A Quick Search for Affordable Kindle Books
A brief story of deal hunting
Recently, I read Brian Staveley’s The Emperor’s Blades after Jason Schreier’s recommendation on Kotaku. It was a phenomenal book with excellent writing, interesting characters, and a tangled, fascinating plot. I may post more thoughts here after I inevitably complete the trilogy (of which this book is the first), but the main reason I bring this novel up here is to set the stage for my search to find the following books at a reasonable price.
My first problem is that I’m cheap, and paying $10 for a Kindle book is generally more than I’m willing to part with. I’ve done it in specific situations, but I usually only buy books that are on sale. So, the easiest and fastest way to get Stavely’s next two books in the series is more of a last resort than anything else at the moment. I was able to fortunately access The Emperor’s Blades as an ebook through my old library subscription (I just moved, so it hasn’t expired yet), but the other two books are both on hold currently and I’m fairly far down the line.
I just got access to the library system where I currently live, so I checked that database for Staveley’s ebooks as well with no success. I then turned to getting the print versions of the books, but found that my library system doesn’t have these either. I sent in a book request, but I don’t expect this to yield anything substantive in the next few weeks. Side note: libraries are fantastic and I don’t mean to criticize my new library system for problems that inevitably come from a lack of resources.
To state the obvious, this entire story deserves to be the butt of a “first-world-problems” joke. I have the money to buy these books on Kindle, and I have the time to wait for them to arrive in print at my library. I just don’t want to do either one of these things, so I turned to the Kindle store once to try and find a way to track the price of Staveley’s books.
I downloaded the IFTTT app yesterday to see if it could help me solve my problem. For those unfamiliar, this app allows people to essentially share information between apps and services (for example, it can sync Fitbit data to the Apple Health app on iOS). Surely, I thought, there must be a way to use this service to create an alert if a Kindle book drops below a certain price. From my searching, it appears that, while there used to be ways to use IFTTT to send Kindle book price alerts, these alerts no longer exist. Maybe they expired, or Amazon vetoed them, or maybe they just never worked at all.
I did eventually turn to eReaderIQ, a free online service that sends email alerts when the price of a Kindle book drops below a certain level. I set up alerts here and decided to test my luck over the next few days. As much as I want to see what happens next in Staveley’s trilogy, I have another book that I can read until then. Perhaps the ebooks will be available at my old library at that point, or the price will drop on the Kindle store. Or, maybe I’ll just pony up the cash because they’re good books and well worth the price.
