I posted earlier about some problems I have been having recently with error-filled ebooks---I am not talking about major editing-process errors, rather, I am talking about typos and formatting glitches resulting from unproofed conversions. People used to complain about these at times before ebooks 'hit it big,' but now that we e-reading customers are a more mainstream group, the complaints are getting increasingly vociferous and this has been the first year where I have really noticed a widespread problem myself. But just how widespread is this problem? Is my feeling that these days, I am becoming more of a copy-editor...

Teleread's frequent contributor Joanna, aka Ficbot, has made her various ebook resources easier to find. She writes, "I have consolidated some of my on-line projects into a single handy website: the e-Finds Book Pages! It's your central gathering place for The Indie eBook Hall of Fame, the eBacklist Collection, the best of my Teleread Articles and more! The site comes in two flavours: The Author Page has info, articles, books and web links of interest to indie ebook authors The Reader Page has links to reviews, curated collections and blogs of interest to readers Via E-Finds...

Lex Friedman of Macworld takes a look at the Barnes & Noble eReader for iPad (not the one for the iPhone/Touch) and concludes that is is adequate, but no match for either iBooks or Kindle for the iPad. One thing he really dislikes is how slow it is....

We have extensively covered consumers using the Amazon one-star “nuclear option” as a method of protest—first with the DRM-laden game Spore, then with the first books to be “windowed”—withheld from the Kindle for a few months at the publisher’s behest. Joanna (nee Ficbot) made waves with her controversial post about using this method to protest Kindle e-book pricing and quality issues, “Maybe we should be hurting the authors”, then posted a more temperate follow-up. Now author Paul Carr has posted a rant against the practice on TechCrunch. He feels that those leaving one-star protest reviews on Amazon...

So many articles on the potential for e-textbooks! Chris Meadows posted earlier about the shortcomings of the Kindle DX at Virginia University, for example. Not so great with the PDFs, and better suited for reading fiction. So...what if reading fiction is part of your degree? Can an ebook reader replace a bagful of textbooks then? I did some thinking about my own degree in English Language and Literature (1996-2000) and I think that if ebooks had been even half as big back then, I would have saved a fortune! WHICH OF MY COURSES WERE E-FRIENDLY? The first year course was your standard...

I spent some time this week going through my ebook library, tagging everything with appropriate labels and pasting in book summaries from bookstore websites. With almost 800 books in my growing collection, I wanted to have an easier time finding unread books to suit my mood, or old favourites to explore and re-visit. So what did I learn from my ebook spring cleaning? 'Have it' and 'Will Read it' are Two Different Things I learned that there are so many great books I can be spending my time on. Why waste it on things which don't really interest me? It's like the...

Sometime this coming week, I should be receiving a Pocketbook 302 e-book reader to review—and Joanna, nee Ficbot, will be reviewing the smaller Pocketbook 360. We have mentioned Pocketbook a few times already; it is a Ukrainian/Taiwanese company that uses e-ink-based hardware from Netronix (the OEM that makes the Cybook, COOL-ER, and others) with its own Linux-based firmware. The 302 is Pocketbook’s most advanced model so far. It seems to be a pretty standard 6” e-ink reader (with the standard USB interface), with the addition of wifi and some apps including RSS, Sudoku, and—according to the Nate’s Ebook...

I am always fascinated to speak with people who notice my readers when I'm out 'in the wild' with them. I feel like sometimes I am a little too 'expert' for my own good---I've tried many devices, read hundreds of books this way, I blog, and so on---that I wonder if the 'average' newbie coming in from 0 on this would really find it all as fun and easy as I do. So when a lady on the bus approached me just after I pulled put my Kindle to ask em about it, I was more than happy to show...

Our own Ficbot, otherwise known as Joanna, has had her 52 minute audio interview with The Writing Show published. You can find it here. Way to go!...

Here's a use for ebook readers you may not have thought of: to use as a handbook in case of emergency. I found myself in a situation yesterday where I had two children in my charge, and their parent arrived to get them feeling very ill and not in a condition to be driving. I needed immediate access to information I didn't turn out to have handy. For example, I had a daytime phone number for the boss, but not an after-hours one; I knew the nearest intersections but did not have the exact address of my location. There was...

So, it's now been a month since I got my Kindle. Was it a worthwhile upgrade for me? Which features am I using and which am I finding lacking? Do I see myself buying another reader anytime soon? MY TWO REASONS FOR UPGRADING First, I must admit, I am really loving my Kindle. I use it daily and am finding that I am especially using the text to speech and dictionary features, which were the two things lacking in my Sony that prompted me to upgrade. I am not a huge music person, so I found that while walking to the subway or...

Mike Masnick at TechDirt links to an article by Martin Bosworth, the managing editor of ConsumerAffairs.com, entitled “The Creative Class War”. (Sadly, Bosworth passed away the day after writing this piece.) After discussing a novel set in a dark future world, which involves a copyright enforcer hunting down and killing copyright violators, Bosworth puts forward the thesis that “there’s a long-simmering resentment of people that actually make art, and the Internet has brought it to the surface in a way we’ve never seen before.” (On reading this, I couldn’t help but think of the title of...