I so wanted to say something nice about Barnes & Noble, the Nook, and its new B&N eReader App for the iPad. I've been a little harsh at times in the past, I'll admit: even as recently as yesterday. So, after reading early reviews of the iPad app from a couple of colleagues, and seeing how, as in the above screenshot, it had already soared to the top of all free apps in the iPad App Store, I was ready. I had even written a headline in my mind for the post: New Reading App from B&N Advances iPad Experience At the very...

Could this be a watershed moment? Apple's iBooks Store has just fallen from the top rung among free iPad Apps in Apple's Top Charts listing. Beatweek Magazine called attention to the iBooks' slippage, in which it has been supplanted an utterly lovely ambient app called Pocket Pond (see screen shot at the right, but it is just the beginning). As the screen shots at the end of this post attest, Pocket Pond is the new #1 free app for the iPad, iBooks has fallen to #2, and the Kindle Store has climbed from the mid-20s to #13 in recent days. Naturally, after...

How many books are there in the iPad's iBooks Store? How many of them are free? And is the total number growing or declining? I'm not sure how many ebooks there are, but for now at least, there's more than one story. It has been widely reported, since late March, that the iBooks Store would open, and did open, with a total catalog of about 60,000 books, of which about half (30,000) are free listings from Project Gutenberg. This has been the story from Apple's friends at Gizmodo, reported here: The official Apple way to get ebooks for the iPad, the iBooks store has...

Wonpyo Yun, a reporter for the Daily Princetonian, has the scoop on an official Princeton University announcement of the results from the Kindle DX pilot project on which the Ivy League school partnered with Amazon last semester. Yun's report suggests that the New Jersey university's report will lead with the positive by touting cost savings and the fact that use of the DX "reduced the amount of paper students printed for their respective classes by nearly 50 percent." But it also makes clear that the Kindle DX pilot project was something less than a love fest. (Update: here's a link to the...

John Einar Sandvand is an exceptionally smart guy when it comes to exploring online media trends, which is good because that's the tagline of his BetaTales blog. He's got a fascinating piece of coverage today, under the title Kindle’s user terms violate basic consumer rights, about a possible initiative by Norway's Consumer Council to apply the same standards to Amazon's Kindle catalog that it applied to Apple's iTunes music catalog. The “Forbrukerrådet,” which is the name under which you may have heard of the council before, was successful in getting Apple to promise to open its music catalog to music...

Amazon's Price War with Walmart: It's All About the Kindle, But It Could Render the Organizational Structure Of the Book Business Meaningless By Stephen Windwalker Author and Publisher, Kindle Nation Daily Back in 1953, after he got his gold watch from H.P. Hood & Sons, my grandfather gave up the life of a milkman and moved from Everett, MA to East Dixfield, ME to semi-retire as proprietor of the East Dixfield General Store & Esso Filling Station. Once a year or so...

DRM. Authors and publishers, have you considered the impact of Digital Rights Management on your ebook sales? A large and growing number of Kindle owners cares about this issue, and some consider it in making ebook-buying decisions, since they are aware that DRM restricts their rights to do all the natural non-commercial things we've been doing with books since we began reading. But what many at both ends of the creative process do not know is that there are tens of thousands of DRM-free books in the Kindle Store. Nearly every book uploaded via Amazon's Digital Text Platform (DTP) for...

For those of us -- readers, authors, and publishers included -- who hope to make DRM-free ebooks the standard not only on the Amazon Kindle on other devices as well, there has been plenty of good news lately. The Teleread blog is well-positioned to be the hub of the effort, and its founder, blogger-novelist David Rothman, is advancing the effort each and every day. We are all key participants here, and we have been joined by DefectivebyDesign.org, authors Cory Doctorow and Steve Jordan, and others. Sentiment is also swinging our way in a wider public. In an online survey of...

I’ve just realized that the Kindle Nation Citizen Survey link that I included in my Tuesday post was incorrect, which would have the effect of disenfranchising a large number of TeleRead subscribers who have definite points of view on the survey’s questions about DRM, ebook pricing. Over 1,200 people have participated and nearly 1,000 have completed the entire survey. Please join them at http://survey.constantcontact.com/survey/a07e2i0n12xft79yzbo/start Editor's note: This is exactly what happened to me. When I tried to access the survey it told me I had already voted. The new link works just fine and let me access the...

In a TeleRead piece that I wrote last week, along with a perhaps more interesting exchange of follow-up comments, I began thinking about what it might take to mount an effective organizing campaign against DRM. Starting from some relatively passive speculation that Amazon could well move to diminish or get rid of DRM in the Kindle Store out of its own self-interest, I attempted to challenge readers and commenters to think rigorously about what would be required in terms of strategy and intellectual honesty to mount such a campaign: “[I]t is important for those who are committed to the...

I don’t bring any special credibility to the table here at TeleRead. I’m a working author, a believer in the potential of and vision behind the Kindle both for readers and authors, and I have acquired a bit of expertise about Amazon’s underlying business strategies over a decade of writing about the company’s innovations and practices. I care about Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues, but I am not doctrinaire about them. My inclination is to believe that these issues will be sorted out at certain critical times in the future development of the book business, and that it may be counterproductive...

Writing about the future of the Kindle last summer, I suggested that "it would make no sense at all for Apple and Amazon to refuse to co-operate in finding ways to make Kindle editions of digitalized text accessible to iPhone and iPod owners through agreements that would be highly profitable to both companies." Although I try with occasional success not to be an "I told you so" kind of guy, I'll just say here that all of my possibly obnoxious self-quotations in this post are lifted directly from the August 2008 paperback version of my Kindle guide. You could...