Goodreads Can Tell You When E-Books Go on Sale
You can receive sale alerts for all books on your Goodreads Want To Read list. If one of them has a discount on your Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Google Play, or Kobo, you’ll receive an email. (This only works for e-books, not physical copies.)
On the Goodreads web interface, go to your account settings and click “Deals”. Select “Deals from my Wish Reading Shelf.” You can also receive collections of suggestions by author, genre, or popularity, but this can clutter your inbox.
With these settings, you will simply receive notifications for books that you clearly want to buy. There are 157 books on my reading list, and one is sold every two to three weeks. It’s so convenient that it seems like a hoax.
The deals are incredible: I bought Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith for two dollars, The People’s History of the United States for four, and The Wizard of Earthsea for three. Such cheap books can be bad for the industry! But at these coffee-sized prices, you can afford to buy twice as much.