This past week, the Kindle iOS app received an update. We did mention it when it happened, but I think a couple of the features in that update are important enough to go into in detail. First of all, the software can now read PDF files. I tried it out with a TV manual downloaded from the website of manufacturer I support in my day job, and it worked pretty well, including drop-down access to the table of contents. Of course, there are many other ways to read PDFs on iOS by now, including GoodReader, iBooks, Stanza, and Safari...

On the New York Times Bits Blog, Nick Bilton suggests that both Apple and Google are engaged in (separate) projects to turn smartphones into more wearable devices. Apple has already been wearable in some respects—you could clip the iPod Shuffle to your clothing, or attach the iPod Nano to a wrist strap to make it impersonate an oversized watch. Now it seems like Apple wants to make it so people can wear their iPhone on their wrist, and perhaps interact with it with Siri. And Google may be working on something similar. This all might lead, in the...

Amazon has been running a promotion with a new smartphone-based price-checking tool that lets users scan the barcodes of items in stores and compare the prices to items Amazon sells to earn 5% store store credit per item for up to three items (excluding books). Amazon has been coming in for a bit of criticism for the promotion, given that it is trying to pull even more dollars away from brick and mortar retailers at the time of year when they make the greatest amount of sales. Author Richard Russo has a fairly long opinion piece on this in...

Could we be getting closer to a free Kindle—but not one provided by Amazon? The rapid price drop of the Kindle led some to speculate that, if prices kept falling at the same rate, it would be free by the end of this year. It doesn’t look like that is going to happen, but the prices sure have fallen, haven’t they? Rumors have long been with us about free Kindles. In 2010, Mike Arrington heard from someone claiming Jeff Bezos was considering giving free Kindles to all Amazon Prime subscribers. More recently, Amazon reps told an AllThingsD reporter...

The New York Times reports on a mysterious sales spike that two local Long Island papers experienced last week, as mysterious buyers swooped in to grab every available copy from newsstands at $1.50 a pop. The papers had to print 64% more papers than usual to keep up with demand. The mysterious buyers were estimated to have snagged 4,000 out of the total 14,120 newsstand copies. The owner of the papers speculated that the mysterious buyers could have been “someone involved in a truly monumental school project; someone really proud of their grandchild on the honor roll; someone with...

It’s an old story: as automation gets better, it makes it possible to eliminate jobs and save money. It’s an old story in the physical manufacturing industry, But until recently, writers would have thought they were safe. But progress marches on. The New York Times has a lengthy article about a computerized article writer that takes statistics and turns them into prose. It can be used on sports games, financial reports, and other statistics that lend themselves to forming narratives. The leaders of Narrative Science emphasized that their technology would be primarily a low-cost...

As Hurricane Irene approaches the upper east coast, property damage is of course a key concern—but Hurricane Irene is also, at least temporarily, knocking down some virtual walls—paywalls. Laura Hazard Owen reports on PaidContent that the New York Times and Newsday.com are both making hurricane coverage available to all readers for free. E-magazine service Zinio is also offering free issues of several electronic magazines to travelers stranded by the hurricane. Of course, the usefulness of these free services depends on people being able to keep their connectivity during the storm. USA Today has a guide suggesting ways for...

Last week, Slate had a piece by Jack Shafer that I only just got around to reading about a comparison between the print and on-line versions of the New York Times. Based on his own experiences, and on a paper recently presented at a journalism education association meeting, the article posits that newspaper readers read more news and retain it better when they read from print than when they read from on-line sources. The researchers found that the print folks "remember significantly more news stories than online news readers"; that print readers "remembered significantly more topics...

Shortly after The New York Times put up their paywall earlier this year, Amazon announced that they would give all Kindle NYT subscribers free access to the the nytimes.com website—just not immediately. Today, over three months later, the company has finally activated this feature. From the press release: "New York Times readers on Kindle are a very loyal and important audience, and we are pleased that online access is now a part of their subscription experience," said Yasmin Namini, senior vice president, marketing and circulation, and general manager, reader applications, The New York Times Media Group. "With this added benefit of online...

App store patent troll Lodsys (which has insisted app developers need to license in-app purchase technology from it despite being told by Apple that developers were covered in Apple’s own agreement with Lodsys) has filed more lawsuits against a number of developers and companies, including six companies (most notably, The New York Times Company) that had already filed preemptive declaratory judgment actions against Lodsys. It is seeking to have their declaratory judgment actions dismissed, and to have all cases involving Lodsys relocated to the troll-friendly courts of east Texas. It’s probably going to be a while before anything...

On Monday, Network World reported, an update to the New York Times iPad app caused the app to stop working for its users. This would be annoying in and of itself, but the icing on the cake is that iPad readers have to pay subscription fees starting at $20 per month to access the paper that way. Many subscribers were displeased, to say the least. and it surely did not help matters that this happened on a holiday weekend when most staff would be out of the office. The app was fixed sometime on Tuesday, and presumably subscribers are...

The New York Times has a column on how the late-night bombshell of the Bin Laden takedown affected the Times’s newspaper production process, coming as it did after most newspapers had already sent their staff to bed and their papers to the presses. The story is interesting in itself, but the most relevant part to Telereading involves the need to “stop the presses” in order to replace the front page of the next day’s paper with the news. Out of 26 national paper sites, most had already completed their print run—only 6 were able to print updated copies. 7,000...