Our own Joanna sent me this email her sister sent to Amazon and I thought it worth sharing with you. Some personal information has been deleted. Joanna said something interesting, herself, in her transmittal to me: I liked the one about allowing users to somehow coach or over-ride the text to speech; I too have had issues with proper names being mispronounced. She told me she is getting her daughter, who struggles with reading, to put in more book time with the Kindle using the text to speech feature; I think this is definitely a niche market untapped by the ebook...

New Features Check library: Allow wildcards in ignore names field Bug Fixes Fix regression in 0.7.25 that broke reading metadata from filenames. Fix regression in 0.7.25 that caused original files to be mistakenly removed when adding books recursively. Fix long series/publisher causing edit metadata in bulk dialog to become very large. Only add SONY periodical code to downloaded news if output profile is set to one of the SONY reader profiles. This is needed because the ever delightful Stanza crashes and burns when an EPUB has the periodical code....

Well, we're up and running on the new site.  Aside from the new look (which has been tested to death - I'm told) we have moved to a new, higher speed provider and have also significantly upgraded the servers.  The site certainly seems much faster to me. As to the future, we are working on adjusting the "Comments" box to add a few more, but be sure to click the "More comments" link at the bottom of the box to get a lot more of the latest comments. If you find any bugs please leave a comment here so they can be...

According to the Wall Street Journal, King made $80K for his novella "UR" written exclusively for Amazon. King says: I didn't do "Ur" for money. I did it because it was interesting. I'm fairly prolific. It took three days, and I've made about $80,000. You can't get that for short fiction from Playboy or anybody else. It's ridiculous. ...

We posted about WorldReader twice so far this year. Today, some exciting news from WorldReader will make for post number three. First, in April we linked to news about the WorldReader program sending Kindles (with the help of Amazon) to test the e-reader in four African nations and see if it can help boost literacy. Testing in Ghana, Rwanda, and Kenya. Second, at the beginning of this month (October 2010), we linked to several articles about WorldReader announcing plans to digitize books by African authors and sell them via Amazon.com. More than 10 titles are already on sale. Today, news that Random House has donated "thousands of...

From the Neiman Journalism Lab comes a review of this new product: The nonprofit news organization Center for Public Integrity is announcing an alternative today at the annual Online News Association conference. The Center wants to make reading its work more enjoyable for the user, and a smarter investment for an organization rethinking its online and mobile strategies. The Center has a new HTML5 product that gives users an app-like experience in a web browser. The project is part of a new digital initiative at the Center, funded by $1.5 million in grants from the Knight Foundation. “We think we’ve created a...

I have a favor to ask—please take a short survey about ereading. Briefly, we’re partnering with a consulting firm, InfoTrends, to build market research content for our website. We want to measure the habits and preferences of end users. We also want the opinions of publishers about the present and future role of reading publications on-screen. That means we need YOU! This is a professional survey organization which knows how such a survey should be conducted and, perhaps more importantly, how the data should be analyzed. To be honest, if it weren't I wouldn't have put the survey up...

Mediabistro has an interesting article on the copyright problem posed by photos when it comes to moving books from print to electrons. Just because a publisher might have the license to use a photo in print does not necessarily mean he can also use it digitally, because the rights are separate and distinct. If the publisher didn’t have the foresight to include digital uses in the contract, he will have to go back and renegotiate. And even if you have the rights to use the photo in an e-book, you may still not have the right to use it...

Mike Masnick at TechDirt points out another e-book whose publisher has priced it significantly higher than the paper version. The book, Appetite for Self-Destruction by Steve Knopper, is about the music industry’s spectacular mishandling of the transition to digital music. Masnick finds a little irony in the fact that the e-book is $17.99 on Amazon while the paperback goes for $11.53 new (and cheaper from other vendors or used). Of course, Amazon routinely marks down all its print books since it can, but even the list price of the print book is $16.95, over $1 cheaper than the...

It's been a while since I blogged a business idea for Gluejar. There have been at least three reasons for this hiatus. 1. Blogging has been fun. Every article generates a bunch of ideas for me to pursue and I just love exploring new ideas and learning about new things. Not to mention the dialogue with readers which has been very stimulating. I've learned a lot.   2. Since January, I've been working with architects and contractors on an extensive home renovation, which takes up a lot of time and mind share. This work is almost done, so it's time to think about...

Received the following question. I certainly don't know the answer. To paraphrase the email: One can read a Gutenberg mobi ebook on the Kindle by simply emailing it to the Kindle's address and having it sent to the machine. However, you can't use this method to email a Gutenberg mobi ebook to the Kindle software on your iPhone or iPad. How can you get the Gutenberg ebook to the Kindle software on the iPhone or iPad - other than by buying the book from Amazon. The reason for this is to be able to keep the book in...

New Features Add support for the SONY periodical format. Content server: Make the new browsing interface the default. The old interface can be accessed at /old Content server: Allow running of content server as a WSGI application within another server. Add tutorial for this to the User Manual. Support for the Pico Life reader, Kobo Wifi and HTC Aria Content server: Add a new --url-prefix command line option to ease the use of the server with a reverse proxy New social metadata plugin for Amazon that does not rely on AWS. Since Amazon broke AWS, it is recommended you upgrade to this version if you use...