http://www.startrek.com/article/six-trek-books-included-in-amazons-kindle-daily-deal-tomorrow A very odd assortment of Kindle books will be $1.99 starting tomorrow. They picked Q-Squared (Peter David), the Nemesis novelization (J.M. Dillard), TOS: Death Count (L.A. Graf), Shatnerverse: Spectre (Shatner, Reaves-Stevens), DS9: Fallen Heroes (Dafydd ab Hugh), DS9: Station Rage (Diane Carey). I can't see any logic behind these selections. These books don't appear to have anything in common and don't relate to any current publications. Only Q-Squared and Fallen Heroes are memorable to me in any way.
I have the paperbacks of all of those except for Nemesis and Station Rage. I don't have much interest in getting Nemesis, as I have Blu Ray. Is Station Rage any good? I'm not a big fan of most of Carey's novels so I'll take some convincing before I get another one of her books.
I'd love to get these, but guessing Amazon UK won't be joining in. They don't even sell Death Count as a Kindle file at all...
I enjoyed Station Rage a lot, but I can see how someone wouldn't. It is really different; it's a fight between Sisko and an ancient Cardassian rendered more as heroes of ancient myth than as real people. Tonally, it's an odd fit with Star Trek, but it's definitely unique. If you're in the mood for a kind of insane mythic take on DS9...
I like artifact stories, so the one element of Station Rage I liked was the notion of large sections of DS9 remaining unused and effectively unexplored, with prophets-know-what hiding in there -- as you might guess I liked the episode Civil Defense, too. IIRC that ancient Cardassian didn't turn out too interesting and there wasn't a lot of payoff though. Fallen Heroes is also a weird fit tonally. I remember it being very violent, almost gleefully so. The deaths seemed more exploitative than tragic. But the plot does hum along quite well IIRC. I think I read both of those as a kid in German, BTW, so who knows what the translators did to the feel of either work.
Thanks for the heads-up, drc. At this price, I may grab all of them. My fingers are crossed that Amazon will eventually do a sale like this on the six Slings and Arrows eNovellas and I would be able to snag all of them for a reasonable price. I'm anxious to read them all but $6+ per novella is too steep for my cheap.
Think I'll only get Q-Squared, Death Count, Fallen Heroes and Station Rage. Didn't much care for the other two.
I love Q Squared. It's very deep and full of rich character development and relationship building. Highly recommended. Specter is also very good, as are most of the Shatnerverse novels.
If you like DS9 novels that read like the author has never seen DS9 and knows next to nothing about the characters or what the show's about, by all means try Station Rage. I didn't see the Cardassian villain as mythic so much as one-dimensional and straight out of 1930s serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, though I admit I haven't revisited the book since reading it when it was first published.
Q-Squared is one of my favorites...will pick that up Enjoyed Spectre and will probably get as well Didn't read the others but may pick.up at that price
If these were creator-owned work instead of tie-ins, I'd suspect that they were trying to boost sales in order to prevent a reversion of rights clause from triggering. But I doubt there's a similar clause in play for these books...
Borgboy, Star Trek Nemesis was never printed in paperback (at least here in North America) --- just like Insurrection before it the only paperback was the Young Adults novelization, the main Adult novel was released in hardcover only. Station Rage was pretty good. Jake and Nog played quite the role in the story, and I seem to recall that Carey was using a part of the DS9 bible that never really made it to screen.... that DS9, when the Cardassians constructed it, constructed it from pieces of older stations that were repurposed (leading to one of the reasons why O'Brien was constantly having everything breaking down) for Terok Nor.
Even BETTER, Google Play has the same eBooks for the same price in ePub. So that's a much better deal.
I don't know if anyone from S&S still reads these boards, but just in case... There are a lot of older ST books that I own print copies of, that I would also like to have in electronic format. However, I am unwilling to pay the prices you currently sell them at. Not only are they higher than the original cover prices, but in many cases they're higher than a new release eBook. If you sold older books for $1.99 all the time, I would buy a *lot* of back catalogue. I know you can't sell new releases at that price, or even recent releases, since you can't undercut the print version price that dramatically. But I can't buy a new copy of, say, Uhura's Song in a bookstore or at Amazon. And you want $9.99 for the Kobo version? At $1.99, I would buy this in an instant. You see, I don't need an electronic copy; if I really want to read it, I can just dig out the print copy. I'd like one for convenience's sake, but it is not worth ten dollars to me. You know what else? Currently I can buy a new ST book for $9.99 for the print version, or $8.99 for the eBook version. I actually currently buy the print version. It's not worth $18.98 to me to have both versions. But if you were able to somehow bundle both versions together for, say, $12.99... yeah, I'd probably pay that. So even though you wouldn't get the full individual price from me, you would get $3 more from me on each release than what you're currently getting. Just sayin'.
I want to second this whole heartedly. I would buy a lot of books I already own if they were cheap just to get them on my Kindle.
Hopefully this sale had a good turnout and the decision makers at S&S see that lowering older ebook prices is a profitable idea. Also, what Avro Arrow said. Especially the suggestion about offering a combo deal of print + digital versions of a book for one price. Amazon already has the apparatus in place with their Matchbook program and I'm sure other online retailers could manage just as well.