Well, right now it’s snowing down below and the devil is skiing to work. I was convinced that there was no way a version of Fictionwise’s eReader would come out for iPad, now that Barnes & Noble was busy trying to push the Nook and its own tied-in eReader at all costs. In April, Fictionwise’s customer service outright said there were then “no plans to update the iPhone eReader app for iPad.” But in the last couple of weeks, surprise surprise, out came a new iPad-compatible eReader. I’m still not entirely sure why. Are Barnes & Noble still...

I do realize this is an e-book blog, not a video gaming blog, but digital media do share a lot of commonalities—and Valve just keeps doing things that prompt me to draw direct comparisons to things e-book stores and publishers should be doing, but aren’t. Our sister blog Gamertell, which is a video gaming blog, has the details. Over the last two weeks, Valve’s game distribution platform Steam’s anti-cheating system mistakenly banned about 12,000 Steam accounts from playing Modern Warfare 2, for cheating. Steam’s system is simplistic, usually accurate, and there is no appeal—the only way to start playing a...

Engadget reports that Verizon is getting a pair of e-book reading devices—one 7”, one 10”—in September, and the name “Entourage” has been thrown around in connection with them. Are they going to be made by the company Entourage, currently known for the dual-screened Edge? Are they going to be dual-screened like the Edge, or just tablets? Nobody knows at this point. On the other hand, our sister blog Gadgetell reports that Sharp is releasing 5.5” and 10.8” color LCD tablets through Verizon later this year (see also this TeleRead story), with 3G enabled. Is this something entirely different...

eReader has been updated to 2.1.2. According to the App Store it has been updated for iOS 4 and now natively supports the iPad....

It looks like another chapter in Fictionwise’s existence has come to a close. Fictionwise is ending its Micropay e-book rebate program. Until June 2010 Fictionwise had a Micropay System that allowed deposits by members and supported micropay rebate promotions on some ebooks. Rebates and deposits for this system have been discontinued due to eBook industry changes and other factors. If you have an existing balance you may still use it until it is exhausted, but no further deposits may be made and there will be no further Micropay Rebates other than Buywise Large Transaction Rebates....

It’s been just over a year since Amazon bought Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, and as I reviewed Stanza the other day I glanced back over some of the old blog entries TeleRead writers made back then. I thought it would be interesting to look at a couple of those predictions or opinions in light of how the past year has gone. David Rothman wanted Washington to see the acquisition as a signal to investigate the e-book industry for possible monopoly practices: Washington often bungles things, but at least we can vote the bastards out...

I’ve already looked at the other two of the original “big three” iPhone e-book apps. The third of these apps is Stanza, the EPUB reader from Lexcycle. Stanza has a lot in common with eReader. They’re both great apps for the iPhone, their reading models are similar, and Stanza even shares the ability to download and read eReader-format e-books—even those protected by DRM. And like eReader, Stanza’s future in the iPad era is uncertain. Lexcycle COO Neelan Choksi said in a comment posted on Lexcycle’s forum on March 15th, “Currently, there is no work being done to customize...

In an article mainly covering the new features of the Nook’s firmware update (which we already mentioned here), CNet lets slip this interesting tidbit about a forthcoming iPad version of its eReader app, which could be available as soon as May: Barnes & Noble reps said the new iPad app is completely redesigned from the ground up. Interestingly, the company is also working on a totally new iPhone app, but it will come out after the iPad app and be offered as a separate download for iPhone and iPod Touch users. Unlike Amazon's...

This article is not directly related to e-books, but e-music and its relationship to CDs are only a short jump away from e-books and their relationship to paper books—and it got me thinking about those similarities. “Ernesto” on the peer-to-peer news blog TorrentFreak takes a look at music industry sales statistics and points out that, as much as the RIAA likes to complain about it, piracy is actually not killing music sales. Ernesto notes that the digital music market—which would compete more directly with digital music piracy than the sale of physical CDs—shows no signs of faltering. ...

I began writing this as part of the review of eReader that I posted earlier, brought on by thinking about eReader and Stanza’s failure to get high-resolution iPad versions, but I thought that it deserved its own separate post. Make no mistake, there has been a certain amount of anti-corporate paranoia going around about smaller, much-beloved e-book companies bought up by larger corporations ever since MobiPocket planned to release an iPhone version of its reader but was allegedly stifled by its new owner Amazon. Just look at what happened when Stanza vanished from the app...

This review represents an update to the review I posted looking at version 1.3 of the reader back in December, 2008. For the most part, I am copying the text of the eReader portion of that review and changing the parts of it that are no longer true. In this, as in future reviews in this series, I will focus the interview on the iPhone reading experience, then cover how the iPad experience differs afterward. eReader (now in v2.1.1) is the grande dame of iPhone e-reading applications, tracing its lineage back more than ten years to the...

Received the following email from Joanna and thought I should pass it on: It's a newsworthy day :) Apparently Fictionwise has removed books from the agency publishers as they ramp up for tomorrow's big change. Someone on Mobile Read reported that the titles are off the website and have been removed from people's wish lists as well. I can confirm that my own wish list of 3-odd books is down to 3 titles now, and some of them are already at the higher prices (although a book on my Kobo wish list seems to have gone down in price!) Many people...