When Ama­zon’s Kin­dle hit the streets last Novem­ber, the crit­ics gave the new­fan­gled ebook read­er mixed reviews. The cus­tomers, how­ev­er, have been say­ing some­thing a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent. Sales have been brisk, a bit too brisk actu­al­ly. Wait­ing up to six weeks to get the Kin­dle, cus­tomers have been get­ting huffy, and last week Ama­zon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, had to post an apol­o­gy on Ama­zon’s home­page. If you’re won­der­ing what makes the $399 Kin­dle so sought after, Life­hack­er’s review does a good job of sum­ming up its virtues. In the mean­time, if you want to get your hands on one, get in line.

Eliz­a­beth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love has been on the New York Times best­seller list for 57 weeks. If you haven’t read it yet, then you may want to spend some time with Gilbert’s talk at Google. While her talk and read­ing did­n’t com­plete­ly strike a chord with me, it may well with you. So here you go (and, yes, we’ve added the video to our YouTube Playlist):

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Harper­Collins has rolled out anoth­er free book — the New York Times best­seller Amer­i­can Gods by Neil Gaiman. You can read it for free here (or buy it here). For more free books by Harper­Collins, see our post from last week. And, as always, don’t for­get to see our col­lec­tion of free audio­books.

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As dis­cussed in this NY Times arti­cle, Harper­Collins has made a few of its books avail­able online for free. You can read them from start to fin­ish in dig­i­tal for­mat. But you can’t down­load them, and they’ll only be avail­able for a few more weeks. (Pre­sum­ably new books will be made avail­able in the future.) Here’s what you’ll cur­rent­ly find.

• The Witch of Por­to­bel­lo by Paulo Coel­ho
• The Unde­cid­ed Voter’s Guide to the Next Pres­i­dent: Who the Can­di­dates Are, Where They Come from, and How You Can Choose by Mark Halperin
• I Dream in Blue: Life, Death, and the New York Giants by Roger Direc­tor
  

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

For more free books, see our Audio­book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion and 45 Free Cut­ting-Edge Books … Cour­tesy of Cre­ative Com­mons

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Com­ing off of the run­away suc­cess of Omni­vore’s Dilem­ma, Michael Pol­lan has just pub­lished a log­i­cal sequel — In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Man­i­festo. His new book tells us what to eat, what not to eat, and how to stay healthy. Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, his advice can be boiled down to a few words: “Eat food. Not too much. Most­ly plants.” But there is obvi­ous­ly much more to it than that. To fill in the gaps, you can buy the book or lis­ten to two recent inter­views with Pol­lan:

1.) The Leonard Lopate Show (Jan­u­ary 9) : MP3 — iTunes — Feed — Web Site 

2.) Sci­ence Fri­day (Jan­u­ary 4): MP3 — iTunes — Feed — Web Site

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A quick fyi: From this page, you can down­load or view 17 graph­ic nov­els. This genre, which mesh­es com­ic book art­work with sophis­ti­cat­ed lit­er­ary plots, has under­gone a major resur­gence late­ly. So we’re not shocked (but we are pleased) to find these kinds of col­lec­tions tak­ing shape.

Quick fyi: The book crit­ics of The New York Times have select­ed their favorite books of 2007. These are the books that they men­tion to friends, or rec­om­mend that you take on vaca­tion. You’ll find here 30 good reads in all.

Now how about your favorite book of ’07? Share them with oth­er Open Cul­ture read­ers and list them in the com­ments below. (If we get enough of them, we’ll list them in a spe­cial blog post.)