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...

One of the important differences between e-books and paper books is that it’s a lot easier to autograph paper books. However, that’s in the process of changing. The New York Times has an article about Autography, the autographs-for-e-books system we mentioned in November and again in January. The system has been improved a touch since we last mentioned it, incorporating the on-board camera of the iPad 2. Autography involves using the iPad or an external camera to take a picture of the author along with the reader getting the autograph, then the author signs on the screen with...

As with the Kindle, so with the Nook. Barnes & Noble is going to be bundling free New York Times web access for Nook paper subscribers, just as Amazon is with the Kindle. The cost to subscribe to the paper on the Nook is $20 a month, just as with Amazon. So far, the Times paywall seems to be reasonably porous. And certainly, the idea of offering free access to subscribers via e-reader devices makes sense—especially if the combined benefit is enough to induce fence-sitters to sub on the Nook or Kindle. Either way, the Times gets more money....

I haven’t been paying a whole lot of attention to the New York Times’s controversial paywall since its announcement a couple of weeks ago. It seems like a fairly complicated proposition, with a number of interesting nuances—different levels of charge for subscriptions on different devices and the like. Those who read via the web (and aren’t already paid NY Times subscribers) get 20 article views per month for free—certainly more articles than I’ve ever read in a month. And as if that weren’t enough, redirects from search, blogs, and social media don’t count against the total. (This led...

In an update on a story from a couple of days ago, the New York Times reports that self-publishing star Amanda Hocking has signed a four-book contract with St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan. The Times reports that bidding eventually rose beyond $2 million, though St. Martin’s declined to reveal the exact figure. The first book in the 4-book “Watersong” series should be released in fall, 2012. Responding to the rumors on her blog a couple of days ago, Hocking explained that she wanted to be able to spend more of her time writing, and less...

NPR’s On the Media has an interesting six-minute segment on a study that Professors Katherine Milkman and Jonah Berger did to determine what kinds of New York Times news stories were most likely to be emailed to friends using the site’s sharing tools. The study turned up a few interesting findings. The study determined that the stories that will be shared the most are the ones that most inspired awe in the reader. Milkman compares this to the reasons that religion spread throughout the world—when we have what we consider to be an amazing experience, we want to share...

In the New York Times, Virginia Heffernan complains about the way some independent cafes in New York City now restrict or ban the use of e-book readers and tablets. (We’ve covered this particular issue before when Nick Bilton brought it up back in August.) Heffernan notes that banning the use of laptops is understandable—it can interfere with ambiance and take up space that could otherwise be used by more paying customers. But she make a case that banning smaller devices runs contrary to the historical nature of coffeehouses. She points out that people in public spaces have to learn...

Early e-reader sales mostly ended up going to older generations of readers—the only ones who could afford to buy the highly-expensive devices. But the New York Times has an interesting article looking at the younger generation that is just beginning to get involved in e-book reading thanks to parents purchasing the devices for them as gifts. This Christmas just passed seems to have been the first in which kids started getting e-readers, and publishers have been noticing spikes in sales of children’s titles in e-book formats. Some of the sales increases have been fairly dramatic: St. Martin’s Press...

Publishing analyst Mike Shatzkin, back from Digital Book World, has an interesting piece on his blog looking at the effect that non-publishers getting into the publishing business could have other publishers. He talks about a discussion he had with a distinctly non-tech-savvy publisher of renown who was now running his own smaller operation. This publisher felt that the advances in reducing the cost of small-scale publishing should make it that much easier for him to publish books. He wasn’t concerned by all the self-published stuff he would be competing with, since 99% of it would be dreck, but as...