"Crazy that Amazon doesn't offer a widget for 'Send a sample to your Kindle.' That 's the first thing I try to do when I read about a book." - Liza Daly. The TeleRead take: I totally agree, Liza!...

The Sony PRS-700 has drawn many gripes that it lacks enough contrast between text and background. Even the new Kindle, without a touch screen reducing contrast, has that problem in the opinion of some users. But could video games, where Sony also has a stake, make users better able to deal with the contrast issue on the Sony and other E Ink machines? You never know. As reported by Joel Aschenbach of the Washington Post: "Video games apparently can improve a key component of eyesight: discerning slight differences in contrast." (Photo from Gear Diary.)...

"...pockets of the publishing industry are prodding themselves out of their Paleolithic ways and joining the rush, with more books on current events coming out faster than ever before." - New York Times. The TeleRead take: Yep, the Times mentions such e-books as Barack, Inc.: Winning Business Lessons of the Obama campaign. So when will it and the rest of the MSM understand the possibilities of linking books to newspapers and vice versa? Yet another reason for standards, as well as stable archives!...

How to use Twitter for books marketing---or, to be more precise, relationship building? We passed on some tips earlier, and now Kat Meyer, the star of the TeleRead post, shares additional thoughts. For example, how do you pick people whose posts you want to follow? Related: Mari Smith's hashtag tips, to which Kat points. This # stuff is one way to group Tweets related to the topic of your book---or to the book itself. For my novel, the phrase is solomonscandals. Yep, the obvious: the use of the title....

Evidently people are starting to develop programs for the Kindle. By accident I came across two calendars that you can install. The first is a daily calendar, priced at $1.59, and the second a monthly one (that's the picture above), priced at $.99. Evidently these things are HTML templates and you add your entries by using the Kindle's annotation function. There's also another weekly planner here. Thanks to Amazon Kindle 2 Review for the links. Since the Kindle has a keyboard it is very possible we will be seeing other applications that take advantage of...

I came dangerously close to buying a Kindle II  last week for $230---a price workable even with my budget and my unhappiness with the K-machine's DRM. Owning the II would give me a chance to write about DRM in the most direct way, beyond using the Kindle app on my iPod Touch. The seller said, truthfully or not, that he was a FedEx pilot. The plan was that I'd try out the Kindle in my apartment lobby, see the related paperwork to make sure the Kindle wasn't hot, and pay him good old American cash if I liked the...

Moderator's note on Hadrien Gardeur: Years ago I urged Project Gutenberg to come up with a truly slick program to download, manage and display Gutenberg books. "A book tuner," I called the idea with radio in mind. Hadrien at Feedbooks had similar dreams and acted on them. Hadrien's technology now helps various e-reading apps serve in effect as book tuners. These include such programs as Stanza (the iPhone reader shown at left) and FBReader (a possible candidate for official use on the next OLPC laptop). From within those apps, his technology lets you directly search and call up items from Feedbooks'...

The Adobe Digital Editons Blog has an article, Working with the Cover, on covers that should be of interest to anyone preparing his or her own e-book. The covers on your books make a first impression. So when you're creating a cover for a book you're likely to put in some extra effort to make sure it looks good. When you're working with EPUBs and Adobe Digital Editions, there are some simple things that you can do that have a big impact on the look of the covers....

Received the following email from Susan Crealock: Last August I started a blog called Online Novels, http://online-novels.blogspot.com/, with the names, descriptions and web addresses of more than 500 novels available on the internet - well, that's what the blurb says. Actually, I think there are more than 700 at the moment; I check about 100 links a day to weed out those which have gone M.I.A. or are no longer free, so the list is as up-to-date as I can make it. Susan's site contains a listing by genre, and each book listed has a picture of the cover page, a link,...

Wow, a few days I received this message on my librarything page: Hi, Was wondering if you'd be interested in reviewing my new novel and posting your comments here as well as a few other book-related sites. Saw you liked Paris Trout, and thought you might like my novel since it's also southern and a bit dark (in the same vein as Paris Trout). I could e-mail you the novel in an e-book format if you'd like. Let me know if you're interested. Here's a link to a summary in case...

The other day, Amazon's billionaire CEO started working at a Kentucky warehouse that his conglomerate owned. Jeff Bezos wanted to see his employees on the job and "hear their comments about their work," according to the Lexington Herald-Leader. Bezo's "restlessly inquisitive mind has been one of his most prominent and distinctive features," Saul Hansell of the New York Times reacted under the headline Curious at Amazon, but Not Idle. But wait! How about people just as important to Jeff, if not more so, than his employees---his customers? Perhaps he needs to guest-blog openly for TeleRead...

I’ve never understood the disdain with which the romance novel is treated. It seems to me that this is nothing but pure sexism.  After all, the James Bond series of books is well regarded and even spawns movies and  the Bond gendre is simply the male version of romance books.  But Bond is literature of course!   Well there’s going to be a conference on these issues soon in Princeton on April 23-24.  Thank to Dear Author for the link. This two-day symposium will be the first national conference to focus on the multiple ways that...