FREE/BARGAIN - Non-Fiction - 2016

[GtrsRGr8]

I didn't know if there would be fewer ebooks than usual on the markdown lists today (Sunday, December 25), with it being Christmas and all. Turns out, there seemed to be about as many as usual.

With my free time short, today, however, I felt like I had time to make just one post. This is the ebook that I chose over all of the others.

Color: A Natural History of the Palette. By Victoria Finley. Rated 4.4 stars, from 193 reviews at Amazon at the present moment. Print list price $18.00; digital list price $13.99; Kindle price now $1.99. Random House, publisher. 448 pages. https://www.amazon.com/Color-Natural.../dp/B000XUBDIA.

Book Description
In this vivid and captivating journey through the colors of an artist’s palette, Victoria Finlay takes us on an enthralling adventure around the world and through the ages, illuminating how the colors we choose to value have determined the history of culture itself.

How did the most precious color blue travel all the way from remote lapis mines in Afghanistan to Michelangelo’s brush? What is the connection between brown paint and ancient Egyptian mummies? Why did Robin Hood wear Lincoln green? In Color, Finlay explores the physical materials that color our world, such as precious minerals and insect blood, as well as the social and political meanings that color has carried through time.

Roman emperors used to wear togas dyed with a purple color that was made from an odorous Lebanese shellfish–which probably meant their scent preceded them. In the eighteenth century, black dye was called logwood and grew along the Spanish Main. Some of the first indigo plantations were started in America, amazingly enough, by a seventeen-year-old girl named Eliza. And the popular van Gogh painting White Roses at Washington’s National Gallery had to be renamed after a researcher discovered that the flowers were originally done in a pink paint that had faded nearly a century ago. Color is full of extraordinary people, events, and anecdotes–painted all the more dazzling by Finlay’s engaging style.

Embark upon a thrilling adventure with this intrepid journalist as she travels on a donkey along ancient silk trade routes; with the Phoenicians sailing the Mediterranean in search of a special purple shell that garners wealth, sustenance, and prestige; with modern Chilean farmers breeding and bleeding insects for their viscous red blood. The colors that craft our world have never looked so bright.

From the Hardcover edition.

[GtrsRGr8]

Several months ago--maybe half a year by now--several of us got ticked off at Verso Books. I don't even remember what the issue was. But I have been wary of them ever since. That hasn't kept me from choosing to stay our their mailing list, however.

Verso is having a really, really good sale right now. First, all of their ebooks are 90% off! All of their print books are 50% off. But listen to this--they ship those worldwide for free (I think that Verso may be based in the U.K.). Finally, if you buy the dead-tree version of a book, they will throw in the digital version free. Sorry, but I didn't see information where I looked on their website about what format(s) their ebooks are available in.

Verso publishes primarily, if not totally, in the soft sciences. Verso is unbashedly radical/New Left in their orientation. It is not what I call a big publisher. I see just a handful of titles in each of the dozen and a half or so different categories in which they publish books, even though they claim to publish 100 per year.

I'll leave you alone now so that you can going about looking over the sale if you so desire. Here's the webpage touting the sale.

[GtrsRGr8]

WarGameVault's Deal of the Day is True Stories of the Civil War, published by Wildside Press. The regular price is $2.99; today's price is only $1.20. For the purpose of comparison, the current Kindle price is $2.99.

Read much, much more about the ebook, than I can give in this post, at this webpage.

When you buy the book, you get it in "multiple file formats." Those are all digital formats, although I've forgotten what specific digital formats that they usually include.

Because it is well up in the day now, the amount of time left in the sale is currently a little less than 16 hours.

[GtrsRGr8]

Quickly . . . .

WarGameVault's deal of the day (by the time that I finish this post, you will have about 15 hours to grab the deal) is Warfare on the Mediterranean in the Age of Sail: A History, 1571-1866, by David S. T. Blackmore.

There aren't enough ratings (3 total) at either/both Amazon and GoodReads to get a true picture, but it is published by McFarland, which is noted as a high-quality publisher.

Today, the book is $3.75. It is a $29.99 Kindle mobi. Caveat: the book apparently comes WarGameVault, as a digital book, only in a watermarked PDF.

WarGameVault's dedicated webpage for this deal.

[piperclassique]

Just picked up a book from Verso. Available as epub or for Kindle. Their web site doesn't really lend itself to use on a tablet. But I got there in the end ��

[GtrsRGr8]

Sent to the Media Deals thread.

[GtrsRGr8]

UPDATE: I just opened the PDF from unglue.it that I had downloaded. It has XL + 784 pages, so that matches the number of pages in the edition that Amazon offers (they apparently exclude the 40 pages with the preface, foreword, etc., while unglue.it includes them). This is a very attractive, clean book; the cover is beautiful--just the kind of things that you would expect from a world-class university press such as Amsterdam University's.


I need to make this short and sweet . . . .

You can get How Modern Science Came Into the World, by H.F.(Floris) Cohen for free at unglue.it.

The least expensive copy at Amazon is around $89 (Hardcover--Used, "Like New").

Amazon apparently offers no other formats than the one dead-tree one. The book is in the PDF format from unglue.it. It may not be available digitally anywhere else--I simply don't know. That, in itself, may be a reason for someone to grab this one from unglue.it.

I notice that the one at unglue.it has a 2010 date (copyright date? first published date?) at unglue.it. There is a dearth of additional bibliographic information about the book there, as far as I can tell. The one sold at Amazon is published by Amsterdam University Press, has 784 pages, and has a date of 2011. I don't know if they are the same or different editions. If they are different editions, it looks like they could not possibly be very different (especially incorporating new developments) because there is only one year difference in the dates. For what it's worth, the cover image on both are very similar.

I hope that someone (in addition to me) will benefit from this ebook!

[bgalbrecht]

Packt Publishing has all of their computer books and videos on sale for $5 through January 9th. This is the publisher that has been giving away a different computer book daily at Packt Free Learning for about 18 months.

One warning, their website will let you buy an ebook more than once.

[GtrsRGr8]

Everyone reading this is probably aware of the concept of "open access," and has at least some knowledge of it. There is a little bit of "fudge factor" in the phrase, but generally all open access materials (books, journals, articles, maybe other media) are free to the general public.

Universities tend to have the most repositories of open access materials it seems, and maybe the largest ones, too. They are non-profit institutions (for the most part), after all. But even quite a few for-profit publishers are getting into the act, and providing at least a token amount of open access stuff. Such is the case with Gorgias Press. It is a scholarly, academic-oriented publisher.

I noticed that their title The Historiography of Music in Global Perspective, edited by Sam Mirelman, is among their open access works. Here's a short blurb at Gorgias Press, about it:
This volume examines the perception of music’s past, in all its historical, geographical and cultural breadth. The wide-ranging collection of papers address the interpretation of past music cultures from the earliest records of antiquity until the present.

Amazon sells it (in the hardcover format only, apparently). Their least expensive price for the tome is $131.25. See this Amazon webpage. (Full disclosure: the same book sells for $78.74 directly from Gorgias Press (shame on you, Amazon, for being so much more expensive on a book than a competitor!)

If you want a free copy from Gorgias Press, you'll have to get it digitally, and only in the PDF format. Here is the direct download link to the ebook. All of this is on the "up-and-up," honest, legal, and all of that. The words "GorgiasOpen" appear in the URL that I just gave. above, for the ebook. It's shown in the Gorgias Press Open Repository. Near the bottom of the webpage, it lets us know that "All works in the Gorgias Open Repository are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License." Translation: they're free (within certain restrictions). If you check the repository, you might even find some other titles that you want to grab, all for free.

[issybird]

The thread for 2017 is here.

[curtw]

Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8

I hope that someone (in addition to me) will benefit from this ebook!

It looks fascinating. Thanks!

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by curtw

It looks fascinating. Thanks!

Thanks. Someone gave me karma on it, too. Comments like yours and karma received on a post are a real help in deciding which one of many, many (on some days) marked down ebooks to post.