebooks and audiobooks all in one place. And what's great about this site is that you don't have to download the audiobooks. You can listen to them online. If you do listen to them on your computer (windows). I recommend using Windows Media Player. Maybe it's just me, but I have problems with Quick Time crashing. Once it starts playing, right click the screen and choose "Enhancements>Play speed settings". Now you can adjust the audio speed. It becomes addicting fast. It would be great of iTunes built in this feature. Enjoy!

Kindle and Nook users, check out your respective stores. A lot of these ebooks can be purchased for free online.