Copia, the new "social reading" company, is offering 7 good books free for anyone with an account, and 15 Harlequin romances, basically a sampling of their various imprints.
The seven quality books are:
A Passage To India - E. M. Forster
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Red Alert - Peter George (the novel "Dr. Strangelove" was based on)
Shoeless Joe - W. P. Kinsella (the novel "Field of Dreams" was based on)
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
The Graduate - Charles Webb
Midnight Cowboy - James Leo Herlihy
I won't bother to list the 15 free Harlequin books. There are examples of everything from Christian Romance to Vampire Romance to NASCAR Romance.
They imply that you have to use their Copia reader software to read the books, but in fact they use Adobe DRM, so if you already have the Adobe Digital Editions software installed on your PC, you can sideload the Copia books into ADE, and then transfer them to your favorite ePub reader that has Adept DRM, such as the Nook or Sony.
(This is perhaps obvious, but if you can strip DRM from ADE books, that same method will work for Copia books; you don't have to move them into ADE, you can just decrypt them directly with the Adept key.)
As far as I can tell, the books are yours to keep forever (or as long as Adept DRM holds out) and are not time-limited or otherwise limited.
There are also some good deals to be had in the Copia store, such as Donald Westlake's
God Save The Mark for $3.41 (vs. $7.99 on Amazon or $7.19 on Barnes & Noble). How exactly to find all these good deals is difficult to say; I find the Copia web site just hideously difficult to use. One tricky thing is that they list in their catalog a ton of books that they don't actually sell, I suppose so you can put them in your reading list and so all that social networking stuff with them. But there's no "current hot deals" link anywhere.
Here are the special deals mentioned in the email they sent me:
Lisa Jackson - The Morning After $4.20
P.C. Cast - Divine Beginnings $2.33
Nora Roberts - Daring to Dream $3.99
Jennifer Crusie - Strange Bedpersons $3.89
Donald Westlake - God Save the Mark $3.41
Sun Tzu - The Art of War $3.47
Don Piper - 90 Minutes in Heaven $2.99
http://www.thecopia.com
Here are the step-by-step instructions for those who need them (copied from my later post). Copying to a Sony is similar, but you use Sony's software instead of ADE.
If you don't already have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), I'd install that first:
- Download the ADE software:
Link here
- Install the ADE software.
- Run it and go through the process of getting an Adobe ID and activating your computer.
If you plan to move the files to a Nook, Kobo, etc. then tie that to your ADE software.
- Plug the eReader into the computer and run ADE, if it's not already running. Wait for the drivers to install and it to be recognized by the computer.
- ADE should detect the reader and offer to tie it to your existing Adobe ID. Say yes.
Join Copia, get the books, and install the software:
- Join Copia:
Signup
- The free ebooks are here:
7 Modern Classics and here:
Harlequin
- Install the Copia software from here:
Reader download page
- Once you have "bought" all the books you want, run the Copia software and register your account.
Do not try to register your Adobe ID if you've already done so on your machine. Just skip or cancel that part.
- Hit the "sync" button in the Copia software to synchronize with your library. This only downloads the titles and cover pictures.
- Double-click each book in the Copia software to get it to download. Click "no" if it asks if you want to read it now.
Move the books into ADE, and then onto your Nook or other eReader:
- Quit Copia software and launch ADE
- In ADE, select Library->Add Item To Library. Navigate to My Documents->Copia Library->Books. Select all the epub files in that directory and click OK.
- Once the books are added to your ADE library, plug in your eReader and drag the books you want from the library pane to the eReader icon on the left side of the page.
Don