Gaby Wood, the Telegraph’s Head of Books, has an fairly lengthy article on The Telegraph pondering what e-books mean for the future of literature. Wood considers Jonathan Franzen’s much-remarked-upon comments about how e-books are damaging society, and ponders the question of whether they really are. Though Wood found she did not care for the Kindle reading experience herself, she notes that there is nothing at all wrong with it for those who do enjoy it (a refreshing admission when it seems like everyone who doesn’t like e-ink reading is ready to claim it shot their wife and kicked their...

  The press release says it all: Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today expanded its portfolio of bestselling NOOK® devices with the introduction of NOOK Tablet – with 8GB of memory,...

While not exactly news, it’s fun to look at a conversion-of-an-e-reader-skeptic story every now and then. Here’s one from Florida International University Medical Library Digital Access Librarian Bohyun Kim. Despite the digital nature of Kim’s job title, she had never really been tempted to get an e-ink e-reader device—mainly because she already had an iPad. But when she checked out a Kindle loaded with e-books from the university lending library, she found she enjoyed the experience more than she expected. And although the lighter weight and less eyestrain-inducing screen were nice, what she really liked was the way there...

The Verge reports that Barnes & Noble is placing a low-end version of its Nook Tablet in Wal-Mart, launching at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, February 22nd. The device will have only 8 GB of RAM, the same as the Kindle Fire, and is expected to launch at a lower price than the current 16GB model’s $249. (The most obvious price point is, of course, the Kindle Fire’s $199, but B&N and Wal-Mart could surprise us.) Of course, to call it an 8 GB model is something of a misnomer. Unlike the Kindle Fire, it will probably reserve all but...

I love word games and this one by John Cog is certainly different from what's currently out there.  From the Amazon description: Create words by combining the correct sets of letters from two columns. Just select a word's vowels and their matching consonants, and then watch as the completed word appears onscreen. You don't need to rearrange any letters, since the letters from each column occur in the same order as in the completed word. (You'd match RPTN with EUIO to form ERUPTION.) The easy-to-play, matching-game format means no text entry is required. And the excitement increases as the game progresses...

From E-Reader-Info: There are reports that Amazon started to order 6" color (Triton) touch E Ink panels from E Ink. E Ink will ship over 3 million displays a month to Amazon - starting next week - which probably means Amazon will soon announce the new e-reader. E Ink is already shipping 9.7" Triton displays to Ectaco, used in their Jetbook color e-reader, which is already shipping in eastern Europe. They are also shipping the same displays to Hanvon for their Chinese market reader. More in the article....

Many ebook distributors use Adobe DRM – not only popular ebookstores like Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google, and Sony, but also a lot local level vendors. We have to live with the fact that Adobe DRM-ed ebooks can be used on a limited number of devices. In the worst case scenario, if you don’t authorize the device with Adobe ID, you will be able to read the book only on that device. It’s because the downloaded file can’t be associated with any ID, therefore it can’t be opened on devices with: (1) no ID, (2) different ID. If you want to have more control and flexibility,...

calibre 0.8.40: New Features Amazon metadata download: Support the new 'Book Description' section that Amazon publishes for some books. Also workaround the amazon US servers occasionally returning broken markup leading to calibre not finding any matches for books on Amazon. Kindle driver: Add an option to allow using page counts stored in a custom column. Go to Preferences->Plugins and customize the Kindle driver, to tell it to use a custom column to get page count data. Template language: Add a current_library_name() function that can be used to return the name of the currently opened library in calibre Driver for Xperia Neo and PocketBook A10 Bug Fixes Fix...

Is Amazon evil or just good at business? We’ve carried a couple of articles lately whose authors believe the latter, but it’s never been a mystery what side the Authors Guild comes down on. The Guild has just posted a lengthy essay to its blog laying out what it sees as Amazon’s predatory pricing and anticompetitive business practices. While admitting Amazon has innovated with the creation of the Kindle, the Guild holds that Amazon used its pre-existing position as the world’s leading print book vendor to leverage its e-book position into a near-monopoly. It cites Amazon’s removal of the...

All may not be coming up roses in e-textbook land. Sarah Kessler reports on Mashable that one of Kno’s largest-selling textbook publishers, Cengage Learning, is attempting to pull its material from Kno’s store—and Kno is suing for breach of license agreement. Though Kno deals with about 40 publishers, Cengage’s content has historically made up 25% of its overall sales. However, Cengage doesn’t like the way Kno allows users to copy and paste passages from textbooks into a separate journal view, considering it an unauthorized derivative work. The publisher gave Kno 30 days to correct the issue, then terminated the...

Another one from Andrys Basten's A Kindle World blog: SUDOKU'S UNBOUND #3 PUZZLE FOR KINDLE AVAILABLE WITH TOUCH/WRITE TECHNOLOGY That's write! right! This is the first puzzle, available exclusively on Kindle Touch, that allows entry of numbers...

From Andrys Basten's A Kindle World blog: THE KINDLE BOOKS APP ON KINDLE FIRE HAS A GLITCH THAT CAN CAUSE BOOK TITLES TO NOT DISPLAY - THE SOLUTION This dilemma of Kindle book titles seeming to disappear from Kindle Fire listings of book titles on The Cloud especially (the server library area) and also from the listing for the Device has been happening to more than a few, per reports from the forums -- and it happened to me twice in a few days. Forum members, as usual (in this case, 'Q' and 'Mona') came up with the answer a few weeks ago,...