I have lately been thinking about writing an e-book guide for the average consumer—something very simple and basic that breaks down some of the complex issues surrounding e-books into something easy to understand for people who don’t currently know anything about them. Before I begin, I’d like to know what members of the TeleRead community might think such a guide should contain. My new tech support day job has brought home to me once more just what a gap there is between how much the average person knows about computers and how much computer geeks know. In a...

Found via tweet from Diane Duane: Duane now has all three extant books of her Middle Kingdoms series available as inexpensive, DRM-free e-books at her website, DianeDuane.com. The books are sold in EPUB, Mobipocket, LRF, PDF, and PalmDoc formats, and the purchase price includes a copy in one of these formats, as well as a free bonus of a PDF map from the original print editions. (Given that it is sold without DRM, of course, one format is really all you need.) Duane only accepts payment via PayPal for now. The Door into...

Notice Len's comments about lack of DRM interoperability - the fact that the books are "Epub" doesn't mean anything!!...

The Bookseller’s FutureEBook blog has a interesting post today on the process of converting textbooks into digital textbooks. The textbook publisher that writer John Pettigrew works for, Cambridge University Press, is in the process of exploring the market for e-textbooks. In looking into the matter, it ran up against the problem that there simply isn’t much information available about the success of e-textbooks versus printed ones—most of the headlines about e-books relate to fiction. So, to get its feet wet, the company chose two textbooks—one fairly well-known and the other relatively new—to convert and market to...

If refurbished $109 Kindles aren’t your thing, perhaps you might be interested in a penny Blackberry. TechDealDigger reports that Amazon is offering the normally-$200 Blackberry Bold 9000 for one cent when you sell your soul to activate a new service plan with AT&T. Though the Blackberry has largely become an “also-ran” to the iPhone, I gather that there are still a number of e-book apps available for it (including Kindle, eReader, and the official MobiPocket reader that is still missing from the iPhone). Of course, compared to the amount you would be shelling out over the life of...

From the Diesel ebook blog. Mobipocket, one of our formats here at the Diesel eBook Store, was created by the lovely French couple, Thierry Brethes and Nathalie Ting. Their smart and lofty goal was to introduce an eBook format that could be rendered on a multitude of devices. It’s no wonder that Mobipocket quickly become as popular as it is. Whereas other earlier formats were designed for a particular device or company, Mobipocket strived to unite all eBooks on any and all reading devices. Democracy in action. Vive la liberté! But, like all good murder stories, this one gets complicated. In 2005, Amazon...

Unlike Stephenie Meyer, Tor.com knows how to give away free e-books for real. The site gave a bunch away as part of its launch promotion, and now it’s doing it again (albeit on a much smaller scale). Four stories that premiered on Tor.com and are now eligible for Hugo, Nebula, or Locus awards are now available for free download via the US iBooks (no direct link available, but it’s showing up as “Award-Nominated Sci-Fi Short Stories” in the rotating ads at the top of the iBooks store right now), Kindle, and Sony Reader stores. They will remain...

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...

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...

Gizmodo has a great article by Matt Buchanan laying out the “Tower of E-Babel” problem: different readers have their own different, restricted file format ecosystems. There is not a lot new to long-time TeleRead readers, but it would be great to show anyone just getting into e-books, or thinking about it. The article starts with a Steve Jobs quote about Apple using the EPUB format because of its “openness,” and proceeds to fill in what he is not saying: “open” or not, DRM-locked iBooks books will not be readable on other DRM’d EPUB capable readers, nor vice versa....

Today Valve Software officially announced that its Steam digital game distribution platform will be coming to the Macintosh in April. But they are not stopping there. Macintosh owners who have already purchased the PC version of compatible Valve games (those built on the Source engine, such as Half-Life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead) will get the Macintosh version free. (And this will continue into the future, too: buying a new game will get you both versions from now on.) Imagine if buying the Kindle version of an e-book bought you the eReader version, too for one price—and...

That's the question asked by Plug Your Book. For some people, especially those outside the US, it might be a good idea. In theory, there’s no reason not to list a book with Mobipocket. I get a few sales a month through them — for every 25 Kindle sales, I get one or two Mobipocket sales. Mobipocket is a Paris-based eBook company that Amazon bought a few years ago. Its eBook format is the underlying language for the eBooks in Amazon’s Kindle store. Books listed with Mobipocket automatically show up as Kindle editions, as long as the publisher selects Amazon as...