FREE/BARGAIN — Science Fiction & Fantasy

[salty-horse]

Amatka by Karin Tidbeck is $1.99 on Amazon.com

Vanja, an information assistant, is sent from her home city of Essre to the austere, wintry colony of Amatka with an assignment to collect intelligence for the government. Immediately she feels that something strange is going on: people act oddly in Amatka, and citizens are monitored for signs of subversion.

Intending to stay just a short while, Vanja falls in love with her housemate, Nina, and prolongs her visit. But when she stumbles on evidence of a growing threat to the colony, and a cover-up by its administration, she embarks on an investigation that puts her at tremendous risk.

In Karin Tidbeck’s world, everyone is suspect, no one is safe, and nothing—not even language, nor the very fabric of reality—can be taken for granted. Amatka is a beguiling and wholly original novel about freedom, love, and artistic creation by a captivating new voice.

[pdurrant]

Tales from the Folly by Ben Aaronovitch is just £1.99 today at Amazon UK.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08BW6LCPH/

A collection of short stories set in his Rivers of London series.

(Fantasy/Mystery/Police procedural, so I'm posting in two threads)

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Tales from the Folly by Ben Aaronovitch is just £1.99 today at Amazon UK.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08BW6LCPH/

A collection of short stories set in his Rivers of London series.

(Fantasy/Mystery/Police procedural, so I'm posting in two threads)

Much to my surprise, Kobo has it in the Australian store at $2.19: https://www.kobo.com/au/en/ebook/tales-from-the-folly-1.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ottdmk

When at all possible, I prefer buying from Duane's store, and right now everything there is 50% off (and has been, I believe, for the entire pandemic.)

Slightly more expensive than the Amazon edition, admittedly, but you get her preferred edition of the book.

OMG! How can this happen? This is awful. I was thinking of buying the eBooks but now maybe not. This blurb is about the Young Wizards series.

All 9 NME volumes are presently being further updated with the cutting-edge Vellum ebook publication software to produce ebooks better suited to newer ebook reading devices and tablets. The books are being re-covered as well. This work will be complete in q1 of 2019.

Vellum is not cutting edge. Vellum is GARBAGE! It needs to go away forever. The code it produces is awful. Do I really want to spend that much time fixing this mess for 9 eBooks? That's the question.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Vellum is not cutting edge. Vellum is GARBAGE! It needs to go away forever. The code it produces is awful. Do I really want to spend that much time fixing this mess for 9 eBooks? That's the question.

If you are doing epub and Kindle format ebooks, Vellum handles the media queries which quite a few authors have issues with.

As for cleaning up? I find it takes me about 5 minutes cleanup the average Vellum created ebook. In the first style sheet, I replace the body, p and p.subsq classes and add a media query for negative margins on kf8. Then I run Sigil's mend and prettify to add in the header infomation, CSSUndefinedClasses to remove the mass of unused classes and IDs from the HTML files and then CSSRemoveUnusedSelectors to clean up the stylesheets. Do any other minor cleanups such as the mobi scene breaks and the dropcap code if present and it's pretty much done.

I do have a collection of saved searches that get a workout during this process.

For the most part, this is done on my wife's ebooks since quite a few ebooks she reads are created by authors using Vellum. Relatively few of the authors I read seem to use Vellum.

[salty-horse]

If you have any concerns about an ebook's formatting, direct it to the publisher directly. They sometimes listen.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

If you have any concerns about an ebook's formatting, direct it to the publisher directly. They sometimes listen.

Most ebooks created by authors using Vellum are not from a large publisher. For the most part, they are self-published or from a indie publishing cooperative. Given the plugins and saved searches I use with Sigil, it's pretty trivial to clean them up.

[salty-horse]

It would still be nice if those self-publishers would provide customers with properly-formatted books. Not everyone has the technical know-how to edit them.

[tch65721]

The Magician's Land: A Novel (The Magicians Book 3) by Lev Grossman - $1.99
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G3L19CI

[Gandulf]

the chronicles of narnia complete collection, all 7 books from Google play books.
Don't know what US price is but should be less than 1 us dollar.

https://play.google.com/store/books/...d=BXkrDAAAQBAJ

[Tarana]

Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. By Neal Stephenson at Amazon, Kobo and B&N

Salty Horse posted about this on the 17th.

[salty-horse]

Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan is $1.99 on Amazon.com
First in a series of Lovecraft-inspired novellas.

A government special agent known only as the Signalman gets off a train on a stunningly hot morning in Winslow, Arizona. Later that day he meets a woman in a diner to exchange information about an event that happened a week earlier for which neither has an explanation, but which haunts the Signalman.

In a ranch house near the shore of the Salton Sea a cult leader gathers up the weak and susceptible — the Children of the Next Level — and offers them something to believe in and a chance for transcendence. The future is coming and they will help to usher it in.

A day after the events at the ranch house which disturbed the Signalman so deeply that he and his government sought out help from ‘other’ sources, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory abruptly loses contact with NASA's interplanetary probe New Horizons. Something out beyond the orbit of Pluto has made contact.

And a woman floating outside of time looks to the future and the past for answers to what can save humanity.

[salty-horse]

Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson is $1.99 on Amazon.com

There is Thorn, a shaman himself. He lives to pass down his wisdom and his stories -- to teach those who would follow in his footsteps.

There is Heather, the healer who, in many ways, holds the clan together.

There is Elga, an outsider and the bringer of change.
And then there is Loon, the next shaman, who is determined to find his own path. But in a world so treacherous, that journey is never simple -- and where it may lead is never certain.

Shaman is a powerful, thrilling and heartbreaking story of one young man's journey into adulthood -- and an awe-inspiring vision of how we lived thirty thousand years ago.

[maddz]

Today's deals on Amazon include:

Dune, by Frank Herbert (Dune 1) is 99p
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004KA...d_i=5400977031



The Big Deal is 21 books by Terry Goodkind; I'm not going to link to them individually:
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=s9_...d_i=5400977031
All seem to be 99p. It looks like the first 12 books in the Sword of Truth series plus #17 and 2 prequels, books 1-5 of the Children of Dhara series, book 3 of the Nicci Chronicles, and a stand-alone.

[Tarana]

The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks $2.99 Amazon, Kobo and B&N
Book 1 of Night Angel Trilogy.