Found via tweet from @Hadrien: The New York Times has a brief article profiling several of the e-book reading choices available for the iPhone and other smartphones: Kindle, Aldiko (for Android), Barnes & Noble eReader, Shortcovers, and Stanza. While the Times only mentions the Barnes & Noble version of eReader and says e-pub rather than the more commonly used EPUB or ePub, the article also mentions Feedbooks twice. It is great to see the smartphone e-reading alternative getting such distinguished press! Related: Times on dedicated e-readers choices and a Disneys book subscription service aided at kids. Technorati Tags: Kindle,Aldiko,eReader,Barnes & Noble,Shortcovers,Stanza,Feedbooks,New York Times,iPhone,Android,smartphones,e-books...

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! A number of other sites are doing Thanksgiving lists (Ars Technica, Wired, another Wired, and Wired again on things not to be thankful for), and I thought I would assay one of my own. Of course, we all know that we have a lot more to be thankful for than just e-book-related things, but they are this site’s focus after all. There are a lot of people and companies that have made a difference in the e-book industry this year, and I thank the ones important to me below. These are the folks...

Simply for the convenience of Kindle owners, we’re now available as a Kindle blog---readable via subscription at $1.99 a month. If you own a Kindle and prefer “Free,” you can still read us directly through the browser or by way of arrangements at Feedbooks....

From Hadrien at Feedbooks: First of all, Paulo Coelho, Brazilian best-selling author published several short stories on Feedbooks himself. We released the first version of our AtomPub service. This will enable integration with Feedbooks in potentially any publishing platform and software. I've blogged about a first example already but expect more and more exciting integrations in the near future. The TeleRead take: Given Amazon’s purchase of Stanza, it’s interesting to see Feedbooks---now focusing mostly on public domain books---continuing to forge ahead with built-in catalog opportunities for e-reader developers....

Feedbooks has put up a post about OPDS and what Feedbooks would like to accomplish in the future. I must admit that I never realized all the technical problems in distributing ebooks. It's just not that simple if you want to do it well. For several months, we’ve been distributing books to Stanza through our Atom endpoints. While the idea of using a standard format (Atom) as a catalog format was a good one, Lexcycle quickly had to extend things through new rel values or additional markup to support things such as thumbnails, search or links to similar books....

From the Feedbooks blog: We’ve updated our support for Mobipocket/Kindle e-books: on the Kindle 2 you can now use the controller to easily switch between contents in the book. This should make overall navigation much easier, and if you’d like to select a specific chapter instead, all of our books use a table of contents too. Kindle 2 users can browse or download books from Feedbooks: using our Kindle guide through our mobile website ...

 FBReaderJ 0.3.1’s new wrinkles: “Library information has been moved from the config database into a separate database. Library speed is increased. The first library loading may take some time (about 3 seconds for 30 books in my library) however all the further loadings should be much faster. Library view has been changed. Tree view is used instead of simple list. (New screenshots are available.) Table of Contents has been implemented. Epub format support has been improved. NCX table of contents support has been added,...

Moderator's note on Hadrien Gardeur: Years ago I urged Project Gutenberg to come up with a truly slick program to download, manage and display Gutenberg books. "A book tuner," I called the idea with radio in mind. Hadrien at Feedbooks had similar dreams and acted on them. Hadrien's technology now helps various e-reading apps serve in effect as book tuners. These include such programs as Stanza (the iPhone reader shown at left) and FBReader (a possible candidate for official use on the next OLPC laptop). From within those apps, his technology lets you directly search and call up items from Feedbooks'...

That's among the questions raised in a study by psychologists and English professors (full study here---PDF alert).  One more reason to rejoice over the spread of free public domain archives on the Net? At least some Victorian novels were intended to encourage moral behavior, the researchers say. But did the intended result actually happen? To extrapolate, did Dickens' fiction really contribute to the end of sweatshops by making people more ethical? It's an issue of personal interest to me. I wrote The Solomon Scandals to tell a story, not elevate morality in D.C.  I doubt it'll reform the...

Some interesting information from Feedbooks. Adobe DE now supports full justification, but not on the user end, only on the creator end. Here is what they say: Adobe released Digital Editions 1.7 today, and although they mostly mention their support for additional languages and installer for IT professionals in their release notes, the most important feature is the support for full justification. The previous versions of DE didn...

For Windows types, which is most people, Bluefire blog has part 1 of a tutorial of how to create a Silverlight 2.0 browser that will show "a grid of thumbnails from a Feedbooks RSS source. Under each thumbnail is a button that allows users to download an ePub version of the book to their desktop." You can see the results on the left. They also have an interesting article here: "The Text Layout Framework (TLF) is new tech that dramatically improves typography and foreign language support in Flash player 10. Adobe recently tapped Bluefire to build a TLF...

FBReader, an e-book reader for Linux and Windows, has added the ability to download e-books directly from Feedbooks. You can read about the details at the FBReader site here. I tried FBReader when I was using my Nokia internet tablet, but I found it very difficult to use. I haven't used a recent version, however. I'm constantly amazed about how much time and effort is being put into the e-book community - all done by volunteers....