Kindle Free Pick of the Week - The Wright Brothers

A story we all should read.

Everyone knows the story of the Wright Brothers. Or do they? This biography conveys the well-known and the lesser-known facts about Orville and Wilbur's lives, and does so by weaving the biographical information into a wonderful story. The evocative illustrations combine with the storytelling prowess of Lewis Helfand to relate the Wright Brothers' joint biography in a way never done before.

Tech Accessory Holiday Gift Idea Day 14: Text Me If You're Breathing by Greg Schwem

The Kindle edition of Text Me If You're Breathing: Observations, Frustrations and Life Lessons From a Low-Tech Dad, by comedian Greg Schwem.  A must to keep on your New Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, iPad or anything with the Kindle app.

What does a dad do when his daughter asks Santa for a Wii Fit and a 4G iPhone? The answer is simple: laugh! In Text Me If You're Breathing, stand-up comedian and technically challenged dad Greg Schwem accounts his mishaps and struggles with parenting in today's digital world. Whether accompanying his daughter to the New York City Apple store, purchasing a "high-tech" swing set, "tweeting" while coaching Little League or trying to lay down cell phone rules, Schwem shows readers that technology, while complicated, can be hilarious. Along the way Schwem also aims his barbs at Tiger Woods, the Consumer Electronics Show, in vitro fertilization, the National Spelling Bee and the movie Avatar. Insightful, heartfelt and always funny, Text Me If You're Breathing is proof that parenting will never come with technical support.

This book is great and you'll want to reference it time and time again.  The truth is, Greg's not that technologically challenged, but he knows how to see the humor in just about any situation.

The price of this book is too cheap, so buy a copy for yourself, give one as a gift and then buy another copy.  Greg has daughters that will in a few years be looking at colleges.  He will need all the help he can get.

Tech Accessory Holiday Gift Idea Day 8: Steve Jobs

I know this book received more press and reviews than any other book the second half of 2011, it still is a great read and would be a great holiday gift.

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Amazon Opens Kindle Lending Library

Today, Amazon.com, Inc. announced the launch of the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. With an Amazon Prime membership, Kindle owners can now choose from thousands of books to borrow for free - including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers - as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. No other e-reader or ebookstore offers such a service. With an annual Prime membership, the Kindle Owners' Lending Library is included at no additional cost. Millions of Prime members enjoy free two-day shipping, unlimited streaming of nearly 13,000 movies and TV shows, and now thousands of books to borrow for free with a Kindle.

"Owning a Kindle just got even better. Today, we're introducing a new Prime benefit built for Kindle: The Kindle Owners' Lending Library," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. "Prime Members now have exclusive access to a huge library of books to read on any Kindle device at no additional cost and with no due dates."

The Kindle Owners' Lending Library offers access to a wide array of categories and genres in fiction and non-fiction, and includes popular titles such as Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Big Short and Liars' Poker by Michael Lewis, TheHunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, and Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen --plus award-winning books such as The Finkler Question and Guns, Germs, and Steel, memoirs such as Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, and motivational books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Just as with any other Kindle book, your notes, highlights and bookmarks in borrowed books will be saved, so you'll have them later if you purchase or re-borrow the book. Books are borrowed from a Kindle device, and customers can have one book out at a time. When customers want to borrow a new book, any borrowed book can easily be returned right from their device.

Titles in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library come from a range of publishers under a variety of terms. For the vast majority of titles, Amazon has reached agreement with publishers to include titles for a fixed fee. In some cases, Amazon is purchasing a title each time it is borrowed by a reader under standard wholesale terms as a no-risk trial to demonstrate to publishers the incremental growth and revenue opportunity that this new service presents.

"The Kindle Owners' Lending Library is a great new benefit for Kindle owners and an entirely new growth opportunity for authors and publishers," said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content. "With the growth in Prime membership and the recent addition of Prime Instant Video, we've been able to broaden our relationships with movie and TV studios such as CBS, Fox, and NBCUniversal and significantly increase their revenue. We're excited to expand that investment to books - with this launch, we expect three immediate results: Kindle owners will read even more, publisher revenues will grow, and authors will see larger royalty checks."

Amazon Tablet Coming Next Week

First the Kindle, and now a tablet.

Amazon on Friday invited media to a press conference to be held in New York next Wednesday, declining to provide further details.

But analysts were confident that the world's largest Internet retailer will introduce its long-awaited tablet computer this year to expand in mobile commerce and sell more digital goods and services.

"Wednesday is tablet day," BGC partners analyst Colin Gillis told members of the media.

The tablet has been awaited as a strong competitor to Apple Inc's iPad. Apple has sold about 29 million of the devices since its launch in April 2010.

In much the same way Amazon's Kindle e-reader was priced low to quickly get traction among readers the company is likely to keep the price of its tablet low to attract users and sell other content and services, one analyst said.

The tablet could pose a major threat to Apple because of the Kindle's popularity and the movie and music services Amazon sells.  That is the apparent advantage Amazon will have over other companies whose tablets failed in 2011.