Now that e-book apps for the iPhone/Touch are so common, what are you favorites---from both tech and content perspectives? Which are good as both books, or quasi-books, and which stink? And which show the most imaginative use of the app feature? The ePub extraction issue For virtually all apps, I believe that ePub extraction capability is a “must.” O’Reilly has released 17 more app books., all allowing users to extract ePub files, and the company’s Andrew Savikas says: “Many more are on the way. (Typo corrected: 17, not 27.) Shown is an earlier O’Reilly...

B&N’s new e-book store has been a real letdown so far, alas. But here’s a nice wrinkle that B&N is already deploying---free WiFi in its brick-and-mortar stores. So now shoppers can browse paper books and immediately order and receive e-book editions. What’s more, if they want to restrict their choices to paper books, they can up excerpts for reading in the store or at home. Those possibilities occur to me, and it’ll be interesting to see if B&N  fully uses WiFi to promote synergies between E and P, beyond just distributing e-coupons and other relationship-building tools....

This is a product I've been waiting for with bated breath. When I saw it finally announced I immediately bought it at $19.95. It is a great and wonderful addition to the M-Edge series of cases I've written about in the past. (For a complete catalog of my case reviews see the end of the Periscope review here.) The eLuminator takes one AAA battery and the thin lip slips into a holder that is present on all M-Edge cases. In addition the flexible neck, the light rotates about the lip so you can set it in an infinite...

“My hunch is that the biggest authors will continue to insist on DRM and that they are sensible to do that. And that lesser authors will often be comfortable without DRM, and they are probably sensible to do that as well. But as the establishment stage of ebook adoption continues, I’d also expect that the ‘viral effect’ of non-DRMed titles will stop being healthy for sales. This is an argument that still has a long time to run.” – Mike Shatzkin, a leading maven in the publishing community. The TeleRead take: I’m pressed for time, but ideally some TeleBlog community...

This isn't ebook related, but is more in the nature of a public service announcement. Forbes is reporting that there is a serious iPhone bug that can allow your phone to be taken over. The bug will be announced at the Black Hat Conference on Thursday. Since so many of our readers use iPhones I thought it we should alert you to the article: If you receive a text message on your iPhone any time after Thursday afternoon containing only a single square character, Charlie Miller would suggest you turn the device off. Quickly. ... "This is serious. The only thing...

It's really amazing when you think about it. A few years ago about all we had was Project Gutenberg and some of us were struggling to read those books on our PDAs. Now we are at the point where we have dedicated ereaders, which are rapidly becoming commoditized, and we can actually choose among 1,000,000 public domain books, not to mention pay-per-read books. And the nice thing? This is still only the beginning....

OK, gang, do your Sonyology act, and try to guess what Sony may actually be doing in the e-book area---a timely topic, even without an enticing rumor wafting around. The following has just appeared in MobileRead from Kindle 2 owner named forkyfork---who insists his source was “very confident”: Pardon me if this is known information, but I thought I would pass it along. While talking with the manager at Books-a-Million, he told me that Sony is coming out with a new ereader in August. He mentioned that it's going to have wifi,...

Editor’s note: This is one more reason for e-book app developers to think about Android and other non-Apple platforms. – D.R. Apple bashers now have one more thing to cheer about. At the behest of AT&T, Apple has pulled Google Voice applications from the iPhone app store on the premise that they “duplicate functionality” already present in the phone. (The same excuse was used to reject iPhone podcast-downloading apps shortly before Apple added that capacity itself.) Google Voice, for those who have not used it, is Google’s new free voice-over-IP service that aims to do for telephony what Gmail did for...

Bowker has a new report available book buying and demographics. Unfortunately it costs $1,000 so I'm afraid I'm not going to buy it. Their press release, however, is free and does provide some interesting information - including an ebook fact. Take a look, and thanks to Resource Shelf for the heads up. 57% of book buyers are women yet women purchase 65% of the books sold in the U.S. -- Mystery books are the most popular genre for book club sales, with 17% of all purchases of mystery books coming directly from book clubs -- Generation X consumers buy...

Murray Alexander's Palm-Mac blog is one of the best gadget blogs on the web. Murray is also very particular and doesn't praise anything unless he really likes it. So I was amazed when he actually recommended an app to read PDFs on the iPhone. If Murray says it works, then it works. I've taken the liberty of reprinting most of his blog post in full, so to make it easier to read I'll leave out the blockquotes. GoodReader for iPhone Since my Palm days I have always liked to carry around a load of pdf files, mostly used...

The Solomon Scandals, my Washington suspense novel from Twilight Times Books, will be discussed tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight in a global OPAL chatcast. Got any questions for me in advance? Email them to Tom Peters, the librarian serving as moderator---who can choose. Tom will give away five free nonDRMed copies of the book (ePub format), at the end of the chatcast. He’ll pick the winners. Maybe for the best question? Scandals is also available as a trade paperback. At any time, blind people and other persons with reading-related disabilities...

Well, this is good news. Here's a snippet from Crain's New York Business. The full article has a lot more: In a sign of the growing importance of e-books, HarperCollins Publishers has created what appears to be the first “editor in chief”-style role for the digital category at a major publishing house. Ms. Schupf will “develop original e-book titles, create new opportunities from the backlist, and work closely with the marketing team … to build our digital presence with digital tools such as iPhone apps,” said Liate Stehlik, publisher of the group, in a statement....