* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other organizations, begin your Amazon shopping from a link on their sites: Amazon.com (Smile.Amazon.com)
* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other organizations, begin your Amazon shopping from a link on their sites: Amazon.com (Smile.Amazon.com)
* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other organizations, begin your Amazon shopping from a link on their sites: Amazon.com (Smile.Amazon.com)
* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other organizations, begin your Amazon shopping from a link on their sites: Amazon.com (Smile.Amazon.com)
* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.
the latest in the Tom Hanks/Gary Goetzman/Mark Herzog pop culture decade documentaries.
It might seem odd to do a documentary on the 1990s, but most of it was more than twenty years ago. In the 1970s, did the 1950s seem like the “olden days”? Sure, that’s why Happy Days worked. In the 1950s, did they think the 1930s were old? Teenagers certainly did…and that wasn’t even a term in the 1930s. 😉
While the previous decadocumentaries (so to speak) haven’t done much with literature, and I’m expecting this one to focus even more on TV, movies, and tech, there were big books and big things (Amazon launch! World Book Day first celebrated!) happening.
Here are 90 books from the 1990s (in no particular order):
Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy (fourth Jack Ryan novel, made into a movie); The Sum of All Fears; Executive Orders; Rainbow Six
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (hugely successful; the sequel The Lost World also came out in the 1990s)
An Inconvenient Woman by Dominick Dunne
Neanderthal by John Darnton
L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy (adapted in 1997)
The Stand (The Complete and Uncut Edition) by Stephen King (the book originally came out in 1978, but this was a publishing event…there was even a very limited special edition); Nightmares & Dreamscapes; The Green Mile
Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
The Bourne Ultimatum by Robert Ludlum (third in the series)
The Burden of Proof by Scott Turow (Turow’s second novel)
Primary Colors by Anonymous (later revealed to be Joe Klein)
Oh, the Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss (still a very popular graduation gift)
Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine (non-fiction by the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about seeing endangered species)
Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future by Dougal Dixon
An American Life by Ronald Reagan (it was a top ten bestselling “autobiography”, although rumored to be with a lot of ghostwriting by Robert Lindsey)
I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy (a non-fiction sequel to I Am Not Spock)
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (a real touchstone of the 1990s, and quite controversial)
Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture by Douglas Coupland (this novel popularized the term “Generation X”)
The Golden Compass (AKA Northern Lights) by Philip Pullman (first of His Dark Materials)
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (kicked off a successful book series, which was later adapted for TV)
The Firm by John Grisham (this was the author’s breakaway hit…it was Grisham’s second book, but the first one to be a New York Times bestseller); The Pelican Brief; The Client; The Chamber; The Rainmaker; The Runaway Jury; Hackers; The Partner; The Street Lawyer
Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding
About a Boy by Nick Hornby
Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (the first of the Pendergast series)
Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley (a highly publicized sequel to Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell)
Heartbeat by Danielle Steel; Jewels; Mixed Blessings; Accident; The Gift; Wings; Five Days in Paris; The Ghost; The Ranch; Special Delivery; The Klone and I; The Long Road Home; Mirror
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Children of Men by P.D. James
Grace Notes by Bernard Maclaverty
Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan; How Stella Got Her Groove Back
Blindness by Josè Saramago
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (AKA Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) by J.K. Rowling (1st in the series)
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Adventures of Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey (first in the series)
The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray
The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré
Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (first published in the USA in the 1990s)
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
The Boggart by Susan Cooper
Private Parts by Howard Stern
Star Wars books by Kevin J. Anderson (Champions of the Force, Dark Apprentice, Jedi Search, Darksaber); many other people were writing Star Wars novels, too
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories by James Finn Gamer
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle
Absolute Power by David Baldacci
Intensity by Dean R. Koontz; Seize the Night
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett; Feet of Clay
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
Paradise by Toni Morrison
Olive, the Other Reindeer by Vivian Walsh
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
The Color of Water by James McBride
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Robert
Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear (and others)
Blood Work by Michael Connelly (first of the Terry McCaleb books)
Sharpe’s Triumph by Bernard Cornwell (and others)
Holes by Louis Sachar
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephon Chbosky
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson
The Ant Bully by John Nickle
The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket (1st of the A Series of Unfortunate Events books)
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time #1)
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Wizard’s First Rule (Sword of Truth #1) by Terry Goodkind
Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
That’s ninety! Well actually it’s more than that because I threw in some extras. 🙂
Quite the decade!
Do you have special memories of books published in the 1990s? Feel free to share them with me and my readers by commenting on this post.
When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!
The basic idea is that the buyer of a new Kindle could agree to see ads, and in exchange for that, that initial purchase price was lowered.
That’s why they are also called “ad-supported” models.
It was up to the customer: get “paid” for watching ads by getting a discount, or pay the normal price and avoid seeing ads.
It’s a simple idea, but there was a lot of buzz around it at the time.
Many people decried it, equating it with ads in books.
First, there were ads in books before that…I have some mass market paperbacks that have a cardboard ad stuck in the middle of them.
Second, the ads don’t appear in the books themselves. They appear on the sleep screen, and (originally) at the bottom of the list of books on the homescreen.
This idea may have been complicated by Amazon having gotten a patent to put relevant ads in e-books. I wrote about that a bit here:
That wasn’t this, though…and Amazon hasn’t followed through on ads in books themselves.
Another concern people expressed was that the ads might be “inappropriate”. Basing it on television, they though that kids might see ads for “mature products”, as one example.
While we did see ads for things like cars, we haven’t had alcohol or intimate hygiene products.
Over time, my feeling is that the ads have actually gotten more tied into what the Kindleers want…more ads for books and Kindle accessories, for instance.
Now, that could be because it didn’t turn out that a Kindle was a great way to sell a car…so those companies stopped buying the ads.
I think it must work somewhat, though, since we still have Special Offers.
It’s also tended to be that SO models are more popular than their non-ad-supported, full price counterparts.
If you think that’s just because people want to save the money (and that they don’t really like the ads), I’ll tell you that I’ve seen plenty of statements to the contrary. Many people like seeing the ads: they know they sometimes get deals that way, and hey, if nothing else, it’s something new to see. 🙂 A lot of people didn’t like the old “woodcut” type pictures we had, and one reason was that after a while, you’d “…been there, saw that”.
With the advent of the Limited Time Special Offers on the current Kindle Fires, folks (including me) have been saving a lot of money.
You can then “unsubscribe” from Special Offers if you want.
Can you opt into getting Special Offers if your device came without them?
Sure…same thing as unsubscribing above, except that you choose to subscribe.
Oh, and they won’t retroactively give you the discount.
Still, I think many people do make that choice, just to have the option of getting a discount on something.
While we are talking about this, let me ask you hypothetically about ads in the books themselves (again, this is something different and not on the table right now):
If you want to tell me and my readers more about what you think about this, feel free to comment on this post.
* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.
“Bufo Calvin is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com."
You can apply them to your account or give them to someone else. This is a great way to support the blog at no cost to you...outside of paying for the gift cards, and you'll then have the same value.
Shop ’til you help! 
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