Anandtech is the "cream of the crop" in hardware reviews and they set the standard for everyone else. Now they have taken a look at the Kindle Fire and Touch 3G, in two seperate reviews.  They like both units.  The Fire review is long and goes into incredible detail on the technical and hardware end. For the Fire they conclude: I feel like Amazon believes in the Kindle Fire and thus we will see the software get better over time. As with most tablet recommendations lately, if you can wait, doing so would be wise. Don't assume that things will get better, wait...

Note: Full text search and snippets are free to all. Various payment plans to view full text. Details below. From the Announcement (Also Includes Video and Images): The British Library and online publisher brightsolid today launch a website that will transform the way that people use historical newspapers to find out about the past. The British Newspaper Archive website will offer access to up to 4 million fully searchable pages, featuring more than 200 newspaper titles from every part of the UK and Ireland. The newspapers – which mainly date from the 19th century, but which include runs dating back to the first...

Voynich Manuscript online: Avi sez, "Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has put complete high resolution scans of the enigmatic, undeciphered Voynich Manuscript online." Written in Central Europe at the end of the 15th or during the 16th century, the origin, language, and date of the Voynich Manuscript—named after the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912—are still being debated as vigorously as its puzzling drawings and undeciphered text. Described as a magical or scientific text, nearly every page contains botanical, figurative, and scientific drawings of a provincial but lively character, drawn in ink with vibrant...

Valve is one of the major players in the gaming arena: Valve: Piracy is a 'non-issue': "Managing director says piracy is a "service problem."Gabe Newell, Valve managing director, has claimed that software piracy is a "non issue" for the company's Steam gaming service. Instead, he said that the fundamental misconception about piracy is that it is motivated by price, when Value believes that its more down to problems with service."For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24/7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come...

From Inside Higher Ed: The biggest problem with borrowing eBooks instead of buying is the selection. My NH consortium has 2,124 fiction eBooks and 227 nonfiction eBooks. Of these, only 398 fiction books and 26 nonfiction books are available to check out right now. The actual numbers are even worse, as not every book is available in Kindle format, but instead as an Adobe EPUB eBook (which can't be read on a Kindle device).   Compared to what is on offer at Amazon the library eBook selection is spectacularly underwhelming. From Amazon, I can buy (right now) 352,366 fiction or 753,533 nonfiction...

Received the following email from Markus Wagner: I recently released a blog post about people who tweet about ebooks. Your twitter account and your website www.teleread.com is attending, too. So I thought it might interest you. You can find the article "Twitteraccounts, denen man folgt, um über Ebooks auf dem Laufenden zu bleiben" (translated: Twitter accounts, which you follow to stay up to date on Ebooks) at http://www.ebookreader-und-ebooks.de/artikel/twitteraccounts-zum-thema-ebooks. The part which might be interesting for you is under "Twitterer mit englischen Tweets" (Twitterer with English tweets).  ...

From The Bookseller: Tokyo-based consumer research group Net Mile polled over 1,000 men and women on attitudes to e-books in Japan and in China for a survey that reveals stark contrasts between the two. Of the 600 Japanese respondents asked, "Do you use or do you want to use e-books?",  57.7% responded they would "never read an e-book". Of the 450 Chinese respondents, only 4.5% answered the same. While 70% of Chinese respondents said they had already downloaded and read an electronic book at least once, only 10% of Japanese participants in the survey, titled "E-book trends today: a comparison",  said they...

All the news that is fit to print about indie bookstores can generally be summarized this way: they are closing faster than a shark feeding frenzy. Perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but the demise of the indie bookstore is on everyone’s lips. The questions are why are they dying out and what can be done to halt their death march? As to why, I don’t think we need spend much time on the question. Fewer Americans want to either pay more for local availability or want to patronize a local bookstore. What they are becoming accustomed to is huge selection and...

About a year ago, I mentioned Google’s decision to stop active development on Google Wave, and the Apache Foundation’s subsequent move to take ownership. More recently, Google announced it will shut Wave down entirely in April 2012. Wired’s Webmonkey column reports that Apache’s efforts with Wave are now available in the form of “Wave in a Box”, a standalone client/server application that replicates the Wave experience. Wave in a Box consists of two parts, a standalone wave server and a web client. The Wave in a Box web client looks a bit different than...

Yesterday, when pondering whether newspapers might eventually use free Kindles to rid themselves of print costs, I was reminded that advertising revenue is one of the major issues tying newspapers down to the print format. Which is why I found it interesting when I noticed a Reuters report that the Financial Times expects its online content sales revenues to equal or exceed its print advertising revenues in 2012. The Financial Times is known for its successful paywall strategy in which it allows readers eight free articles per month but requires they subscribe beyond that. It recently launched an HTML5...

Charlie Stross has posted to his blog a brief rant about the futility of e-book DRM. He points out that, not only is it ineffective against piracy, it allows Amazon—which has displayed a history of using its king-of-the-hill position in the book and e-book market to squeeze concessions from its suppliers—to keep its customers locked into its platform and gain even more power in the marketplace. If the big six began selling ebooks without DRM, readers would at least be able to buy from other retailers and read their ebooks on whatever platform they wanted, thus...

From the Nieman Journalism Lab, an article by Joshua Benton (blockquotes omitted): Okay, maybe it’s a minor point. And after Jeff Bezos rightfully taunted me on stage (an honor, really!) for something I wrote almost three years ago, I should probably shut up about the Kindle for a while. But Amazon has just put out another press release talking about how great Kindle sales are without including a single actual sales number. Four years after launching the Kindle, Amazon has still not released one single concrete number regarding either how many actual Kindle devices they’ve sold or how many Kindle books they’ve...