Tweet-related links here (via BookSquare). NYT story here. Let’s hope that Amazon is next in Justice’s sights. Please! No, I’m not saying Amazon is guilty of anti-trust violations. But enough strange things are happening for Jeff and friends to be begging for a fond look by the feds, whether Justice or the FTC. I mean, why can’t Kindle books show up reliably in the iPhone’s Safari browser when you use Amazon’s search engine? Why the false “unavailables”? Another example of Amazon tilting the table to favor the Kindle over Apple alternatives? Meanwhile as a writer I’m...

Remember the good chuckle we all had over those $10 computers that India was to develop? Maybe in time, no? But for now, India has ordered 250,000 OLPC XO machines, with millions more expected. That’s a lot of potential e-book readers---the human kind. Will Western publishers catch on and offer freebies or extra-extra-low-priced editions? (Thanks to Chris Meadows.) Technorati Tags: India,One Laptop per Child...

Coincidence? Just as Amazon is digesting Stanza, something long overdue has happened---the addition of ePub books to Fictionwise’s Multiformat option. Congrats both to FW and its parent company, Barnes & Noble. No DRM taints MultiFormat books, of course. Announcement follows: “Today we began adding ePub files to Fictionwise (over 16,000 are already online) and the rest of our MultiFormat eBooks will be online by the end of the week. ePub is an eBook file format that is gaining popularity with both publishers and consumers. As part of our launch of unencrypted ePub eBooks, we are offering all our...

Prior columns in this series: The Superguy Mailing List The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative The Legion of Net.Heroes might be the oldest Usenet-based shared-world fiction setting still alive and kicking—but there are some defunct settings that pre-date it. Identifying them by the names of their newsgroups, these are mainly alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, and alt.pub.havens-rest. Today we will look briefly at these groups where people were writing “e-books” before anybody ever knew what an “e-book” was. The Chatsubo and the Pubs When these groups are mentioned, they are often mentioned together, because they share more similarities than differences. Though they are based in different genres,...

Some readers have reported problems with reading TeleRead on their feed reader.  TeleRead changed its URL structure slightly last February and although legacy RSS feeds still seemed to work, apparently some readers report that Bloglines has not been updating after April 20, 2009.  The best URL for Teleread RSS is currently: http://www.teleread.com/feed/ (In fact, this URL redirects you to a feedburner RSS feed, but this is more detail than you need to know). Speaking of RSS feeds, here’s the mp3 for a great SXSW panel discussion I attended in...

Publishers Weekly is reporting that the judge in the Google class action has granted the request of the Steinbeck heirs, among others, and agreed to and postponed the deadline for opt in/out for 4 months.  You can read the coverage here. From FBReader:  FBReader 0.4.4 for Google Android is released today. Search UI was completely rewritten for this version. Text search is now much more androidish. Local library search has been also added.  Image scaling has been also implemented in this version.  Mobipocket support and network book search are expected in the next  (stable) version....

Thanks to Michael Harris for this link.  Sounds fascinating. …  In about six months, the company [Google] will roll out a system that will bring high-quality news content to users without them actively looking for it. Under this latest iteration of advanced search, users will be automatically served the kind of news that interests them just by calling up Google’s page. The latest algorithms apply ever more sophisticated filtering – based on search words, user choices, purchases, a whole host of cues – to determine what the reader is looking for...

Beyond the Book has uploaded a recording of our panel at the Writers Conference.  You can find it here, or use the links below. BTB #94: Publishing Has A Future? Yes!, Says ‘Round Table’ Panel On Saturday, April 25, Beyond the Book’s Chris Kenneally moderated the closing panel of the annual New York Round Table Writers Conference. The audience were treated to crystal ball readings and insights on technology, marketing and business models from Paul Biba, Laura Dawson, Jeff Rivera, and Mike Shatzkin. Make no mistake: It is an earthquake you feel,...

Yesterday I pronounced Amazon to be eminently worthy of a serious investigation by the FTC, Congress or both. I’m not anti-Amazon per se. I am anti-monopoly or would-be monopoly---especially when Jeff D. Rockefeller takes such a big chunk out of the hides of publishers and writers. Shoppers may not even find the nonKindle version of my novel, because they didn’t type in the “the.” And within the Amazon search engine, my iTouch’s Safari browser falsely tells me that The Solomon Scandals isn’t available in Kindle format. Innocent accidents? Or sleazy efforts to promote the Kindle edition over...

Tired of the low contrast between the text and background on your Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader? A University of Cincinnati professor has invented an e-paper display tech with a much brighter background---reflecting 55 percent of ambient light, far more than the current 35-40 percent of E Ink. Prof. Jason Heikenfeld says the display might eventually be almost as bright as white paper. What’s more, the refresh rate is higher than E Ink’s. As summed up by MIT’s Technology Review: “Each hexagonal pixel in a new e-paper design has a reservoir in the center containing...

A similar article is at KindleFormatting.com. Will Qualcomm’s color-capable mirasol display technology---shown in the left image and also discussed in a YouTube---beat out E Ink for e-book viewing? Or might another choice? Some background: Stephen Windwalker wrote recently about the future of E Ink and what he expects we will see in versions of the Kindle coming in the next few years. He based his predictions on information from the makers of the e-paper screens and on the assumption that Amazon will stick with that technology indefinitely, and the predictions sound very plausible. My concern with that...

As most of our regular readers know I generally refrain from making too many editorial comments. I feel that presenting the news speaks for itself in most cases. But not in this case. While I bemoan the general "Amazon bashing" that goes on by some of our other contributors, I think that it is quite justified in this case. While the Lexcycle people, whom I know and respect, say that business will continue as usual, I'm afraid this is either naive or wishful thinking. As a corporate lawyer for the last 40 years, I can assure you...