The Kindle Challenge is a new initiative by Amazon to encourage people to buy and read Kindle books, it’s an interesting concept that Kobo started years ago but then abandoned. 

Basically every month there will be some challenges and you will need to take part and complete them to gain badges. You can also earn credits to buy Kindle Books.  The challenges so far has been easy like reading a book, buying a book or subscribing to Kindle Unlimited. 

There is obviously a large marketing element but the Kindle Challenge can be fun for users by gamifying the experience users can be motivated to read more. 

How do I take part in the Kindle Challenge?

So far it is at a kind of pilot stage and you must have an invitation, there will be more invites sent in the next few months. Sadly you must live in the United States to take part for the time being. The Challenge might be extended to other countries in future, although there are no details yet. 

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Every year on January 1st, many books enter the public domain either because they were published before 1925 (United States) or at least 70 years have passed since the author’s death (European Union and many other countries).

This year it has been discussed a lot that The Great Gatsby is now in the public domain and yes you can download it here for free.

Also very famous are other titles now in the public domain such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, Sugimoto’s A Daughter of the Samurai and John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer.

There are other major titles that have now entered the public domain on January 1st 2021 but have not yet been uploaded online.

These are Dreyser’s An American Tragedy, Hemingway’s In our Time and Aldous Huxley’s Three Barren Leaves. These will be available later this year on sites like the Internet Archive and the Gutenberg project.

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Everyone should know the writer Thomas Hardy, famous for writing novels such as Tess D’Ubberville and several others.

This is a bit of a gruesome story but we are assured that it is true, which is perhaps even worse. Do not read it if you are very sensitive.

Being a successful author when he died in 1928 it seemed appropriate to bury him at Westminster Abbey along with other people in the fields of literature, politics or science. But Hardy was very attached to his homeland; Dorset and had asked to be buried in the small graveyard next to Stinsford church, which the writer has always frequented since he was a child. 

It was then decided to make a compromise, Hardy’s body would be buried at Westminster Abbey while the heart would remain in Dorset and buried in the church graveyard as the writer wished.

The village doctor made the delicate operation of removing the heart from the corpse, once removed he placed it wrapped in a cloth on the table. When he returned shortly after, he no longer found his heart but saw that his cat had stolen it and ate it.

He then decided to kill the cat that contained the heart and have it buried. The photos of Hardy’s heart funeral in fact show a container where the heart should have been, which was undoubtedly a little too big to hold a heart but just the right size to hold a cat.

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