So, if you happen to be Canadian and in possession of a working iTunes Canada account
(ETA: melmac has noticed that this also seems to be going on in the Australian store as well), there are literally dozens upon dozens* of glitch freebies right now from publisher Penguin, across all genres, some by quite well-known authors.
For example, here's a Stephen King that I managed to pick up which is still free as I type this:
Four Past Midnight
Every single category has quite a number of books free, including major authors like Nora Roberts, Harlan Coben, Clive Cussler, John Grisham, C. J. Cherryh, a lot of the annotated Penguin Classics, some vintage Nancy Drew novels and lots of non-fiction as well (including some nice biography, history, and science stuff), which have been steadily climbing the Free bestseller listings in the Top Charts section of the iTunes store.
I spot checked a few, and none of them seem to be free in the US iTunes store when I futz with the URLs, and they're definitely not free in the other stores, either.
Under the spoiler is a quickie list of just a few of the authors I grabbed freebies from, before I decided it was just too much to keep track of for posting here. I apologize for the poor formatting and lack of alphabetization/categories:
I have no idea what's going on with Penguin (they had nearly a dozen multi-store freebies yesterday that only lasted a few hours), but if you want to pick them up, here are some tips:
1. Absolutely make sure that you've gone into iTunes/iBooks preference and reset all the dialogue warnings so it will warn you if you click on a Free book which is no longer free and ask if you want to buy it.
Some of the books will do this, so it's best to be prepared.
If you're paranoid, you can check your receipts via the main iTunes store in the Purchase History section under the main Account, which should all say 0.00/FREE.
You may also want to keep screenshots of the iTunes store listings saying the book is Free, just in case.
2. If you already know your favourite Penguin-published authors, do a search for their name and filter for free books if you're using the iBooks Mac app, or just keep scrolling down and clicking whatever you spot which says Free.
Trust me, this is considerably more efficient than trying to browse the standard categories after a publisher name search, even with the filter on.
3. If you're stumped for authors or just want to browse, type Penguin Group US as your search term and then filter if you can. The main page will load a huge amount of books with many freebies at the top, but that won't be nearly all that's available.
Click the various subcategories after your initial search to filter down further.
4. Even the subcategories don't contain all the freebies, it seems. So if you spot a freebie by a favourite author, do a search for their name again to see if they've got more.
5. Some of the subcategories sortings are kind of surprising. Romance readers will want to click on both of the Historical categories that show up, as well as Suspense (where they seem to have filed all the romantic suspense), and the Fantasy & Ghost stories category as well.
SF people will want to check out Adventure, where it seems a lot of space operas went.
6. For best results, don't click more than two things at a single go, wait for them to download before going onto your next two. This will minimize the chances of your getting an error message (check your library after seeing one though, sometimes it means that you got the book but it couldn't download due to server load and is sitting in the cloud).
7. Expect the iBooks store to regularly freeze and crash on you as you do this. If you have a memory cleaning app which frees up your RAM again after an app crashes, use it.
If you start to get a lot of freezes, it's time to reboot the computer and try again.
You may want to turn off everything else on your computer, and let iTunes/iBooks hog all the resources. This does make it marginally more responsive, at least on a Mac.
I don't know how much longer this is going to last (I just found out about it myself when I went to check the other FT Press freebie which I found out had expired, and it definitely wasn't happening yesterday when I did a general Penguin freebie check because of the others that got missed), but it's past 9PM Pacific Time, which is usually when the iTunes servers roll over, so if they were going to fix this glitch by fiat, they would have done so by now and maybe you get an extra few hours/days due to the long weekend.
As for myself, I anticipate another sleepless night (thanks, insomnia!). And I'll have to find some reasonably-priced Penguin books I want in the Kobo store and throw some money at them by way of thanks.
And this has been the selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.
Enjoy†!
* Tempted to make a Sagan-style billions and billions joke, but no, there aren't quite that many. It just seems that way.
† If you manage to grab anything you like before it disappears. You weren't planning on doing anything this weekend anyway, were you?