As the iPad launches, so too do the tech-maven reviews. Here’s one from the Wall Street Journal and AllThingsD’s Walter Mossberg, who makes no bones about the fact that he really likes the gadget. My verdict is that, while it has compromises and drawbacks, the iPad can indeed replace a laptop for most data communication, content consumption and even limited content creation, a lot of the time. But it all depends on how you use your computer. Mossberg found it excellent for viewing media (including reading e-books), surfing the web, and light typing...

Received the following email from Joanna and thought I should pass it on: It's a newsworthy day :) Apparently Fictionwise has removed books from the agency publishers as they ramp up for tomorrow's big change. Someone on Mobile Read reported that the titles are off the website and have been removed from people's wish lists as well. I can confirm that my own wish list of 3-odd books is down to 3 titles now, and some of them are already at the higher prices (although a book on my Kobo wish list seems to have gone down in price!) Many people...

Part of an email I just received from them: Dear Reader Store Customer, The publishing industry is turning a page and so are we. Beginning April 1st some major publishers will be instituting a change in the pricing of eBooks, which puts decisions on eBook pricing firmly in their hands. As a result, prices of bestsellers and new releases from these publishers will be changing on the Reader Store, and during the transition time, some titles may be unavailable. Although most of these eBooks will be priced from about $12.99 to 14.99, there will not be a broad pricing change across the Reader...

Publishers Lunch (subscription required) quotes Overdrive CEO Steve Potash "are adapting as best we can" in "getting the information and making sure it's good to go" from those publishers switching models, while warning that "there will be holes in [some publishers'] catalogs starting tomorrow." Among the issues with the Agency Five, Potash says, is that "some of the imprints and subsidiaries that may have not been initially identified" as changing models "are now also confirming that they are switching over," such as Harper's Zondervan division. Calling it a "dynamic" situation that will have "people busy all day late into the night" getting...

Out of South Africa, this new store is dedicated to romantic fiction. In addition to selling books they have a section allowing readers to publish their own work online. The store divides ebooks by cost and sub-genre and includes a number of free books. Books are mainly sourced from Harlequin Mills & Boon and they are adding about 100 new books a month and books are in Epub format. Thanks to Book Bee for the heads up....

Marvell has announced the prototype of a $99 tablet. The tablet has “always-on, high performance multimedia” and features live, real-time content, 1080 full HD and 3-D media, and full Flash internet. It is powered by the Marvell ARMADA 600 series of processors with gigahertz-class processor speed, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/FM/GPS connectivity, high performance 3-D graphics capability. Full specs haven't been released yet, however Marvell announced a pilot program in partnership with the Washington, D.C., Public Schools, in which the company will donate a Moby tablet to every child in an at-risk school as part of a multi-year program in new media and learning. More...

New Features EPUB Output: Use SVG for covers, to ensure cover image is correctly resized to fit available screen space Support for the Motorola Cliq and Milestone Fetch My Clippings from the Kindle Comic Input: Add option to disable conversion to grayscale (black and white) MOBI Output: Mark single section news downloads as newspapers so that they are automatically archived by the Kindle MOBI Output: Add option to control setting of document type to Personal Document SONY driver: Tags within [] do not translate into a category when sending books to device ebook-device: Add a test_file command Location support for PDF when fetching annotations from a Kindle Bug Fixes CHM Input:...

Done by the editors of the Encyclopedia, and powered by Paragon who is well known in the dictionary area, the app has over 25,000 unique articles and 800 images and maps. The whole database is contained on the phone and runs about 22MB. There are hyperlinks between articles, an "On This Day" feature, article can be shared via email, wildcard search, and more. It costs $24.99 and there is more information here....

In contrast to papers, such as the London Sunday Times, that are erecting paywalls, one English and Scottish local newspaper publisher is bringing its paywall trial to an end. Press Gazette reports that Johnston Press is dropping the paywalls it erected on the websites of two Scottish and four English weekly papers starting in November as a trial to learn more about how well paywalls might work. If one source the Press Gazette heard from is right, they might have learned a lot: One source has told Press Gazette the number of subscribers paying...

The question of free library lending of e-books in the UK is proving to be quite a contentious issue. TheBookseller.com reports on a letter sent to Culture Minister Margaret Hodge by the Booksellers Association of England and Ireland, as well as similar letters written by the Society of Authors, the Writers’ Guild, and the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society. The Booksellers Association is concerned that free library lending of e-books could adversely affect bookshop business: "If borrowers no longer need to come into a library, they certainly don’t need to come into a bookshop to buy a copy.”...

All the talk about the coming shift to the 'agency' model from 4 of the big 5 publishers has caused much digital ink to be spilled on the fate of the customer, the author and the publisher's bottom line. But what about the big e-stores? If everybody has to charge the same price and nobody is allowed to offer discounts, how are they going to grow and retain their customer bases when there is no real benefit or incentive to shop at one store over the other? I think that what we are going to start to see is an increasing...

The following comes from PriceGrabber's Ereader & Ebook Trends Consumer Behavior Report, which was a survey of 1.631 online consumers in February of this year. § The eReader market is gaining share. One in 20 consumers owns an eReader, and one-third plan to purchase an eReader in the next 12 months. The most popular eReading devices consumers are looking to purchase in the next year are the Apple™ iPad (20 percent) and the Amazon Kindle (12 percent). § The primary use of an Apple iPad...