KINDLE AND NOOKCOLOR NEWS ROUNDUP Haven't been around the last two days and now that I'm back, I see that the news seems to be almost entirely about the holiday lists all the newspapers and 'zines are making.   I drew attention to one very popular list the other day, but on the Amazon review areas and forums, there are still many people wondering which e-reader to buy or whether or not they should upgrade their prior Kindles, so I'll go again with what's in the news.  Since I missed a couple of days, this will be extra wordy.  I miss...

The subject title of this piece belongs to TechGear's Tim Conneally, who is one of the very few writers who seem to have noticed the glaring flaw in the basic premise of the survey by ChangeWave Research which asked consumers which "e-readers" they were likely going to buy this holiday and presented them with the choices of the iPad, Kindle, Nook, Sony, A Smart, and "Other." The survey conclusions were regurgitated without any analysis by about 95% of the news stories on the first day. The iPad is the portable equvalent of a small computer that runs multimedia apps, and only secondarily is it used...

Reading devices help people with strokes, neurological disabilities In the picture are Chrissy Akers (left), a graduate student in speech pathology, and Tina Puglisi-Creegan, a clinical instructor, who are helping Tom Calteux "relearn the reading process with the aid of a Kindle years after having a stroke.  Although he never lost his ability to write, the part of his brain that makes the connection between letters and comprehension was damaged." Harvey Black, writing for the Journal Sentinel, feels that "The Kindle and the iPad are in many ways the face of today's communication technology" and that there's "more to these devices than...

Consumer Reports has released its latest survey of e-readers, and they have the Kindle at the top again. Click the image at the left to see the video. The video linked to at the left explains that the iPad was not included because they were testing the category of dedicated e-readers and the iPad is essentially a multimedia tablet and computer that also functions as an e-reader. They add that it's considerably more expensive while having an LCD screen which "is fine, though it is slightly less crisp than that of the best e-book readers" and is also quite a bit heavier than the dedicated...

From the press release: Publishers’ book sales tracked by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for the month of September decreased by 12.1 percent on the prior year to $1.1 billion and were up by 3.8 percent for the year to date. The children’s book category showed decreases over September of last year, with Hardcover Children’s/YA sales down 17.4 percent for the month with sales of $76.6 million in September, and year-to-date sales are down by 15.1 percent. Children’s/YA Paperback sales decreased 1.6 percent in September with sales totaling $53.3 million; sales fell 6.8 percent for the year to date. The Adult Hardcover...

This is a new free tool to help enlarge the essential portion of a PDF when the words are too small to read and to divide the pages to ease navigation when viewing the results in Landscape mode. PDFs with content too small to read I JUST saw a comment at the a Teleread.com comment area, offering a new free tool (on a good site) to help with PDFs that are comprised mostly of image pages and therefore cannot be converted to normal Kindle text format since there are no text fonts to enlarge while keeping within the screen frame. This would...

 In a column I overlooked yesterday because the title wasn't designed to grab you by the throat, Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka cybercinic, writes that "The forthcoming Nook Color and the rumored Amazon Kindle Tablet will bring good Linux-powered tablets to users this year after all."   Then he adds: ' "Sources at Amazon tell me that the company will indeed produce a mass-market Android tablet.  I can't tell you its size, pricing, when it's expected to ship, or anything else of substance.  The one thing I do know is that, like the Kindle, it will run Linux with a Java-based...

As mentioned here on Oct. 15, Amazon told its UK customers about its battles to avoid the 'Agency Plan' created by Apple with the larger publishers and that the latter would 'require' online booksellers to accept the plan to fix prices to be the same at all online stores (notably higher in most cases). See the recent story for details of what Amazon said to its customers in a posting on the Kindle forums. The short version is: Recently, you may have heard that a small group of UK publishers will require booksellers to adopt an "agency model" for selling e-books. Under...

 CNet's David Carnoy weighed in on the debate over whether or not e-book reading on LCD screen causes more eyestrain than when reading on an e-Ink screen.  For him, it doesn't matter, but he apparently understands that for other humans it can be a problem though he prefers to think that it's not due to the LCD screen that others have a problem. In my own case -- with a focus only on words one after another against a background that puts light right into my eyes, there's quite a difference. I (and others report the same) can read...

There are already customer reports, at the Amazon Kindle Community forums, on the new early preview of Kindle 3 software update v3.0.3. Changes that were noted: 1. Those who are using screensaver 'hacks' will see no changes in that the screensavers they installed will still work. However, the update prevents installation of new screensavers, for now. That usually happens with new Kindle software updates and then a fix is created in a day or two. Amazon Kindle support has said in the past that these are ok but that people do anything at their own risk. I'm...

 Amazon's not standing still.  They recently officially released Kindle 3 Software Upgrade version 3.0.2, and last night they began requesting feedback on the "Early Preview of Next Version 3.0.3" for Kindle 3. Thanks to Golf11 (Randall), who alerted us to this one as he did the last one. As before, this is offered so that "Customers who want to try this early release of the software and provide feedback can download the update" from their servers. This update will also be available wirelessly in the next few weeks. Amazon explains that this update includes general performance improvements. 'After installing this update,...

I was reminded today by commenter Joaquín Avaria about some features that many don't realize are available, as one of them I mentioned some time ago worked well for him. One day, while at the Amazon forums, I saw a tip from a customer whose Whispernet on his new 3G Kindle-2 model (Global) wireless had suddenly stopped working in that he could not connect to the Internet . Because he was not in the U.S., he couldn't easily call Amazon voice support w/o charges to his phone. (U.S. residents, on the other hand, can always call Kindle Customer Support...