Made Available by Project Gutenberg

Swann’s Way
by Marcel Proust

$0 – A FREE ebook

A middle-aged man recalls his life in the French village of Combray where he spent his childhood. Plagued by insomnia and disjointed dreams, he recalls  glimpses of the patchwork of loneliness and lost loves that sum to his life.

Volume one of the seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past, also know as In Search of Lost Time.

Made available through Project Gutenberg. Scroll to the bottom of the Project Gutenberg page for this title to choose your ebook format.

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Available Formats: .ePUB, .mobi (how to use for Kindle), HTML. For help choosing your format, visit our ebook Primer.

File Size: up to 1MB
Published: France, 1913 to 1927
ISBN: Not copyrighted in the United States.
Project Gutenberg Page: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7178

Made Available by Project Gutenberg

Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert

$0 – A FREE ebook

Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair that brings nothing but tragedy. Written and set in France in the late 1800’s, Flaubert set out to paint a portrait of French bourgeois life. What he created was one of the world’s most heartfelt and memorable classics.

Made available through Project Gutenberg. Scroll to the bottom of the Project Gutenberg page for this title to choose your ebook format.

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Available Formats: .ePUB, .mobi (how to use for Kindle), HTML. For help choosing your format, visit our ebook Primer.

File Size: up to 700KB for HTML
Published: October 1, 1856 to December 15, 1856
ISBN: Not copyrighted in the United States.
Project Gutenberg Page: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2413

Vodaphone Mobile

In an ever growing trend, mobile phone carrier Vodaphone have decided to make their music store free of all copy protection on their music.

The have announced that most of the songs bought through their store for mobiles and PCs will be DRM (Digital Rights Management) free by the summer.

It has deals with such labels as EMI, Universal music group and Sony to license artists like Duffy, Lilly Allen and Coldplay to their store.

Apple announced earlier this year that it would release  iTunes Plus, a feature to buy songs without copy protection for an extra 20p. Amazon and 7Digital are also DRM free in their stores so it seems to be in growing popularity to suit the ever changing market trend. It will probably be a while until all music stores are free from all copy protection as the all label companies will all have to get on boad first. Warner, however have not signed a deal with them so far which takes the  store down a massive 1 million songs.Vodaphone have said that they have been taking to Warner. A huge blow dispite best efforts to go completely free of DRM.

However if you have already bought DRM strapped music from them fear not as they will allow you to swap your old tracks  free of charge for copy protection free versions.

In the UK, songs will cost £1 and albums will be £6 plus discounts for people who buy more than 15 tracks.

Birthday Girl: a novel
by Diane J Wright

$10.00 per ebook
$21.95 + shipping per printed book

preview at www.birthdaygirlnovel.com

Sixteen-year-old Tracey Burns has been confined to a single room for two years. One night, amid chaotic spring winds, she slips to freedom and inadvertently sets herself on a journey that takes her further away from the one thing she wants most: to find the mother who left her behind.

Determined but starkly naïve, Tracey plunges into a harsh and confusing world where she is no more than a headline, a case file, another ragged face on the side of the California highway asking for change. It’s only when she stumbles upon an enclave of irrepressible epicureans tucked in the flatlands of the Mojave that she begins to uncover the truth of her world, of herself, and of her missing mother.

BIRTHDAY GIRL is a novel based upon actual events. Get lost along with Tracey Burns as she struggles to find her place in a world that chooses who is seen and who is not.

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Available Formats: .pdf & dead trees.  For help choosing your format, visit our ebook Primer.

File Size: up to 19.5MB for .pdf
Published: November 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-615-27666-3
Official Site: http://www.birthdaygirlnovel.com

After the Strawberry: a novel
by Kathryn Pope

$9.99 per eBook

Lydia Poole wants to be a good person—the kind of person who does everything right and deserves to be loved. To accomplish this, she eats only one cup of Cheerios per day and lets her weight drop below ninety pounds. When Lydia’s sister introduces Jesse, a new friend and filmmaker, Lydia agrees to be the subject of his documentary.

Jesse’s camera follows Lydia as she’s hospitalized for anorexia, as she walks the line between hoping for death and wanting life, as her weight continues to fall. With the camera running, Lydia shifts from the viewfinder’s object to the eye behind the camera. In doing so, she discovers how she wants to see her world.

After the Strawberry is a novel about a girl who disappears while trying to be seen.

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Formats (made available via):

• iPhone, iPod,  Stanza (ePUB)
• Kindle, MobiPocket (.mobi)
• Sony Reader (LRF)
• PALM (PDB)
• Plain text (RTF)
• Online reading (HTML or Javascript)
• Free, ad-supported online reading (HTML)

For help choosing your format, visit our ebook Primer.

File Size: up to 1.3MB
Published: March 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-615-28869-7

Speaking of music subscription plans, Magnatune – which offers high quality DRM-free music downloads and podsafe licensing – announced two new ways to enjoy their music this morning:

Now available for the very first time, Magnatune Memberships allows you to hear Magnatune music without any announcements or interruptions between songs! Starting at just $9 a month, you can stream over 500 albums and mixes into iTunes or player of your choice. Listen online all day, every day wherever you are. For serious audiophiles, we recommend our Download Membership, an “all you can eat” plan that lets you download any of our music, whenever you like, as many times as you like, and in any format, including CD quality WAVs. BONUS: BOTH PLANS include access to our new two hour, talk-free podcasts.

I checked out the details of the two plans. For $9 a month you can stream the company’s entire catalog of music, and for $18 a month you can download the company’s entire catalog of music. Let me repeat that part: for $18 a month, you can download every album on the site to your computer. (Magnatune only asks that you not strain its servers by using a downloading robot.) You also get access to streaming audio and members-only music podcasts. Under both plans, 50% of your subscription fee goes to the musicians whose songs you downloaded and/or streamed. Pretty sweet.

I do not recognize a single one of the artists listed on the site. But what I do recognize is if I really want to expand my musical horizons, Magnatune is a great way to go – particularly if I want to explore baroque, classical, medieval, and electronic music. And there are some fascinating oddities, such as Professor Armchair and his “demented 19th century children’s music“.

I’ll have to think about whether membership is right for me, or whether I’d prefer to cherry-pick tracks that I like. But I’m really impressed with the company’s pro-customer, pro-artist policies.

MacTechNews.de berichtet, dass der MP3-Online-Store von Walmart nur mit dem Microsoft Internet Explorer benutzbar ist und somit die komplette Mac-Kundschaft aussen vor lässt.

Ich habe es trotzdem versucht, und tatsächlich, ich bekomme die gleiche unfreundliche Fehlermeldung. Nach einem Blick ins Hilfe-Verzeichnis lese ich folgendes:

Other browsers may be able to access our original Music Downloads store. This older site has fewer user features than our latest version, but it does offer all the same music.

Hier der Link zu dem alten MP3-Store von Walmart. Darüber kann man die gleichen Dateien erwerben, also richtig fatal ist es nicht, auch wenn die Aussage:

System Requirements:

• Windows 2000, XP or Vista (sorry, no Macintosh or Linux)

für eine Webseite(!) schon ganz schön frech ist.

Looks like they have pipped itunes this time!

Source: 7digital