On Monday Paul pointed out a post at the Wired blog by Priya Ganapati about the ugliness of eBooks. Ganapati talks at length about how book covers are an important part of a book, how fonts and typography are one of the major keys to a book and how the reader interacts with it, and ends by setting up what is, in my opinion, a false dichotomy between Amazon's Mobipocket format and the ePub format. Ganapati's argument that typography is essential to a book is not completely unjustified. However, I think she is forgetting the fact that the...

A similar article is at KindleFormatting.com. Will Qualcomm’s color-capable mirasol display technology---shown in the left image and also discussed in a YouTube---beat out E Ink for e-book viewing? Or might another choice? Some background: Stephen Windwalker wrote recently about the future of E Ink and what he expects we will see in versions of the Kindle coming in the next few years. He based his predictions on information from the makers of the e-paper screens and on the assumption that Amazon will stick with that technology indefinitely, and the predictions sound very plausible. My concern with that...

A few weeks back I posted about Jeff Bezos' take on DRM on the Kindle. Bezos said that copyright holders can choose to include DRM in their Kindle books if they want it, but my contention was that anyone who uploads content to the Kindle through the Digital Text Platform (DTP) did not have this option. I made that assertion because there was no information on the DTP about how to add DRM to a book, and there is certainly no check-box on the upload interface that lets a user choose to DRM the content or not...

It has been my distinct pleasure over the last year to work with the Virginia Woolf Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides reading materials in extra large print to the visually impaired. Michael Gold, the Foundation's executive director, contacted me early last year and we started researching ways to make large print books available on the Kindle. The largest default font size on the Kindle screen is equivalent to a 16-point font in print, but most large print books are published in at least 18-point, if not more. After some trial and error, I was able to get the Kindle...

I'm very pleased to be able to write for TeleRead. I'll be focusing my posts on the Amazon Kindle, including some technical tips and tricks. For a good overview of who I am and what I do, read Kat Meyer's TeleRead Q&A with me---or take a look at my Web site. In his interview yesterday on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, mentioned in passing that publishers get to decide whether they want to have DRM on their books. This is a repeat of what he said to Kirk Biglione last year, but...