This is from the Kindle 2 Review (at least I think that's the name of the blog, the owner's nomenclature is awfully confusing): With the first book in each of their Sci-Fi series Baen includes a CD that has all the books in the series. Originally the idea must have been to encourage users to take a look at one or two books and get them to buy the others - since no reasonable person would attempt to read through a whole series on their computer screens or on their pdas. Since we now have Kindles and the books are available in Mobi...

Three pesky Kindle issues, unrelated, show up in TeleRead today. Issue One: Is Amazon skewing search results to favor itself and the Kindle over nonVIP authors and small publishers? Will self-published writers and tiny presses even suffer heavily at times if they do offer Kindle books? Is Amazon discriminating against paper editions on occasion to push the K machine and related titles? Issue Two: Is the Kindle putting literary novels and even lit-minded daters at an unfair disadvantage? Without the usual cover visible to all, fellow strap-hangers can’t see that the romance-minded...

The latest posting on Switched has an interesting little article about about a guy who wrote 400 words a day on his cell phone and put together a novel: Brett wrote the majority of his first novel, "The Warded Man," on his phone during trips between his Brooklyn, NY home and his job in Times Square, across the East River in Manhattan. In total, he estimates writing over 100,000 words on the train over two years. The book finally hit shelves last month and is on best-seller lists in Poland and England (it has sold 2,500 copies in the US)....

This is a day and a half conference on Monday May 11 and Tuesday May 12. As of right now I'll be attending the Tuesday session for TeleRead. I'm unsure as to whether I'll be able to make the Monday half day session or not. I'll probably do the same thing as I did with the Writers Conference; do Twitter posts of the interesting points and then collect them and publish them on the site (provided, of course, that I can get connectivity). Here is the Conference description: An eBook Stimulus Plan for Publishing is the theme for...

All done. It was a fascinating couple of days and I'm glad I took the time. Learned a tremendous amount about the publishing business. Here are my tweets from today's conference: Conf: marketing research for small presses mostly done by authors not the presses Conf: for small presses authors must find the audience Conf: for small presses start marketing a year before book comes out Conf: marketing get known in local independent bookstores Conf: marketing connect with on line reading groups Conf marketing: start on local market and build strong presence there first Conf marketing; use Twittet and Facebook to find book clubs There...

“President Obama will soon get his souped-up, high-security BlackBerry for use in and around the White House and during presidential travel, said Obama administration officials. The top-secret BlackBerry 8830 is in the final stages of development by the National Security Agency, which will soon begin checking to make sure its encryption software meets federal standards. The device could be ready for use in the next few months.” – Washington Times. The TeleRead take: Don’t forget, Barack---here’s a chance to be a role model and get young people reading e-books on BlackBerrys, iPhones and other gizmos. Talk about...

There has been a decided uptick in interest in Mark Twain recently. All to the good: the great satirist deserves as large an audience as he get in this and any other time. Now HarperStudio is getting in the game with its release of Who is Mark Twain?, a collection of 24 previously unpublished essays by him. And if you buy the hardcover, you also receive the DRM-free e-book. While I can’t see why anyone would buy both a hardcover edition and an e-book, if HarperStudio is giving it away and it’s DRM-free in the bargain, I don’t see how...

Welcome to TeleRead’s newest contributor, Michael W. Perry, editor of Inkling Books---an author who has officially objected to the proposed Google settlement! Among other works, Mike has written Untangling Tolkien. Please note these are Mike’s opinions and not necessarily TeleRead’s. – D.R. Quick, tell me who Michael Boni is. You don’t know? How about Joanne Zack Zack? Still drawing a blank? Then surely you must know Joshua Snyder? No? That's odd, because all three work for the Pennsylvania law firm of Boni & Zack (yes, I know, it sounds like...

Psst! Lexcycle updated it Stanza e-reader to version 1.8.1 this week, although it would have been nice if the company had put out an announcement. I didn’t see anything from @stanza_reader. The new version, about which I found out through addicted2iphone’s Tweet, includes these wrinkles: Chapter position is now correctly restored when starting in the landscape mode. Added the ability to disable tap & hold functionality for word definition Fixed font aliasing problem when reading in a landscape mode ...

It's late so just a brief post. Have to get up early to go back to NYC in the morning. Very interesting conference. I wouldn't want to be an author - getting something published isn't any fun. Here's a quick summary of the Twitter posts I made from the Conference. I'll try to tweet again tomorrow: At Writers Conf. Very interesting so far. Small presses report it can take 1 year or more to get book reviewed - if at all Conference: agents say self publishing experience will count against you with big publishers when you...

This post is from Steve’s blog A Kindle Home page. Also see the TeleBlog’s speculation on the possibility that the Kindle just might pick up PixelQI display technology. – D.R. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was characteristically coy, during Thursday's Amazon earnings conference call, when he was asked if the company “might unleash the computing power of the Kindle” by adding features that could make the Kindle competitive with netbook computers: “We're really focused on purpose-built reading devices. We wouldn't talk anyway about what we're going to do in the future.” Bezos (photo to...

From Michael Pastore, EPublishers Weekly: Here is a very informative video of a presentation about e-book reading devices, featuring Liza Daly and Keith Fahlgren. It's designed as a talk targeted for e-book publishers, but clear enough for everyone to understand. I've seen a number of “e-book videos: lately, and all of them keep the camera focused on the speaker, and not the screen---which means that the video viewers cannot see what the audience sees: the important stuff on the lecturer's screen. To solve this problem, a slideshow of this presentation is included...