Greeting Card Apps for your iPhone or Android – Just in time for the Holidays!

Holiday season is approaching. This is the time when you log in to Hallmark, 123Greetings and eGreetings to send out animated electronic greeting cards via email to your loved ones. Pretty sentimental and touching stuff, right?

Unfortunately, nothing can beat good old traditional way of sending postcards: by mail and in paper. In this age of electronic greeting cards, you can actually stand out and touch the hearts of your loved ones by sending traditional postcards. But the caveat here? It’s troublesome. You will have to visit to a stationery shop to buy postcards, write down the addresses, personal messages, buy stamps, visit to a post office and send them. No big deal, it only takes a few days out of your already busy schedule.

Fortunately for busy people who own Android and iPhone, there are much more convenient options available – Greeting Card Apps. And no, if you are thinking those are the apps designed to send e-cards, you couldn’t be more wrong. These apps are designed to let you have the convenience of sending out printed postcards by using your phone.

“Apple Cards”

Apple Cards is recently announced app from none other than Apple itself. According to Apple, the app will let you send one letterpress printed and custom-made card on premium cotton paper. The prices are fixed at $2.99 within U.S and $4.99 for international deliveries. Currently there are 21 built-in Apple templates but you can use your own pictures to customize the cards, along with a personal message. Just choose the recipient from your address book and let Apple does their magic.

“Postagram”

Postagram is a cross-platform app, available for both Apple and Android devices. The app can take photos from your Instagram account, Facebook or iPhone pictures library and send high quality postcards to anyone in the world.

The photos are glossy printed at 300-dpi and you can customize your messages. This is standard, but Postagram postcards have a removable bezel which lets you pop out the photo from the postcard. The cost is only $0.99 per card.

“Sincerely Ink”

Sincerely Ink comes from the same company behind Postagram and available for both iOS and Android devices. The app works more or less similarly as Postagram, but the theme seems to be leaning towards photo cards. You use the photos in your iPhone pictures library, add personalized greeting messages on both front and back and send them. The cost is $1.69 including postage, both within U.S and international. Sincerely offers a guarantee for both Postagram and Sincerely Ink that will offer a replacement card or refund in case your card gets lost in the mail or damaged.

“eCards Postcards App”

PostCards is another free app from a UK greeting cards company eCards that has similar functions has all the above apps. Customization options seem to be standard just like other apps. But if you are living in UK, then this app is a must have. It costs 99p to send to anywhere in UK but £1.49 for anywhere else. The app is available for both iOS and Android devices too.

Now with all of these apps available at your fingertips, you won’t have to find a place to print photos and stamps while you are on a trip. All you have to do is take photos to your heart content and let those apps do the magic, all while sipping Mojito and enjoying a beautiful evening.

How to get free eBooks for your e-reader (iPad, iPhone, Kindle)

The e-readers have forever reshaped the way we read books. They still can’t beat the charm of good old paper books. The sound of rustling papers, the feeling of holding a book in your hands, and the smell of papers – all of these are traits of a traditional paper book you won’t be able to get with e-readers.

But then e-readers will give you the convenience and access to virtually unlimited number of books in your palms. With the expansion of storage space on e-readers and average size of an eBook, you can store at least a few thousands books on your Kindle, iPad or iPhone, three of the most popular e-reader devices.

With that much storage and convenient access to eBooks, the cost for book purchases can add up to a huge amount. Individual books on Apple iBooks store and Amazon Kindle Store doesn’t cost much. The prices are almost negligible. Before you know it, the purchases will burn your wallet. It is common to see an e-reader like Kindle loaded with more than 100 books, but that’s already about $1,000 if you paid $9.99 per book. Fortunately, there are ways to get more than 2 millions eBooks for free. And yes, all methods are legit and no piracy involved.

Here’s a list of sources for free eBooks for your e-reader:

1. Kindle Lending Club. Amazon has recently launched the Kindle Lending Club which basically lets Kindle owners lend books to each other. All you have to do is list the books you have and the ones you want to read. The website will match you with others in the club. After you lend a book, the system will automatically return you the rights of book back to you in 2 weeks. Only caveat is that you can only lend each book once.

2. Free books on Kindle Store. If you have enough patient to search for it and sort through price list, then you will be amazed that Amazon offers a huge selection of free Kindle downloads. Some books are even from New York Times Bestsellers list!

3. ePubBooks. This is one website where you can find books from many different genres and titles. You can read ePub books on iOS devices and Kindle, although the latter will need conversion into MOBI format using a free open-source software called Calibre.

4. Project Gutenberg. This was the first site that provides free eBooks with the help of many volunteers, working to make available books that are already in public domain. Many golden nuggets can be found here.

5. The iBooks Store. This one is only for iOS users and the iBooks Store offers over 30,0000 free books, mostly from Project Gutenberg. Many of them have surprisingly decent formatting.

6. ManyBooks. This website offers nearly 30,000 free eBooks, and you can find a list of the most popular titles within its collection. There is a neat genre filter to easily search the kind of book you want to read.

7. Open Library. This is a wiki-style website and provides you with access to around 1.7 million book titles through scanned copies. You can find many classic literature works from different genres, including non-fictions.

There you go. Seven solid ways to get free eBooks for your e-reader. Some of them are Kindle or iOS specific, but the rest are good sources to ease your hunger for more books to read on your favorite devices.