There is a risk to relying on cloud services, as I’ve found to my chagrin time and again: they may not always be there when you need them. Etherpad servers have crashed, taking the only copy of my writing with them. Web-based IM service Meebo shut down, leaving me scrambling to find a replacement. And now comes the latest blow: Google plans to close down its Google Reader RSS reader service (along with a number of other, lesser-used services) as of July 1. I used Google Reader exclusively to find stories to reblog when I was writing more actively here—I would...

CNet’s “The Cheapskate” blog has a special offer on the TruConnect MiFi hotspot, offering a $25 discount to knock the device down from $99 to $74 when you use the discount code CNET2012 through TruConnect’s checkout. As I’ve said before, this is a great way to get inexpensive (albeit slow) prepaid 3G wifi (using Sprint’s network) for those who only plan to use it occasionally or with very low-bandwidth applications (such as, say, downloading e-books). The plan costs $4.99 per month in which it is actually used (you pay nothing if you don’t use it at all during...

Calibre is one of the only good open-source options for managing your e-book collection, but we all know it’s notoriously user-unfriendly. On one of the mailing lists I follow, I’ve heard from Becca Price, who is trying to do something about that. She is compiling a help file for Calibre as part of a class she was taking on how to develop help files. Becca notes that this is an entirely unofficial project, and “isn’t even quite a beta draft.” And the sound file on the “About Calibre” topic does not work reliably (apparently it works on Macs but not PCs) has...

Today the Wikimedia Foundation announced a demonstration of a forthcoming new WYSIWYG editor for Wikipedia, in the hope that making it easier for people to edit without having to understand confusing symbols or wikitext markup will lead more people to edit the wiki. The idea is that you shouldn’t have to learn a new coding language in order to contribute what you know. (According to TechCrunch, only about 0.7% of Wikipedia users are active contributors to the site, making up about half of the entries.) While the demonstration version still lacks a number of key features and is restricted...

Want to add on-the-go connectivity to your Wi-Fi-only tablet or e-reader? Wal-Mart could have just the thing for you. Our sister blog Gadgetell reports on a new prepaid MiFi plan coming out through a deal between Wal-Mart and TruConnect (whose $5/mo + 3.9 cents per megabyte plan I currently use). The plan will use the same MiFi 2200 model as TruConnect’s, but instead of a monthly fee, there will be a one-time charge for megabytes that never expire (as long as you use the device at least once a year so your account stays active). The press...

Publishing Perspectives has an article discussing various new tools for electronic research. Though this isn’t directly connected to e-books, in a separate discussion seed post editor in chief Edward Nawotka draws a parallel between the problems of researchers sifting through reams of data to find what they need and readers confronted by a million zillion $2.99-or-less self-published e-books to find something worth reading. Unfortunately, those research tools in that main article won’t help. The internet and digital age promised us tools that would help us find the perfect books to read. But with the proliferation of...

Readability has lately found itself plunged into some of the same hot water as aggregators Flipboard and Zite. Originally conceived as a reformatting service to let people read articles on the web in clear, easy-to-read formatting, without distracting advertisements, the service revamped itself and expanded into a subscription service to pay publishers for skipping their ads. This didn’t work out terribly well for Readability, and so it recently went free instead of trying to convince people to subscribe. But one particularly obnoxious feature that Readability introduced at the time of its revamp is that when you reformat an article...

On ReadWriteWeb, Alicia Eler reports on Cowbird.com, a site meant for telling stories that are too long for social networking. Sounds an awful lot like a blog to me, but Eler explains the site has broader ambitions pertaining to storytelling in general: What Cowbird is really trying to do, however, is something much bigger than just building another social network where stories live and die. It wants to bring back the art of storytelling, that same art that's been lost in the 24-hour Web news cycle, the constant onslaught of tweets and Facebook status updates, image-heavy...

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...

Venture capitalist Bill Gurley’s personal blog, Above the Crowd, has a post pointing out why Dropbox is a “major disruption” (that is, a disruptive innovation—”an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology” per Wikipedia) in the industry. Prompted by a new feature Dropbox added, to allow Android devices to synch photos automatically, Gurley points out that it’s easy to underestimate the importance of what Dropbox has done. He explains that Dropbox was the first...

We’ve mentioned the e-writing app Scrivener (available for Windows or OS X) a time or two, and some of our commenters have expressed fondness for it. Indeed, even my brother loves it and has been pestering me to try it; he seems to think that lack of Scrivener is all that’s keeping me from writing the next Great American Novel. I have to admit, with the things I’m seeing about it I’m definitely starting to get tempted to try it out. On The Creative Penn, writer Joanna Penn blogs that she used Scrivener for her latest book, and that...

A while ago, I wrote about the idea of using a MiFi to retrofit 3G mobile web access to wifi-capable devices (such as e-readers), and I also mentioned the TruConnect MiFi pay-as-you-go service that allows bite-sized prepaid-3G-wifi usage with no contract required. It has been a couple of weeks since I received my TruConnect MiFi for Christmas, and I’ve used it enough to get a decent idea of how well it works. I use the MiFi mostly with my iPod Touch and iPad, though I have had the chance to try it with my laptop as well. Fundamentally,...