On blog e-Learning Stuff, an unidentified blogger writes about a recent conference he or she attended at which discussion was had of the “Kindle Problem”—the Kindle is the most popular e-book platform, but not all e-book platforms and formats are compatible with the Kindle. And thus, there was a problem “with the Kindle.” The blogger points out: Blaming the user is indicative of an industry that fails to understand its users and is an industry that dictates how users should do things, over trying to meet the needs of the user. The...

Tech In Asia reports that, after months of delays, Japanese news sources have reported Amazon is soon to release the Kindle in Japan. This marks the fourth time such reports have surfaced in the last few months. This time, the anticipated date is by the end of the year. A previous prediction had set the device’s debut right about now. It seems that negotiations with Japanese publishers have been going slowly, though several major and about 40 minor Japanese publishers are reported to have signed on so far. Perhaps they’ve learned from watching Amazon’s history with publishers in the...

A few days ago, I was contacted by Chih-Chin Sun of Flygrip, an iPhone/e-reader handgrip accessory made by a company that began selling its products in February of this year. Ms. Sun had read my post about seeking a one-handed e-reading solution for my mother, who had her right arm amputated on New Year’s Eve, and wanted to send my mother and me each one of the Flygrip devices gratis—for my Mom to try out, and for me to review. She noted that the device already had a number of quite satisfied one-handed (and two-handed) users. After looking at...

It’s no secret that the sales of e-readers seems to be flattening out lately, as just about everyone who would ever have wanted to buy an e-reader has by now already bought one. As the bottom of the barrel of customers draws near, Amazon is about to embark on a new initiative designed to sell e-readers to the most die-hard paper book holdouts. According to a recently-issued press release, Amazon will pitch its next reader at those people who say they just couldn’t give up the smell of paper books. Amazon is going to partner with DuroSport, manufacturer...

Amazon is shortly going to push an over-the-air update to upgrade all Kindle Fire users from version 6.2.2 to version 6.3. The upgrades will include a number of performance improvements such as faster reconnection to wifi after the Fire has been asleep. It will also be adding the ability to highlight and share passages from books that regular Kindle users already have, and an application called “Book Extras”, which will serve as a portal to Shelfari content about a book while reading it. It is also going to add the ability to buy print-replica textbooks, which precisely duplicate the...

The Kindle is great for e-reading, but what about editing? British writer Stephanie Zia blogs that the keyboard Kindle makes a great editing tool: Be it a book, a dissertation, a company report, you can email your own work to your kindle with the special email you're given with your purchase. Or you can transfer it direct from your computer. Your MS magically transforms into 'book'. A nice chunk of that all-important distance is added that doesn't happen when you read to edit from the screen, or even from paper. You can highlight text and add...

I know I mention Diane Duane’s e-book store sales a lot, but I figure that she’s one of very few excellent examples I know of authors who run their own DRM-free multi-format e-book stores and offer frequent discounts to boot. She’s a shining example of how to do things right, and I think that kind of example needs all the exposure it can get. And speaking of frequent discounts, Duane is currently offering a 60% discount on everything in her e-book store through 23:59 Hawaiian time, Tuesday March 27th. Use the coupon code FLASHSALE during the checkout process. Among...

One of the benefits of e-books is that they don’t take up any space. They reduce clutter and allow us to simplify our lives by reading more but not having what we read take up space. Though I doubt most of us go to the extreme of Joshua Fields Millburn. Millburn was inspired by the passages in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club about the tyranny of material possessions to sell or give away his entire 2,000-book physical library (save for four reference books he uses in a class he teaches) and do his subsequent reading via Kindle. The few books...

Update: I had not noticed until it was pointed out to me in the comments that the article I was reporting on was a year old. It was shown in Zite as a recent article (probably because of the “March” dateline without a year in the blog posting format). My eyes slid right over the “2011” in the subject line. I should have done more research, but I was in a hurry to post. I apologize for misreading the date. In fact, there was a more recent article from July stating that, due to friction with Amazon’s...

Until recently, the main formatting tools that self-publishing writers could use to create e-books were expensive desktop-publishing applications that cost a lot of money to buy and a lot of time to learn. (I’m not counting Calibre here because Calibre is a conversion app—you still have to do the actual writing and formatting in something else.) However, the $50 writing and note-keeping app Scrivener has changed that. Scrivener can export e-books in PDF, Kindle, EPUB, and Word (required for Smashwords) formats, among others. On his blog “Writing is Hard Work,” independent author and English teacher Roger Colby...

Blogger James W. Harris has been thinking about the effects the Kindle is having on the science fiction genre. Looking at Amazon’s Top 100 lists for paid and free e-books in the SF genre, he notices many unknown, usually self-published, authors grabbing up position on both lists, and a lot of books by classic SF authors (such as his favorite, Robert A. Heinlein) aren’t even on the list. Harris finds a lot of new writers are taking a cue from Amazon’s sales technique of lowering the price of a book for a few days to get attention and then raising...

The emergence of search engine optimization (SEO) significantly changed the way that web content is created. Will the digitization of e-books, and the offering of free sample chapters, change the way that books are plotted and written? This is the question asked by Alan Jacobs in an article on The Atlantic. And he finds that in some ways it already is. Jacobs points out that a number of authors are trying to plot their books so that a major cliffhanger occurs at the end of the 10% that Amazon provides in its sample chapters. He also notes that the...