January Reading

We're still in holiday mode over here; my new contract doesn't start until this week and the Russian's place of employment takes an extended break every year at this time so he doesn't go back to work til Thurs. Since we only spent one day doing holiday stuff with my family this year, we've had lots of time at home. Time for cleaning and reorganizing, but also lots of leisure time, for movie watching and sleeping late, games and puzzles and for me, reading. Of course being underemployed also means a serious lack of funds too so any opportunity to acquire reading materials at no cost is an added bonus. So I was delighted to find out about the proliference of free ebooks that are available from many different sources.

I had already discovered that our library system has many titles available as digital or ebooks and you don't need a separate device to take advantage of these. All you need  is an active library card and and an ereader program on your computer. My choice of ereader software is Adobe Digital Editions which you can download for free here:

If you aren't in Canada, the Adobe website will redirect you to the appropriate download link.

Ebooks from the library don't stay on your computer so be sure to read them in the allotted time (3 weeks for ours).

You can use Adobe DE ereader to access titles from other sources as well! Kobo has a large library of free ebooks and all you need to do to access these is register for a free account. Once your account is set up, you chose a book, add it to your library on the Kobo site and click on the button that says Download EPUB and it will open automatically in DE!

If you're a fan of Amazon.com, you can also sign up for a free Kindle account. Amazon often offers ebook titles for free or small cost, however you must have the Kindle software installed on your computer to take advantage of these. Again the registration and software is free and once you have an account you also have access to their Cloud feature which gives you 5 G of free online storage!

You can download the software here for PC or here for Mac

Once you've installed one or both of these, check out Story Fresh Picks and sign up for their free monthly newsletter. Every month they offer a free ebook and many more titles for a very low cost. I personally recommend ordering Niki Jabbour's book The Year Round Vegetable Gardener for a mere $2.99 - I reviewed it here and it was my favourite gardening book of last year. Thanks to this book I'm still harvesting fresh greens in January, and if you can't be gardening, you might as well be reading about it!