There are at least two dozen Baen free e-book CDs on Joe Buckley’s Fifth Imperium Baen CD repository, which represents a wealth of free SF and fantasy e-books available for reading in iBooks (or your other EPUB-reading app or device of choice). The problem is, they’re each located in their own separate directories on each disk, and dragging them individually into iTunes could be quite an undertaking. Plus, there are so many duplicates, and a lot of the CDs don’t even have the books in EPUB format yet! How do you deal with that? Here’s how I did...

The last few e-readers I’ve reviewed have been corporate-, or at least company-created—crafted by teams of developers, with a very smooth and polished look to them and, with the exception of eReader, all relative latecomers to the iPhone platform. It’s time to switch things up and take a look at a much older, largely solo effort: Zachary Bedell’s iPhone/iPad universal application BookShelf (v2.3.2968). If any app could be called the original iPhone e-book reader, BookShelf certainly qualifies. A predecessor, Books 1.0 (not written by Bedell), actually pre-dates Apple’s first iPhone software development kit—it was in one of the unofficial...

Sara Weinman just spotted a breakdown of e-book formats that lit agent Steve Axelrod provided for the first week of sales for book by one of his best-selling writers. The numbers show Amazon’s dominance of the e-book trade. Granted, this is for just one title, and it’s a June stat; and some other people’s numbers are odds with his breakdown---suggesting, for example, that Adobe counts more heavily. Still, I have no doubt that Amazon is e-bookseller #1 right now and will be the Goliath for some months, regardless of how well the Nook or other rivals fare. Perhaps...

“Courier is a real device, and we've heard that it's in the ‘late prototype’ stage of development. It's not a tablet, it's a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. “ – Gizmodo. Details: Techmeme and Google roundups and CNET (thanks, Felix), plus BNET’s not-so-upbeat  item on the device’s commercoal prospects. The TeleRead take: Hey, told you something might be cookin’. For now I’d like to know more about the e-book angle, and whether Microsoft will spiff up its Reader app...

Microsoft brushed up its ancient Reader software a tad with slightly tweaked Windows Mobile 6 and 6.1 versions. So might a tablet be next, with e-books as a major app? A Microsoft product manager announcement has sparked some tantalizing speculation about a tab (Techmeme roundup here). E-book-friendly device on the way? If so, it would be in line with an old vision of Bill Gates, who couldn’t pull it off because the publishing industry and the tech weren’t ready. But maybe life will be different now that E has gained more traction and an Apple...

I love that title! Here's what TechFlash has to say about this update: ... The comment made me wonder about the status of Microsoft Reader, and it turns out that blogger Todd Ogasawara turned up something very interesting on that front this week. The Microsoft Reader team, apparently stirring to life, released a small update for the Windows Mobile version of Microsoft Reader. (It's for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 devices but not WinMo 6.5, which hits the market next month.) Just how stagnant has this Microsoft product been? The release this week...