On The Literary Platform, Tony White (of Piece of Paper Press, which I covered here a couple of weeks ago) writes about an interactive storytelling project he has been working on with renowned artists Blast Theory. The project, Ivy4Evr, is aimed at drawing teens into the drama via messaging on their cell phones. White writes that over the course of planning the project, it was necessary to “forget about apps and ebooks for a while”, because they made a number of interesting discoveries. Most notably, most young people don’t have smartphones—but the phones they do have are almost...

The closed nature of the Apple platform has let it in for a lot of criticism, especially when that closed nature affects e-books or e-book applications. For example, Apple famously made David Carnoy change a swear word in his first iteration of the Knife Music appbook (though let it through in a later version), and rejected an e-book app for being able to access the public domain Kama Sutra e-book. And let’s not forget the great mature app purge, which probably caught some e-book-related apps as well. A number of people have been touting cell phones based on...

Ben Kunz at Bloomberg Businessweek has an interesting post on Apple’s pricing practices. Kunz posits that Apple uses psychological pricing tricks such as reference prices and price “decoys” to boost sales of more expensive items. I can’t say I agree with all of his points, but he brings up some interesting things to consider. Kunz first discusses price decoys, items that don’t really look like very good deals in order to make slightly better items look much better. He suggests that the rumored 7” iPad is such a price decoy, to make a 10”, more featureful version look...

E-books aren’t the only way to “TeleRead”. Whenever we receive a text message, or an instant message on line, you could say we “TelePhoneRead”—as different a form of communication from the phone calls of old as e-books are from printed books. I covered a similar article from TechCrunch a couple of weeks ago, but Om Malik of GigaOm has posted a piece on “Why we never talk anymore”—an article about the decline in phone voice communications and the rise in other forms such as text and possibly soon video. Malik talks about his personal history growing up...

I’ve written about using a MiFi or similar device—pocket routers that channel cellular Internet into secure WiFi—to “retrofit” 3G-style everywhere-connectivity to WiFi-only e-book and other devices. While there is a monthly charge for this Internet service, unlike the Kindle and Nook’s 3G, it is available for many more potential uses than the freebie connectivity baked into those devices. You can use it with any or every wireless device you own—at the same time. At least, as long as your bandwidth holds out. At the time I wrote the aforementioned article, Verizon was offering 250 megabytes per month for...

Bill Stiteler at our sister blog Appletell has posted a piece looking at the possibility of Apple adding Facetime to the next generation of iPod Touch (as I did here). He does mention a couple of points that I didn’t consider. One is that turning the iPod Touch into a wifi VoIP phone would allow Apple to offer phone service of a sort without having to put up with the complaints about AT&T’s service or the external cell phone antenna. Another is the possibility that the iPod Touch will only have the front-facing FaceTime camera...

Ether Books has looked at the population of devices out there and has concluded that the mobile phone is the best way to do for its ebooks, says the Inquirer. Speaking to Reuters at the London Book Fair: "The tech press may be slavering over the Ipad, Kindle and Sony Ereader as traditional publishers leap over themselves to expand their e-book offerings," Ether Books digital director Maureen Scott told Reuters. "But at Ether Books we've made the decision to go straight to distributing short works via our Iphone app to devices people already own, are familiar with and are happy...

From a press release I received this morning: The Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK’s only annual book award for fiction written by a woman, today announces the 2010 shortlist. Celebrating its fifteenth anniversary this year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world. ... Orange is partnering with mobile book specialist GoSpoken this year to offer free downloadable extracts of the shortlisted books direct to your mobile. Text extracts from all six shortlisted books will be available to download for free from today by texting ‘prize’ to 60300 from any UK mobile. The shortlist is:...