FREE/BARGAIN - Non-Fiction - 2016

[artig]

Some ebooks may well have a 'best before' date. Such as calendars, yearbooks, Valentine's Day books, etc. Once that date is passed it would be sensible to sell more at a lower price than far fewer at a higher price. Next year there will be new ones available, and the old titles probably won't sell at all. So a clearance sale for ebooks may not be as silly as it sounds.

[GtrsRGr8]

The least expensive copy of this book at Amazon is $131.45. This pdf of it is free. When you want a particular ebook, you can sometimes save a lot of money if you will first scour the Internet thoroughly to see if you can get it for free.

This book seems to be academically oriented, and the material would be challenging for someone who is not a devotee of the subject to understand (in other words, it's "deep").

Title: The Historiography of Music in Global Perspective.
Format: Pdf.
Author(s): Sam Mirelman (editor).
Publisher: Gorgias Press.
Pages: viii + 207.
Ebook Rating/Number of Reviews (Amazon):
Price: $0.00.
Lowest Price at (or through Amazon) if available there: $131.45 (Hardback-"New").
Book Description (from the Preface):
This book is based on a Study Day which I convened at the Institute of Musical Research (University of London) on July 4, 2009. The authors address issues surrounding the perception of music’s past in various historical periods, and various parts of the world. Many of the essays in this volume offer evaluations of episodes in the history of musical enquiry which are barely known in (ethno-) musicology, as well as archaeology or anthropology. Such episodes of enquiry or scholarship are important for several reasons. They may or may not contribute towards a greater factual understanding of music history, but they certainly have much to offer in terms of improving our understanding of wider cultural history, as well as musical thought, during the period in question. In particular, studies concentrating on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries allow for a closer examination of the context in which the modern disciplines of musicology and ethnomusicology emerged. Furthermore, such episodes contextualise the history and background through which the contemporary discipline of music archaeology developed in the twentieth century (Lund). Indeed, this collection of articles highlights the extent to which the serious,
methodical study of music’s distant past has been a flourishing field of research since at least the mid nineteenth century until the present.
Comments: Has B/W photographs and illustrations. This ebook was posted by the publisher, Gorgias Press, on their website. So, I believe it to be a legal free download.
URL: http://gorgiaspress.com/bookshop/dow...of%20Music.pdf.

[GtrsRGr8]

Ratings for this book are hard to come by, but the few that I could find (those at Amazon U.S. and GoodReads) are excellent. Oddly, this book does not seem to be sold at the Amazon Australia website, even though the publisher is in Australia. So, there are no ratings for the book to be found there. I did a little perusing of the book and it looks very well done, however. I am personally thrilled to have it, because a good dictionary of biography is great to have around for reference purposes.

The book apparently is not sold at Amazon U.S. except as two separate volumes. This one book contains all of the content of those two volumes.

Unusual for this kind of find, this book is available in all three of your favorite digital flavors: pdf, ePub, and mobi.

Title: Dictionary of World Biography, Second Edition.
Format(s): Pdf, ePub, mobi.
Author(s): Barry Jones.
Publisher: Australian National Press.
Pages: xv + 938 (pdf format).
Ebook Rating/Number of Reviews (Amazon): 5 (1) for volume 1; 5 (1) for volume 2. 4.00 (3) at GoodReads (for the 2 volumes).
Price: $0.00.
Lowest Price at (or through Amazon) if available there: $25.00 + $25.00 = $50.00 (paperback - New, for volumes 1 and 2).
Book Description (Amazon): There is no true book description there, but this information about the author is there:
Jones, Barry Owen (1932- ). Australian politician, writer and lawyer, born in Geelong. Educated at Melbourne University, he was a public servant, high school teacher, television and radio performer, university lecturer and lawyer before serving as a Labor MP in the Victorian Parliament 1972-77 and the Australian House of Representatives 1977-98. He took a leading role in reviving the Australian film industry, abolishing the death penalty in Australia, and was the first politician to raise public awareness of global warming, the ‘post-industrial’ society, the IT revolution, biotechnology, the rise of ‘the Third Age’ and the need to preserve Antarctica as a wilderness. In the Hawke Government, he was Minister for Science 1983-90, Prices and Consumer Affairs 1987, Small Business 1987-90 and Customs 1988-90. He became a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO, Paris 1991-95 and National President of the Australian Labor Party 1992-2000, 2005-06. He was Deputy Chairman of the Constitutional Convention 1998. His books include Decades of Decision 1860- (1965), Joseph II (1968), Age of Apocalypse (1975), and he edited The Penalty is Death (1968). Sleepers, Wake!: Technology and the Future of Work was published by Oxford University Press in 1982, became a bestseller and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish and braille. The fourth edition was published in 1995. He received a DSc for his services to science in 1988 and a DLitt in 1993 for his work on information theory. Elected FTSE (1992), FAHA (1993), FAA (1996) and FASSA (2003), he is the only person to have been elected to all four Australian learned Academies. Awarded an AO in 1993, named as one of Australia’s one hundred ‘living national treasures’ in 1998, he was elected a Visiting Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1999. His autobiography, A Thinking Reed, was published in 2006.
Comments: This is the second (the most recent) edition. I believe this ebook to be a legal free download because the publisher offers the book free on their website and provides the direct links to it.
URL: http://press.anu.edu.au/titles/anu-l...rld-biography/ (semi-direct link).

[murg]

Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8

Get a Really Great Dictionary of World Biography FREE in Pdf, EPub, and Mobi!

That's my tax dollars at work...

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8

Title: Dictionary of World Biography, Second Edition.
Format(s): Pdf, ePub, mobi.
Author(s): Barry Jones.
Publisher: Australian National Press.
Pages: xv + 938 (pdf format).

URL: http://press.anu.edu.au/titles/anu-l...rld-biography/ (semi-direct link).

Publisher: ANU (Australian National University) Press


There are other free ebooks on the ANU Press site.

Just the story of how Penguin prepared a early version leaving out all composers with names beginning with B is worth the download trouble.

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

Publisher:
<snip>
Just the story of how Penguin prepared a early version leaving out all composers with names beginning with B is worth the download trouble.

I'm not familiar with the incident. Do you know where I can read about it?

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by murg

That's my tax dollars at work...

We sure do appreciate you, mates!

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8

I'm not familiar with the incident. Do you know where I can read about it?

It's in the introduction to Dictionary of World Biography (there's a read online option if you don't want to download).

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

It's in the introduction to Dictionary of World Biography (there's a read online option if you don't want to download).

Ha! I didn't know that it was in the book itself. Thanks.

[GtrsRGr8]

I find the topic of this book very interesting. It seems hard to get accurate, reliable, unbiased information like this book contains--how the ordinary people live their day-to-day lives in places where the U.S. military is fighting or has fought wars. Although the U.S. now is basically out of Afghanistan, I think that the war there is still fresh enough in our minds that we will find this book interesting.

This book should be authoritative--it was written by a woman who was born and raised in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The book is easy reading, being written at probably no higher than a 10th grade reading level. It has many nice color photographs. It apparently is not sold anywhere, only given away; for that reason, there are no ratings to share with you.

Title: Afghan Women: A Guide to Understanding an Afghan Woman's Role in Her Society.
Format(s): Pdf.
Author(s): Shaima Khinjani.
Publisher: Defense Critical Language/Culture Program, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center at the University of Montana.
Pages: xii + 46.
Ebook Rating/Number of Reviews (Amazon): N/A.
Price: $0.00.
Lowest Price at (or through Amazon) if available there:
Book Description (from the Introduction):
Typically village women in Afghanistan do not speak with men, especially foreign men in military uniforms. Afghan women are restricted by their culture and are sensitive to cultural issues. They accept their lives and rarely uestion the restrictions placed on them by society, religion and Afghan culture. To open up communication with this half of the Afghan population, female military personnel must understand common cultural practices, social norms, and possess basic language skills in order to engage appropriately with Afghan women in villages.

This book is designed to help American military personnel learn about Afghan women, the socially constructed norms that affect women’s lives, and Afghan cultural practices. Moreover, this book provides female military personnel with knowledge of women’s issues in Afghanistan prior to deployment in order to help them avoid culture shock and cultural misunderstandings.
Comments: I believe that this ebook is a legal free download, due to the fact that it is offered as a free download by the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana (http://www.umt.edu/mansfield/dclcp/e...ghan_women.php). The Mansfield Center is the publisher.
URL: http://www.umt.edu/mansfield/dclcp/d...istan_full.pdf (Direct link).

[GtrsRGr8]

The book publisher Penguin (which is a division of Random House now, I think) offers around 200 free teacher's guides to Penguin's classics, in the pdf format. These include such series as "Signet Classics" and the "Plume" editions.

You may be a teacher. If so, I think that you would find the material specifically created for you to be helpful. And, even if you're not a teacher, you might even find some of the dedicated teacher's material helpful if you're doing study for yourself.

But much of the material in these books is similar to the material in guides like CliffsNotes and SparksNotes. For example, in the guide for Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" there are sections for an Introduction to the play; an Overview, giving the historical context of the play; a List of the Play's Characters; Synopsis . . . well, you get the picture. Two other features in these, that I'm not sure that CliffNotes or SparkNotes includes, but I think could be enormously helpful, are a Bibliography and a list of Websites on the subject.

Even if you don't own the Penguin classics editions of the plays and books, there is little in these guides that couldn't be used with any other edition that you might be using.

You will need to interpret "classics" very, very broadly. I found, for example, guides to E.L. Doctorow's City of God; God's Hotel, by Victoria Sweet; and Listening Is an Act of Love, edited by Dave Isay! Maybe Penguin is thinking that they will be "future classics (or maybe I just don't really know the meaning of "classic" ha).

Penguin must be continually adding new guides, because in the list of titles they denote the ones that are "new teacher's guides."

This is one website that I've made sure to bookmark. And, I want to be sure to download some of the guides to put in my library, in case they should be taken away in the future (things like that do happen, you know).

You can find links to all of the guides here.

[Mort1997]

Free on Amazon UK - The Battle of Hurtgen Forest by Charles Whiting

It was the longest battle ever fought by the US Army, Thirty thousand American GIs were killed or wounded. A battle that has been ignored for more than fifty years - and one that should never have been fought.
From September 1944 to February 1945, eight US infantry and two US armoured divisions were thrown into the ‘green hell of Hurtgen’: fifty square miles of thick, rugged, hilly woods on the Belgian-German border, full of German soldiers in a deadly network of concrete bunkers. The butcher’s bill was high; casualty rates ran to 50 per cent and more for most rifle companies. The High Command, from the relative comfort and security of their headquarters, miles away from the forest, refused to admit there had been a mistake. Careers, and the pride of the army, were at stake.
More troops were poured in and the slaughter continued, to capture an objective that had long since lost any real purpose. The Battle of Hurtgen Forest is a classic account of the price fighting men must pay for the prideful blunders of their commanders.



UK
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Battle-Hurtg...ndeavour+press


US
http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Hurtgen...ndeavour+press

Au
http://www.amazon.com.au/Battle-Hurt...ndeavour+press

Can
http://www.amazon.ca/Battle-Hurtgen-...ndeavour+press

[Apache]

Don't you love the way they show the savings?

Digital List Price: $3.99
Print List Price: $36.95
Kindle Price: $0.00
Save $36.95 (100%)

I Saved $3.99 Not $36.95.
Apache

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by Apache

Don't you love the way they show the savings?

I Saved $3.99 Not $36.95.

I've never cared for them basing my "savings" on the print list price.

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by Apache

Don't you love the way they show the savings?

I Saved $3.99 Not $36.95.
Apache

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

I've never cared for them basing my "savings" on the print list price.

Kudos to both of you.

When I make a post of an ebook and put the percentage savings, I always base it on the digital list price and not the print list price. Of course, the advertisers base it on the print list price to make the deal look better. Unless the digital price is the same or higher (I have seen that a time or two), the percentage savings over the print list price will always be higher than that over the digital list price. But comparing it with the digital list price better reflects what most people could really save, as Apache implied. To compare the sale price to the regular digital price would be even more realistic--who ever pays full price (at least among those in this forum) for an ebook? But sometimes information about the regular digital price is hard to ferret out, unfortunately.