It may well be the best indication yet of the new-found popularity of e-books that I happened to notice in Google News’s technology section a listing of a number of short, remarkably similar posts talking about how awesome a reader the Kindle is. (The one that caught my eye was entitled, “Kindle DX: an eReader for College Students!”—which amused me given that a trial of the Kindle DX with college students concluded that was exactly what it was not.) The articles are posted in such sources as “Los Angeles SEO or “Stopwatch News”, both of which appear to be...

One big advantage e-book readers have over printed books is the “instant gratification” they offer their users: as Amazon puts it, you can be reading any Kindle book within a minute of deciding you want it. And I’ve mentioned Amazon’s Disc+ program in which Amazon applies a similar principle to CDs and DVDs it sells. But over the last six years, Amazon has been trying to do the same to its sales of, well, everything else. If they can’t deliver instant gratification, they can at least deliver it faster. This is the purpose of the Amazon Prime program,...

Are the days of unlimited wireless data plans numbered? ReadWriteWeb reports on a speech by a wireless researcher who believes that they are. Dr. Reinaldo Valenzuela, director of wirelss research at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, notes that the more people use smartphones, the more data usage is going to go up. Only 10% of all smartphone users are using the majority of data, and as that usage grows, soon the cost of providing “unlimited” bandwidth data plans will surpass the revenue it brings in. Valenzuela believes that metered pricing is one possible answer, but there are also...

It’s been a while since our latest “Apple censorship” story, so here’s a mention of Apple rejecting a digital magazine from its app store because the magazine was solely about the Android operating system, a rival to Apple’s iOS for primacy in the smartphone and tablet world. The article points out that other magazines that are partly or mostly devoted to Android are still available in the store, but publisher Brian Dixen thinks that the fact his magazine was entirely about Android was the deciding factor for Apple’s rejection. This isn’t Dixen’s first brush with app store “censorship”, either;...

Blog Kindle reports on the “aftermath” of the Black Friday $89 Amazon Kindle deal. As might reasonably be expected, the Kindles sold out so fast that some people accused Amazon of not actually having them at all. Not that it’s too surprising, given how popular Amazon is; the blog notes that between Twitter and Facebook, there was the potential for half a million people to be aware of the deal even before its spread on blogs (such as ours) came into play. Under all that attention, even several thousand refurbished units could sell out literally in seconds. ...

Today is the day that WikiLeaks—despite reportedly being under a distributed denial of service attack—sprang its biggest leak ever, releasing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and airing global diplomatic laundry for all to see. The Guardian has an interactive map of countries whose secrets have come out, and browsing it produces some interesting stories. But the most interesting thing to me is not the contents of those stories, which enough other people are going to be covering today, but what the WikiLeaks organization represents for journalism in the era of the Internet—or, rather, how the Internet makes...

Bug Fixes Fix various regressions in the calibre windows build caused by the switch to python 2.7. If you are on windows and upgraded to 0.7.30, it is highly recommended that you upgrade to 0.7.31. If you are not on windows, you can ignore 0.7.31...

A day or so after those in the US finished celebrating Thanksgiving, I had reason to thank my lucky stars for pirates. In particular, the ebook pirate who ripped off my book and posted it on a well-known non-legitimate download site. I’d name the site, but I don’t think that’s the done thing. People can use Google any way they like. I’m a journalist who became an author in 2006 when my book Baby Steps: a Bloke’s-Eye View of IVF was published by a major Australia publisher. It went out in paperback and, as an afterthought – as it was back then...

If you’re looking for a cheap tablet as an inexpensive e-reading alternative to the iPad, you might want to look a lot further than the Maylong M-150 Android tablet selling for $99 at Walgreens. Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica has a review of the tablet that might better be called a defenestration—for judging by her description, after dealing with this tablet your first impulse might be to throw it out the window. Among her list of reasons are that the construction is flimsy, the touchscreen (which is resistive like the old Palm PDAs, rather than capacitive like the iPhone...

I’ve had a couple of days to play with iOS 4.2 on my iPad, and I can’t deny that it is by and large an improvement. It’s nice to be able to play Pandora in the background while I read an e-book or browse the web, for example. Of course, the multitasking isn’t perfect. Sometimes multitasking apps can crash but hang around zombie-like in the background. TCGeeks has advice for how to deal with that problem if it ever happens to you—go to the multitasking display by double-tapping Home, hold your finger down on a program, and hit...

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that the iPad is going to be very popular this holiday season. eWeek reports that a Nielsen survey ranks the iPad as a very popular wishlist item for kids. 31% of kids aged 6-12 expressed a strong interest in owning one in the next six months, compared to 29% for an iPod Touch. It was also popular with kids 13 and older, coming in at 18% just behind smartphones at 19%—beating out Blu-ray players (17%), e-readers or Nintendo Wiis (15%), PlayStation 3 (13%) and iPod Touch (11%). More kids...

New Features Support for Acer Lumiread and PocketBook Pro 602 When importing by ISBN also allow the specification of a file to be imported. E-mail sending: Email sends are now regular jobs that can be accessed from the jobs list. Also when sending using gmail/hotmail send at most one email every five minutes to avoid trigerring their spam controls. Failed sends are now retried one more time, automatically. Content server: When a category contains only one item, go directly to the book list instead of forcing the user to click on that one item E-mail sending: Allow unencrypted connections to SMTP relay Improve startup times for...