Click on the links below to jump to specific sections

Kindle eBook
Nook eBook
Apple App Store App

Gifting a Kindle eBook
Amazon makes gifting eBooks very easy, providing you the ability to give via email or print our a gift coupon for in-person giving. You can also set the gift to be delivered in the future, plus include a personalized message.

For this example, we will use The Judas Conspiracy by Leslie Winfield Williams as the Kindle book we want to gift.

1. Navigate to the book’s Kindle Page (for The Judas Conspiracy, the URL is http://www.amazon.com/The-Judas-Conspiracy-ebook/dp/B004EHZTWY); (If you happen to get to the book’s paperback page, simple click the link for “Kindle Edition” as in the first image below).
2. Click on the yellow “Give as a Gift” button (If you have not already logged in to your Amazon account, you may now be prompted to do so).
3. You should now be on the “Complete your gift purchase” page. You can choose to either “Email the gift directly to my recipient” or “Email the gift to me”.
4. If you do not already have payment information associated with your Amazon account, you will be prompted for payment info.
5. Click either “Place your order” buttons and you are done.

Gifting a Barnes & Noble Nook Book

Barnes and Noble also gives you the opportunity to gift their ebooks with only the recipients email address and your good intentions!

For this example, we will use Jade: The Law by Robert Flynn as the nook book we would like to gift.

1. Navigate to the book’s nook book page (for Jade: The Law, the URL is http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/jade-robert-flynn/1029162286?ean=2940013239623). (Again, if you end up on the book’s paperback page, scroll down and select the “NOOK book” or eBook page).
2. Click on the “Buy as Gift” link as indicated in the image below (if you have not already logged in to you Barnes & Noble account, you will be prompted to do so);
3. The “Personalize your eGift” window will pop-up, as in the image below. Fill out the information as in the example;
4. If you click on the “Not a gift” link, the process reverts to simply purchasing the nook book for yourself (always a good option!).
5. Click “Submit” (if your account does not have payment information associated with it, you will be prompted to input it).

Gifting an App from the Apple App Store
For this example, we will use the enhanced eBook app Grand Canyon, available in the App Store at this link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grand-canyon-multimedia-adventure/id452174804?mt=8

The examples and screen shots for this type of gifting will depend on whether you are using iTunes on a PC/Mac, or if you are using iTunes on a iOS device (iPhone/iPad/iPod).

1. Navigate to the app’s page in the App Store. The easiest way to do this is to search for “JoSara”, and then click on the thumbnail image;
2. Below is what the search results page looks like on an iPad;
3. Click on the app that you want to gift (the Grand Canyon app is an excellent choice, thanks!). You will then get to the app’s page in the App Store. Below is the image of the apps page in iTunes on Windows;
4. And below is what the app’s page looks like on an iPad;
5. On your iPad, gifting the app starts when you click the “Gift This App” link on the upper right of the app’s page;
6. On your iPhone or iPod, you have to scroll down on the app’s page to below the “Screenshots” section, where you will find buttons for “Tell a Friend” and “Gift this App”;
7. On iTunes, you need to click on the drop down arrow as indicated in the screenshot below to get to the “Gift this App” link;
8. Clicking on the “Gift this App” link wil prompt you for your iTunes account information;
9. If you are doing this from within iTunes, the following very green screen appears (notice the pretty five-star reviews!). Again, you have the option of gifting via email, or of having the gift sent to you for in-person delivery;
10. Once you fill out all of the information, you are given a final screen to review before you “Buy Gift”;
11. The process on iOS devices is the same after clicking the “Gift this App” link.

If you have any questions or comments about this process, do not hesitate to contact us. And happy gift giving!

In this sequel to his novel “Jade: Outlaw,” Flyn vividly peoples the starkly brutal world of the Texas frontier with a fascinating cast of characters whose conflicts over barbed wire, prostitutes, horses, race, religion, education, taxes, water, railroads and even — after decades — human rights and the tourist business remarkably parallel the political dynamics of contemporary Texas.

In a world where guns, greed and prejudice run rampant, Jade struggles mightily to work for the common good, seeking to uphold the law and respect for the rights of others. Rain aids him, sometimes with a shotgun in hand, as does pastor Wilbur and his wife, Hannah, who for a time try to speak truth to power despite all odds.

Flynn brilliantly employs a directly simple, subtle and at times sardonic narrative voice to tell this tale. It is alternately tough and tender, succinct and sweet, cadenced to the clip-clop of a horse trotting down Main Street, the hullabaloo of a steam locomotive triumphantly making its way into town amid a jubilant crowd’s hoopla, and, of course, to the shots of guns of many kinds fired in self-defense, anger, treachery and haste.

And what a tale it is, of a settlement that becomes a town in spite of opposition from surrounding ranchers who refuse to recognize the law, and citizens who don’t see the point of paying taxes despite their admitted need for a sheriff.

Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/entertainment/books/article/S-A-writer-Flynn-s-sequel-a-cautionary-tale-2406177.php#ixzz1gtpLrGWO

The story describes the time in America before the Civil War.

America in the early 1800s was a cultural blank canvas, a barren landscape awaiting texture in the form of learning, literature and the arts.

Geraldine Priest creates this fictional historical memoir of Eliza Rupp, the embodiment of the many Americans striving to fill that void. The story of Eliza’s family and her study of piano are interwoven with
those of the leading literati, artists and educators of the day. Like so many of them, she journeys to Europe to further her studies and make her own cultural contribution to America’s Barren Landscape.

The genesis of the story is told excellently by Jerry in her Foreword:

From a lifelong love of history, music and the arts began to grow some years ago a vague but nagging feeling that I needed somehow to pull these things together. I had not a clue as to how to go about it until I came across a paragraph in Henry James’ biography of Hawthorne which struck me like a lightning bolt and became the starting point as well as the pervasive theme of this book.

In a backward glance at a simpler time, when our New World seemed so full of promise, when our stresses were more limited in scope, and with an innate affinity for the beginnings of things, I have told this story of one family’s struggle with what Henry James describes as a time of “a great desire for culture, a great interest in knowledge, in art, in aesthetics, together with a very scanty supply of the materials for such
pursuits. Small things were made to do large service.” Many, like James, found the American cultural landscape too bleak and spent their creative lives in Europe. To others, like Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Gilbert Stuart, Charles Bulfinch, we are grateful for a culture of our own. Has all their striving come to naught in our time?

In writing A Barren Landscape my aim has been to present a broad overview of America’s cultural history in the fifty years before the Civil War – that great cataclysm that ended our young country’s age of innocence. While the book is built around a fictional family, and in the format of a nineteenth century memoir, historical accuracy has been my primary concern; even the story of the Old Elm in Boston Common
is authentic, having been found in a very old book in Boston. As for the paragraph from Henry James quoted at the outset, I leave it to the reader to decide if it seems unduly harsh.
Geraldine Smith Priest

The reader can find where to purchase this book in all its versions on our books page.

August 1, 2011 – As a lover of books and technology, I’ve spent a lot of time the past few years investigating how to combine them. The proliferation of tablet computing, and the need/availability for interaction, have pushed us to a point where a book can be more. Terms like enhanced eBook, interactive eBook and others have been bandied about; but whatever the term, adding multimedia to a print book turns it into something more.

We also recently have been working with non-profit organizations, such as my friends at the Texas State Historical Association, helping them to take their unique and valuable content (most of it in print format, or even out-of-print) and get it into a digitized, interactive medium…into a format that will continue to promote their goals of education, research, preservation and membership.

I stumbled across the work of some fine people utilizing HTML5 to build enhanced eBooks. With the current ePub standard, there is no standard support for adding multimedia; Amazon’s Kindle format provides some, but only on certain platforms.

With these converging trends, technologies and paths, I’ve put together an app for the Apple App Store that is an experiment of sorts; a proof point, if you will, that not only can you build an entertaining enhanced eBook, but that utilizing available content that you can use this content as a bridge to sustainable funding for non-profits.

With that introduction, we are happy to announce:

Cecil does the GRAND CANYON holding a poptart

If you want to reflect back on a trip you made to the Grand Canyon, one of the eight natural wonders of the world, or you just want to imagine one, this app will take you there.

With proceeds benefiting the Grand Canyon Association, this Grand Canyon app follows the author, friends and guides as they:

• hike down Bright Angel Trail;
• raft one hundred miles down the Colorado River;
• hike the so-called “Death March” hike to Thunder River and Surprise Valley;
• visit Havasu;
• brave Lava Falls (and live to tell about it);
• helicopter out from Whitemore Wash.

Containing hi-definition videos, hundreds of photos, maps and the story of the journey, this multimedia application will be sure to remind you of your own trip to the Grand Canyon…or increase your desire to visit.

To read an excerpt, click here.

To find where to purchase, click here.

From the article (entitled “Div School is the setting for murder mystery”):

“The Judas Conspiracy,” a new novel by Leslie Williams DIV ’11, takes place in Great Britain and at the Yale Divinity School. The novel, which will be released Dec. 1, centers on the search for a complete manuscript of the real, much-debated Gospel of Judas, which says that Jesus had commanded his disciple Judas to turn him over to the Romans and runs counter to the traditional story that Judas betrayed Jesus. The book has strong connections to Yale and New Haven: Its two protagonists are a New Haven police officer and the nephew of the dean of the Divinity School, who join forces to track down the Gospel of Judas before a murderous secret brotherhood finds it.

Emily Suran

“The Judas Conspiracy” was written by Leslie Williams DIV ‘11.

“I’ve always been interested in writing thrillers,” said Williams, 73. “[I thought] this would be something different and fun.”

The novel, set in 2008, follows the re-emergence of the complete Gospel of Judas in New England, at the Divinity School. Members of an ancient secret society called the Sethian Brotherhood try to regain the manuscript of the Gospel of Judas, which they owned for over a thousand years before losing it to Henry VIII in 1539. The Gospel of Judas is set to be donated to the Divinity School by a fictional dean, but is lost again before the dean can formally turn it over to his school. While the protagonists try to find the brotherhood, its members commit multiple murders and concoct a plan to blow up a national monument, whose identity Williams asked to keep secret before the book’s release.

Williams, a novelist and nonfiction writer, said she was inspired to set the story at Yale after spending 2004 and 2007 at the Divinity School as a visiting scholar and enrolling in the one-year master of sacred theology degree program at the school this year. Long before studying at Yale, Williams spent part of her childhood in New Haven while her father attended graduate school at Yale.

Jade: Outlaw (click here to preview on Amazon Kindle now)

Everyone knew who he was. His name was Riley O’Connor but he was known as Jade.

“I don’t know if I could do it, but he did the right thing,” men confessed to their wives who shuddered thinking of the awful choice a man had to make. “If he had anything that could be called luck, it would be that they didn’t have no children.”

Boys played like they were Jade. “I don’t want to do it but it’s what I have to do,” they said, their make-believe six-shooters aimed at a friend’s heart. Sometimes they killed Indians with sticks that were make-believe knives like the one Jade had.

The settlement was too small to have a name or a street, just footpaths called Barefoot and Moccasin Streets. It was a place on the freight wagon trail between San Antonio and El Paso, a track that narrowed to the springs like a river narrowed to its source and then threaded out again as travelers chose the shortest, smoothest, easiest or safest way and those depended on the Indians, the weather and the time of year.

Where the trail narrowed people had pulled close, held together by fear. The trail ran past a store, a church, a saloon, a blacksmith shop, to the springs. The houses looked another way as though they were not part of the movement and commerce.

The store supplied wagon trains, cavalry patrols, scouts, adventurers, outlaws, cowmen. One cowman, called the general by his cowboys and the Big Augur in the settlement, built a house near the store for his wife, daughters, teenage boy, and his stove-up father, Shep, so they would be safer during Indian raids. One daughter had been killed by Indians. One son just curled up and died; no one knew why. Cletis, the teenager who survived, lived in town with his mother but carried messages to the bare wood, dirt-floored house that was his father’s headquarters. The general visited them when he came in a wagon for supplies, accompanied by a few cowboys for his protection and their chance to toss a few drinks and bounce the whore.

Another cowman was called El Jefe by his pistoleros who spoke with a Spanish accent. Proper names were scarce between the Devils River and the Pecos. Jefe built a house for his wife, young children and his wife’s parents on the other side of the trail from the general, and lived in a rag house near the chuck wagon. Their cowboys needed a place to howl and that meant a saloon with a shack in the back. Trail traffic required a blacksmith shop, and all those sinners needed a church. It was a free country.

Check it out, and check out all of the eBooks featured in Read an eBook Week.

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Find Dusk Before the Dawn at Kobo here.