YMMY (Dec 23-30): Spend $25+ in eBooks, Get $6 ebook store credit

This promotion is back again at Amazon. It is YMMV, and you have to activate it first in your own Amazon account, which I believe happens automatically at the Promotional Page OR if you click on any of the in-page banners at Amazon (you may see them while you are in the ebook pages ~ that’s how I found it while writing the post about the Nikon D3500 dummies offer)…

Just like before, the offer works retroactively (once activated) for the period between December 23 at 00:01am and December 30 at 11:59pm. If your total ebook purchases are $25 or higher, within four days of reaching the milestone, a $6 promotional ebook store credit will be applied automatically to your Amazon account.

The $6 promotional ebook credit must needs be used within 21 days of it being credited to your account, otherwise it evaporates into the 13th dimension. More details at the Promotional Page

PS: given the date range, it is possible they have another promotion to cover the New Year but this is PURE speculation on my part…

Sunday: Moon USA National Parks (all 62) ebook for $5

One of the Kindle ebook deals of the day for Sunday, hiding between the various war and romance and detective ebooks is 1284-page Moon USA National Parks: The Complete Guide to All 62 Parks by Becky Lomax in the Kindle format, going for $5… As of the time of writing, it averages 4.8 out of 5 based on 138 ratings…

This is part of their 16-book Travel Guides series…

Offer ends on Sunday 12/6/20 at 11:59pm pacific time…

UPDATE: the current Adorama dailies (change Monday 10am ET) are:

+ KODAK 10″ Touch Screen Rechargeable Digital Photo Frame Wi-Fi Enabled with HD Photo Display for $130

+ Monument Labs Personal Cloud Server with Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi for $95

LAST CALL (Mon PM): $25+ Kindle ebooks, Get $6 back

This is a last call alert, Monday 11/30/20 at 11:59pm pacific time is the last day to take advantage of the Amazon Kindle Buy $25+ in ebooks, get $6 promotional ebook credit promotion. The details are at the aforelinked page, the two things to remember is that you must activate the promotion. The other thing is actually a nice thing, once you activate the offer, it works retroactively for ebook purchases between November 23-30 in 2020, and the ebooks can be purchased on different days and times, not a single transaction.

This works on ebooks of all kinds since Amazon’s digital arm is the only one selling ebooks, there are no 3rd-party sellers like there are with physical products. So whether you buy fiction, non-fiction, camera guides, “Understanding Exposure”, Photoshop/LR books, etc, Harlequins, sports e-almanacs, etc…

Sunday: Presidential Photography of Pete Souza, “Obama: An Intimate Portrait” for $7 [Kindle, eBook]

Presidential Photographer Pete Souza [Wikipedia], chief white house photographer for two presidents, Reagan and Obama [one film, one digital we can assume], is one of the Kindle daily deals for Sunday, with his presidential photography e-book “Obama: An Intimate Portrait” covering all eight years (327 pages, November 2017). The sale price is $7 but you get a $0.70 “Great On Kindle” promotional store credit as well. You can “Look Inside” to see if this mix of presidential photography and text is something of interest. Offer ends Sunday at 11:59pm pacific time. eBooks don’t sell out… This is currently #1 in the Photography & Video category at Amazon…

Spend $25+ on Kindle ebooks, Get $6 promo credit

It’s that time of the year for the Kindle ebook offers as well! This promotion runs between November 23-30 in 2020. If you purchase $25+ in Kindle ebooks in any combination [eg one expensive ebook, or multiple ebooks on different days] during the promotional period, you will earn a $6 promotional Kindle ebook credit.

First, you must activate the promotion. If you are logged on, it may activate simply by visiting or reloading the page, or by following the link mentioned over there.

Once activated, any purchases you made during this promotional period [even before you activated the offer] count towards the $25 minimum.

Your $6 bonus will be applied to your Amazon account within two days of reaching the $25 minimum.

Once applied to your account, you have 21 days to spend the $6 ebook credit (you can use it on one ebook or multiple ebooks).

There are plenty of photography ebooks out there, from camera guides, to post-processing, to inspirational, to “Understanding Exposure” type of books, and so on. OR you can buy any other ebook sold at Amazon.

To make the most of it, plan also how to spend the $6 credit before jumping in on the offer, so it won’t be left to expire unused.

Some ebooks also have a “Great On Kindle” store credit, which is stackable with this $6 credit…

BOOK CLUB TIP: If you are looking for a long complicated epic fantasy that can be read by the whole family during the socially-distanced winter holidays, try The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson [there’s Kindle sample and look inside]. Not brutal or convoluted or uber-complicated or sexually charged as “A Song of Ice and Fire / Game Of Thrones”. From what I recall the most sexual thing that happened in book #1 was a kiss between two mature adults. Infact it’s so nonsexual you have to wonder whether most of the characters are eunuchs 😉 Note that this is planned as a 10-book series but Sanderson is writing fast fast fast fast.

Wedn: “Picture This: How Pictures Work” by Molly Bang for $3

The number of ebook offers are increasing in the Amazno gold Box, and as such, the net may grab more photography-related ebooks. Such as this offer, good until 11/25/20 [one month until COVID Christmas!] at 11:59pm pacific time [ebooks rarely ever sell out]. It is a classic, Molly Bang’s “Picture This: How Pictures Work” going for $3. This is a 154-page book. As of the time of writing it averages 4.5 out of 5 based on 131 customer ratings…

You can request a free Kindle sample [and send it to your favorite Kindle app or Kindle ereader or tablet] or you can go to the Hardcover version and “Look Inside”.

UPDATE: of popular science interest, Brian Greene, one of the “physics/space science popularizers” has a daily deal ebook as well, it’s “Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe” for $4 (408 pages, February 2020, 4.5 out 5 with nearly 1000 ratings, you also get a $0.40 Great On Kindle credit)…

Monday: “Sontag: Her Life and Work” biography for $3 [793pp, Nov 2019, Kindle]

Among the Monday Amazon Gold Box deals of the day there’s a photographer biography in the Kindle ebook format. It’s a relatively new book (September 2019) by Benjamin Moser, “Sontag: Her Life and Work” going for $3. You also get a $0.30 “Great on Kindle” store credit towards future “Great on Kindle” purchases within a preset time limit. The ebook is 793 pages long and averages 4.5 out of 5 based on 113 customer ratings as of the time of writing of this blog-post…

Speaking of Kindle related matters, if you want to try Kindle e-readers or want to refresh your older model, right now the entry-level Kindle is on sale for $60 (with Special Offers). It’s not your uncle’s entry-level Kindle though. Nowadays the entry-level Kindle has both a touchscreen and a built-in light. However, the screen is 167ppi… To get to 300ppi, you need to move to the triple-figure Paperwhite models

PS: “Great on Kindle” are ebooks that are formatted in a way that read great on the Kindle. Sort of the exact opposite of a PDF file on the Kindle 🙂

Friday: Photoshop Elements 2020 Dummies ebook for $5

Reading is FUN-da-mental! Of the Friday Kindle daily deals one is of photography interest, it is the Kindle edition of the Dummies Photoshop Elements 2020 by Barbara Obermeier and Tad Pavoda for $5. This has 425 pages and as of the time of writing it averages 4.4 out of 5 based on 260+ ratings…

Of “6 degrees of interest” to photography, and a wordplay on the more famous books, of math interest, it’s the The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity by Steven Strogatz for $3…

Monday: “Picture This – How Pictures Work” Expanded Molly Bang classic for $3 [eBook]

The 1991 classic book “Picture This: How Pictures Work” by Molly Bang is now available in an expanded and revised edition (2016, 154pp, Chronicle Books), and it is one of the Monday 7/6/20 Kindle daily deals going for $3. It averages 4.3 out of 5 based on 170+ ratings [rating is the (weighted? who knows) sum of written reviews and plain star-ratings].

Speaking of Amazon, it’s a very busy day of tech in the Germany Gold Box where the sales including a stunna ASUS Zen Ultrabook for 899 euro, MSI gaming, TP-Link, 15 euro multimeter kit, Oppo’s Find X2 smartphone line (PRO, NEO, Lite), Huawei MateBook 13, EGLO lighting, refurbished iPhones, IBRA cables, Amazon hardware, SodaStream, Melitta shiny coffee machines, Fitbit, Sennheiser, Bosch and Samsung Galaxy M31 smartphones…

Humble Bundle: Focal Press eBooks for Film-Making [$1 gets you 6 ebooks, pay more, get more]

If you are interested in film-making, good for the next 13 days (as of the time of writing), Humble Bundle has a Film-Maker Book Bundle by Focal Press. These are DRM-FREE ebooks available in multiple formats [you can download all the formats, you don’t have to choose one format].

The $1+ tier includes six ebooks including sound, cloud, indie, genre, and screenwriting.

The $7+ tier adds seven more ebooks, from the general film-related topics to the specifics.

And then the $13.50+ tier adds eight more ebooks, making it a total of 21 books, and it includes single-camera production, low budget, visual effects, on location, and more…

Of other potential interest at Humble Bundle they have the following:

  • Technology essentials for non-techies in business
  • Apress ebooks on digital security (cybersecurity and such)
  • Circuits and Electronics ebook bundle (DSP, Engineering principles, etc)
  • Map Software Bundle
  • Learn Python with PyCharm
  • Image Comics showcase
  • each of the above bundles has its own expiration date

Tuesday: “Picture This: How Pictures Work” eBook for $3 [Molly Bang, August 2016, 154pg]

Among the Tuesday 4/28/20 Amazon Gold Box deals of the day is a photography ebook on sale for $3! It is the “Picture This: How Pictures Work” ebook by Molly Bang, 154 pages, published in August 2016. As of the time of writing, it averages 4.3 out of 5 based on 160 customer reviews…

You can read the first few pages of the ebook with the Kindle sample, or you can jump around inside the book when you use the “Look Inside” feature at the Print Book page

This book was originally published in 1991…

Sale ends on 4/28/20 at 11:59pm pacific time. eBooks do not sellout 🙂

Still Good: “Analogue Photography: A Reference Manual for Shooting Film” by Andrew Bellamy for $3

UPDATE 4/10/20 at 12:43pm ET: as of this recheck, the $3 sale price continues for this ebook that was a Wednesday daily deal…

Everything old is new again! There’s a brand new book about shooting on film and it is one of the Amazon Wednesday ebook deals of the day, good until 11:59pm pacific time on 4/8/20. The author is Andrew Bellamy and the 192-page Princeton Architectural Press ebook is on sale for $3 for the Kindle. The ebook is titled “Analogue Photography: A Reference Manual for Shooting Film”

The Kindle sample will show you the first few pages of the book (including the table of contents) but if you go the the paperback page and “Look Inside” you will be able to jump around inside the book.

There are a couple of international reviews on it (one UK, one Italy) while the only USA review is a two-word review titled “Beautiful Design” but with a 1-star rating. This type of confusion sadly is prevalent (for various reasons) at Amazon, where the text of the review does not match the star rating. In this case, this novice reviewer may have gotten confused because on the same day (Nov 30, 2019) he reviewed a physical product with a 1-star for which he wrote actual meaningful text that matched the review title of “Total Rip-Off”.

Regardless, you can return e-books if you don’t like them. You can go to amazon.com/myk and select “Digital”, locate the ebook you want to return, click on the dots and select “Return for Refund”. The return window for ebooks is one week (or something like that, I don’t recall the exact duration)…

Sunday: “Understanding Exposure” [4th ed, 2016] ebook by Bryan Peterson for $2

Don’t want, RUN to Amazon! Good until Sunday 4/5/20 at 11:59pm pacific time [ebooks don’t run out], you can get the 4th edition of Bryan Peterson’s “Understanding Exposure” for $2 as one of the Sunday Kindle deals of the day. The 4th edition came out in 2016 (Random House).

If you haven’t seen this book before, you can get a Kindle sample for the beginning of the book, and you can use the page for the print edition of the book to “Look Inside” which allows you to jump around a book, very helpful in trying to figure out whether this is something that might interest you. o/~ Jump, jump, jump around! o/~

Sunday Photography-related Novel: “The Age Of Light” for $3

There’s only so many photography how-to and camera user-manuals you can read. Sometimes you just want to read a novel that has some …photography in it. For example, the protagonists are photographers or some other related plots and twists and turns. Such is the case with one of Sunday’s Kindle ebook daily deals, it is the “The Age of Light” novel by Whitney Scharer (for the speed-readers out there, no, not Whitley Strieber) for $2.99. It is 385 pages, got published in February 2019, and averages 4.1 out of 5 based on 150+ customer ratings. You can get the start of the book using the “Kindle sample” or you can jump around jump around jump around using the “Look Inside” feature when you are on the Hardcover or Softback Amazon page of the book.

This is biographical historical fiction, not a romance novel…

“As they work together in the darkroom, their personal and professional lives become intimately entwined, changing the course of Lee’s life forever.”

FREE (with DRM): “The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography” ebook

We have an ebook freebie that is of direct camera-and-photo interest, and for a limited time, the University of Chicago (UoC) is offering it for FREE. However, the ebooks they sell come with DRM, Adobe Digital Editions, so you need to install their crap on your computer or use a mobile app that is compatible with their crap in order to read it.

The UoC freebie ebook for this month is “The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography” by Peter Buse (320 pages). UoC offers one free ebook each month but every time it is with Adobe’s nasty DRM stuff.

IF you are curious about the ebook without committing to Adobe’s DRM, you can “Look Inside” at amazon.com (they only have a Kindle preview, no preview of the hardcover).

PS: typically Kindle previews are a number of pages (or a percentage of the ebook) starting from the front cover, while hardcover previews jump all over the book and you can get a better feel for it ~ depending on the book of course…

Monday: “Sontag: Her Life and Work” for $4 (w/60c store credit)

One of the hundreds Kindle ebook deals of the day at Amazon for Cyber Monday is the “Sontag: Her Life and Work” e-book by Benjamin Moser (793 pages, September 2019) for $3.99 but because it’s a “Great On Kindle” ebook, you will receive a $0.60 store credit towards future “Great on Kindle” ebooks. The 60c credit happens automatically and gets applied automatically in future orders. It is a promotional credit so it expires if not used. The ebook averages 4.1 out of 5 based on 12 customer ratings.

A TL;DR refresher on her career at Wikipedia. In terms of photography, her “On Photography” essays are often a recommended read…

Spend $20+ in Kindle ebooks, Get $5 ebook credit [YMMV]

This is a YMMV promotion as it may be targeted, and you have to login to your Amazon account to activate the offer (if you don’t see an activation button it means your account is not eligible ~ how they decide these, I have no clue)…

The offer is this: spend $20+ in Kindle ebooks by the end of day on December 4 and receive a $5 promotional Kindle e-book store credit. You must first activate the offer, so you won’t earn anything before that…

The link is the second box, the cyan-blue color at the Amazon Book Deals page. Click on that while logged on to Amazon (or login if prompted) to see if you are eligible…

PS: I’m not posting the direct link to the offer because that’s a login page, and that’s bad practice from a security standpoint ~ not to mention that people get spooked if they click a link that takes them directly to a login page…

Tuesday: Dorothea Lange ebook for $3

One of the Tuesday Kindle deals of the day at Amazon is an e-book written by Dorothea Lange’s grand daughter about her grandmother, “Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning” for $2.99.

Speaking of ebooks, for a limited time (but longer than a daily deal), Amazon is running a 99c+ ebook sale

Kindle Offer (YMMV): Spend $15+, Get $4 ebook credit

This is a targeted / invited offer, so there’s no general use link. You will find the offer while browsing around the Amazon website, or if you want to “encourage” their website to show you the offer (if you are eligible for it) start browsing around their eBooks pages

The offer is this: spend $15+ in any Kindle ebook purchase(s) between August 27 and September 5 in 2019, and receive a $4 ebook credit towards future purchases. The $4 credit will be automatically added to your account two days after you reach the limit, and will be used automatically in your next eligible e-book purchases in the next 30 days after it was received. If not used within 30 days, it evaporates.

In addition to general fiction/non-fiction, there’s a number of camera and photography related ebooks. The ones with pictures and diagrams are best enjoyed on larger color screens but text-only books (eg Susan Sontag’s essays) can be nicely read on e-readers.

NOTE that you must manually hit the “Activate Now” button while logged on to your Amazon account in order for the offer to …activate 🙂

Monday eBook: “The Planets: Photographs from the Archives of NASA” for $4

Good until Monday at 11:59pm pacific time, one of the Kindle daily deals is the Kindle e-book The Planets: Photographs from the Archives of NASA (258 pages, November 2017, Chronicle Books) going for $4. You can get a Kindle sample on your device or app OR to go deep inside the book, use the “Look Inside” feature on the Print Book page

Sun ebook: James Aldred Wildlife Cameraman adventures for $3

I almost missed this. There are over 80 e-books featured in today’s Amazon USA Gold Box daily deals. One of them is of camera-photo-video interest, it is a book about wildlife BBC camera man James Aldred, “The Man Who Climbs Trees: The Lofty Adventures of a Wildlife Cameraman” (272 pages, May 2018) going for $3 until Sunday at 11:59pm pacific time. eBooks don’t sell out 🙂 It averages 4.6 out of 5 based on 28 customer reviews.

Refunds are coming in July: all Microsoft ebook purchases

Trigger warning for Zune fans!

Microsoft has one more time decided to kill a previously-launched media store. This time they decided to kill their ill-conceived e-book store. All ebooks purchased (including the free ones) will disappear in July 2019. Until then, you can access them with the Edge browser.

The refunds should happen automatically in July to your original payment method IF that payment method can accept refunds (eg credit or debit cards). IF your original payment method cannot accept refunds (gift card, expired/cancelled card, etc), you will receive a Microsoft online store credit).

And IF you left any notes/annotations in any of their ebooks prior to today, you will receive a “bonus” $25 Microsoft store credit.

More details at the MSFT FaQ, via the The Verge

PS: at this point, when should we expect the Microsoft App store to shutdown? 🙂

Select Alexander White Camera Guides for $8 to $10 [updated]

If you like reading camera guides, Alexander White has a number of his titles, in e-book format, on sale for $8 to $10 for the Amazon Kindle. They have “Kindle samples” and you can also “Look Inside” from within the web browser without the need of a Kindle or Kindle reading app.

UPDATE: the one below I somehow managed to post it in a Canon mirrorless post instead of here, so I’m moving it here below:

Speaking of camera guides, on the Micro Four Thirds front, a number of “menu simplified” e-book titles from David Thorpe range from $4 to $5 depending on the age of the camera…