Category: Kindle

  • Despite complaints and DRM, Kindle is a good value

    I’m starting to see signs that Amazon has successfully injected some major mojo behind its Kindle electronic book program. Dare we call them green shoots? This morning, publisher, blogger and Chris Anderson-fill-in Rex Hammock had a great post up about how his Kindle was aiding his effort to re-read David Foster Wallace’s massive novel Infinite…

  • As feared, Kindle prices appear to be rising

    I’ll start this post about Amazon’s fabulous Kindle just like I did the last one: I really, really like my Kindle and I’ve written about it positively here and all over the web (Internet smartie and publisher Rex Hammock says I’m his go-to Kindle fanboy). And, I really want to see the Kindle succeed. That…

  • Scary complaints mounting about Amazon Kindle’s DRM (Updated)

    I’m a big fan of Amazon’s electronic reader, the Kindle, but I have to admit that stories about the digital rights management software embedded in Kindle books are starting to make me very nervous. Digital rights management, or DRM, is the euphemism for restrictive software limits that copyright owners frequently require in digitally licensed versions…

  • Apple gives stage to overpriced ebook developer Scrollmotion

    Fans of electronic books got a little bit of exciting news today at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference. Showing off how the new iPhone OS 3.0 will allow purchasing transactions from within apps, Apple brought out on stage an ebook app developer called Scrollmotion. The company’s co-founder, Josh Koppel, showed off how his Iceberg reader…

  • Amazon finally expanding and seeding Kindle ebook ecosystem

    Despite my unabashed enthusiasm for Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, I’ve had my fair share of gripes. I’ve been particularly disappointed by Amazon’s failure to do more and get creative around this new platform. Back in January, I posted a list of Kindle ecosystem shortcomings including poor file management and inflexible pricing. I wasn’t alone. Joe…

  • Reading Infinite Jest on the Kindle versus dead tree pulp

    When I was a younger man sans spouse and kids, I had more time for the more diverting pursuits, pursuits like reading post-post-modern, 1,000-page novels written by genius authors who loved footnotes. Exhibit A: Infinite Jest by the late David Foster Wallace. You can see the beast pictured here to the left. Ah, but those…

  • Instapaper’s instantly useful for sending articles to Kindles

    For a while now, I’ve found that the best way to read long-ish online articles and blog posts is to email them to my Kindle. This avoids the horrid eye strain from reading them on my computer and is more environmentally-friendly than printing them out on paper. Back in December, I even wrote a simple…

  • Insanely great Kindle on iPhone needs one big improvement

    (Updated 3/5) Wow – just wow. Pretty much ever since Amazon announced its nifty Kindle e-book reader in November 2007, people have been predicting that Apple would jump into the e-book game and blow Amazon away. Today, Amazon decided it wasn’t going to wait around and introduced an e-book reader program for the iPhone and…

  • The messy, the missing and the mistakes: Adventures in iTunes Plus upgrading

    Well, it’s been almost two months since Apple announced the huge expansion of higher-quality and DRM-free music in its iTunes Store “Plus” offerings and I think it’s fair to say that the upgrade process is an unmitigated disaster. Despite personally paying 30 cents per track to upgrade hundreds of tracks, Apple has erased my metadata,…

  • Exciting e-book progress from Amazon and Google

    It’s been over two years now since I first starting writing about electronic books and e-book readers on my blog. At the 2006 introduction of Sony’s reader, I was concerned that the “long tail” of niche and out-of-print content was being ignored in favor of making the latest John Grisham best sellers available on an…