Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

I should have posted this when it first came up, but better late than never.

If you're interested in Zen and mindfulness, this is a heck of a collection. As the subject says, 37 books for $18! They were written by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who passed away two years ago: he was a major writer and proponent of zen in the west.

It's a heck of a collection, however, it's only available for another three days! Entirely my bad. It's been a rough few weeks, fortunately we're leaving on vacation tomorrow and hopefully will get to unwind a bit.

The books are all epub without DRM, so if you need to convert to a different format it should be quite easy to do via Stanza or any number of other programs.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/thich-nhat-hanhs-zen-library-books

Other current Humble Bundle deals includes a nice one on Raspberry Pi's - which has, for $1, a book on the history of British microcomputers! There's also a bunch of other stuff. :)

https://www.humblebundle.com/books

Now, they say you get 30 items for $25. Yeah, that's true. But when you download it? A HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE VOLUMES!

And it takes 32 gig of space! So you might have a bit of difficulty cramming them all into your device at the same time! It's a lot of space, but also kind of typical because you're looking at graphic novels.

And that is, of course, if you elect to buy the entire bundle.

Titles included are: A Sign of Affection(7 volumes), A Silent Voice(6), Blue Period(13), Drops of God(44!), Medalist(8), Nina the Starry Bride(10), Shangri-La Frontier(12), Vinland Saga(13), What Did You Eat Yesterday(10), and Witch Hat Atelier(11).

Extremely brief synopsis: A Sign of Affection and A Silent Voice are about deafness, Drops of God looks interesting: about a dead wine reviewer and his collection, Shangri-La Frontier is about computer gaming! Should be fun. What Did You Eat Yesterday is about a male gay couple who talk about their day over food: I'm hoping it includes recipes. Witch Hat Atelier is about a girl who wants to do magic but is told you have to be born to it - and she finds out that may not be true, Vinland Saga is a viking tale of revenge, Blue Period is about a boy who suddenly finds himself falling into the world of art, Medalist is about competitive ice skating, and Nina looks quite amusing - she's a thief with special eyes who is taken by the king(?)/prince(?) because she has the same eyes as a recent priestess, except Nina can't give up her thieving ways. Should also be fun!

Everything here has won or been nominated for awards, so it's good stuff! And by visiting the web site linked below, you can click on a title and read the description of the series and usually download a PDF preview. All titles are available in PDF or epub, and not tied to Kodo! (something HB has been doing of late.... *grumble grumble*)

The charity that this bundle supports is the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, BINC, described thusly: "Book Industry Charitable (Binc) Foundation has helped bookstore and comic book store employees and owners who encounter unexpected financial crises. The Binc Foundation works to keep book people in their homes, in their jobs, and with their families – stabilizing the brick and mortar bookstore community."

The bundle is available for 18 days and 22 hours as of this posting.

One download option, as opposed to clicking a Download button 133 times, is to bit torrent it. This is something that HB has supported for a long time. Download the torrents, load your program, and you're off to the races and everything is done in a couple of hours! HOWEVER, when I did this last night, I found a good 15% or more of the files had not downloaded! I still had to download a bunch manually. Just be aware that no method is fool-proof, fools are far too ingenious. And you can download items after offers end, don't worry about it if you find you missed an issue on your initial download. Just log in to your account, go to the offer, and you can find a link and usually download it.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/kodansha-awardwinning-nominated-manga-books

What timing! Looks like someone over there reads geek technical news and sees trends. Whouldathunkit?

The bundle will server you as an excellent introduction to the Godot gaming platform development system with 20 training courses for $25. They are listed as multi-platform.

These are not books, not 100% sure they're downloadable. The web site description: "Master Godot—the lightweight, fast, and free game engine behind hits like Sonic Colors: Ultimate. Whether you want to use the brand new version 4 or the battle-tested version 3, these courses will get you building platformers, RPGs, first-person shooters, city-builders, strategy games, and more—no prior experience required! Plus, you’ll learn how to customize your games by creating your own art and assets, all while supporting Girls Who Code with your purchase!"

The bundle will be available for twenty days!

https://www.humblebundle.com/software/everything-you-need-to-know-about-godot-4-encore-software

Twenty-four books for $18 with the following titles:

Post-Truth
Espionage: A Concise History
Analog
Critical Thinking
Memory
Happiness
Neuroplasticity
Extremism
Quantum Entanglement
Behavioral Insights
Nihilism
Carbon Capture
Synesthesia
Free Will
The Book
Phenomenology
Smart Cities
Macroeconomics
3D Printing
Nuclear Weapons
Gender(s)
Content
Neurolinguistics
Robot Ethics

The books are DRM-free epubs, and the charity is "Covenant House is the nation's largest movement providing food, shelter, immediate crisis care, and ongoing services to homeless and trafficked young people".

The Bundle will be available for the next twenty days.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/essential-knowledge-mit-press-books

The bundle just launched. 31 books for $18!

Oddly, the collection seems to be entirely Epub, so you may need to use Calibre to convert them to other formats.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/goosebumps-collection-scholastic-inc-books

The first one is gorgeous! It's a collection of eleven books related to space exploration, astronomy photos, spacecraft photos, etc. Basically coffee table books. Eleven books for $15 with two lower steps for fewer books.

Two of the books are only available as PDF, all the others can also be had as epub. They are: New Space Frontiers and NASA Mission To Mars.

This bundle is up for another two weeks, the charity is Prevent Cancer Foundation. I can get behind that one! And they're going to get more than $15 from me with a lot more going to the charity.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/space-exploration-quarto-books


The second bundle is a collection called Knowledge Master 101. This is a collection of FORTY books for $20 with an amazing array of subjects. This is the second time the 101 bundle has been offered, the previous about a year ago and I'd say there's maybe 50% overlap between the two, so lots of new stuff. Of course, you can't just buy the new stuff, but you can choose to not download the stuff that you already have.

Actually, I'll download everything, just to make sure I have it all by counting forty, then I'll delete the dupes.

This bundle just launched and will be available for three weeks and is available as PDF, epub, and Mobi for you Kindlers out there. The charity is also a good one, World Reader, described as "Worldreader is a global nonprofit bringing digital books children and their families, empowering them to read, think, and grow in order to improve their lives and their world. In its first five years, Worldreader has reached 5.6 million readers in 69 countries with a digital library of 28,500 local and international e-books via e-readers and mobile phones, and aims to reach 10 million readers with its digital library by the end of 2015 and 15 million readers by 2018. To read free books on your mobile phone, visit read.worldreader.org. For more information on Worldreader, visit http://www.worldreader.org." They're also going to get some bonus bucks from me.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/knowledge-master-101-adams-media-books

This looks like a very cute collection of titles, which I'm about to purchase, and they all begin at issue #1.

The titles are:
A Couple of Cuckoos (kids swapped at birth, now grown, trouble ensues when the parents want to undo the swap and want them to marry),
Police In A Pod ("female officer ... is about to resign and meets the new female director of her station and realizes maybe she's not quite done with the job yet),
Shikimori's Not Just A Cutie (Shikimori and her boyfriend are HS sweethearts, but she knows what she wants and "can turn from cutie to cool in an instant"),
Ya Boy Kongming (a general from the far past wants to be resurrected in peaceful times, and ends up in modern party Tokyo),
When Will Ayumu Make His Move? (girl who runs the school shogi club is smitten by the boy in the club, Ayumu, the only other member, who is smitten with her, but has vowed he will not profess his love until he beats her at shogi - except he sucks at the game),
and Blue Lock (about the Japanese soccer team trying to get a great striker, I'm not very interested in this one but will look at it)
The Dawn of the Witch (boy develops strange powers and a little group forms around him, also with strange abilities),
Tokyo Mew Mew Omnibus Vol 1 (girl is exposed to 'mysterious ray', gains superhuman abilities, superteam, etc).

A dollar gets you the first issues of Cuckoos, Police, Shikimori, Ya Boy, and Ayumu! $18 gets you all twenty books. They're all available as PDF or epub, except for the Ya Boy Kongmings which are PDF only. The charity that part of your purchase will go to is the Book Industry Charitable Foundation.

The bundle just launched and will be up for the next twenty days.

And while it is advertised as twenty titles, it actually downloads as FORTY files, if you buy the full $18 package.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/2022-anime-season-kodansha-books

Great bundle with a really neat selection of titles, including one that's based around Raspberry Pi hardware! Two about women in physics, even! I'm looking forward to those! I'm currently reading a book that is sort of a summary of great scientists over time, it's really just a page or two summary of their big discoveries, and it's fun, still it's just a summary. I just read the entry for the Arab researcher who created the number zero and the entire zero through nine system, plus pretty much algebra and provable equations at the House of Wisdom, AKA the Grand Library of Baghdad. Alas, the library was largely lost when the Mongols invaded.

Still, $18 for 24 text books is a heck of a deal! My only complaint is that with one exception, they're all PDFs. I much prefer epubs. They are all DRM-free and available for the next nineteen days (almost). Donations also support the Trevors Project, which is a suicide prevention project to help the GLBTQ community.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/kickass-physics-morgan-claypool-books

There's A LOT of good games in here! Many of them are not only both PC and Mac, but also Penguin-compatible! The games are all downloadable through Steam with the keys provided by HB. Several of the games are multi-player in various ways.

The Bundle is very limited and is only available for another six days and nineteen hours!

Myself, Feather looks very nice, Satellite Reign looks good, and I think I might like Paperbark. Paper Fire Rookie looks awesome if it's playable without a VR headset. But I really want to play the Euro Truck Simulator and try to drive around the areas I've been and see how they look in-game.

https://www.humblebundle.com/games/australia-fire-relief

Lots of us here write with varying levels of seriousness, and here's something could benefit us! Lots of interesting stuff in this collection: a book on the Tao to help you overcome writer's block, a book of interviews with successful script writers, including the Coen brothers, Christopher Nolan, Andrew Sorkin, Seth Rogen, Darren Aronofsky and others, books on improving your grammar (which I could use), writing proposals, screen writing, writer prompts, etc.

LOTS of stuff! As usual, the collection is three-tiered at $1, $8, and $15, and all of the ebooks are multi-format and DRM-free. The charities are the National Coalition Against Censorship and FirstBook, a program that "provides new books and educational resources to programs and schools serving children in need". Good stuff.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/write-like-a-writer-books