The promise of the digital era lays in its growing ability to shed old limitations and obstacles. However, there are many problems which must be addressed as our societies enter this new epic period. I have recently finished reading William Easterly’s excellent book “The White Man’s Burden.” In it he argues that foreign aid must take on a more decentralized form in order to allow for verifiable results. At this point you may be asking yourself: how does this all tie in with e-books? I believe that e-books are a rare combination of traditional media with its depth and substance...

Somewhere in between early college and late college, my media purchasing habits changed. I went from needing a physical copy of everything, to preferring a digital copy or a free copy I could return once I was finished with it. Maybe this could be because I was sick of moving all that junk every time I moved during college (every year), or maybe it was because I got older and was more realistic about whether I was really going to watch that movie or read that book again. I’ve been purging all the stuff for years now and only a few choice books and comics remain. All the...

I had a thought today after reading of Barnes & Noble's new iPad app, which allows customers to loan/borrow purchased books. I haven't heard whether the annotations go along with the lending, but it strikes me that academics needing to cite locations in ebooks and those interested in annotation technology both need a way to refer to locations within electronic documents. The problem for academics looking for citation conventions is that we're all used to page numbers, which give us a way to identify a location manually by flipping through pages (or by hunting for a letter or other archival document...

(SEE earlier story). Amazon Kindle forum members noticed the new Penguin Kindle books were disappearing from sight again, and this is the norm after an Apple-type "Agency model" agreement is made based on Steve Jobs's arrangement with the Big5 publishers, a requirement for them to use his iBookstore, and their agreement is that no pricing at other online e-bookstores can be below Apple's pricing with the Big5. Before coming back online with the generally higher pricing on new books, Amazon servers must reflect new pricing on all Penguin e-books and Amazon will add a disclaimer on each Penguin e-book that the publisher now...

This is an expansion of the original blog article on the coming software or firmware update v2.5 for Kindle 2 and Kindle DX.  This is separated from other news that was included in the original entry, and there is a wonderful online introductory tutorial link added.  I received my update recently and will add a few words on that, but most Kindle owners will get this probably during the last week of May.  Kindle forum members are seeing more updates happenng now, and there is added word on how that is done as well. The Kindle Chronicle's Len Edgerly pointed me to the...

Some months, shortly after the iPad was announced, John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan published a much discussed and influential blog on the pricing of books and the 'agency model'. This was influential because it articulated the reason why Macmillan (and most of the other large publishers) were going to use the advent of the Apple iPad as an occasion for reasserting publisher control over the pricing of books. Digital books that would be sold through the iPad's iBook store, but also for reasserting control over the pricing of books that would be sold by Amazon through their Kindle. Publishers through...

The real action on a television set doesn't happen in front of the camera. Behind the scenes the show's producers wear every possible hat – they pitch the pilot, write the scripts, hire actors, and oversee film editing. Over the years that job has become even more complex. As cable has broadened the creative possibilities and show topics are more niche, creators have had to expand their knowledge base. Charlie Craig (above, right) knows this better then anyone. He was a writer and supervising producer on The X-Files and, more recently, executive producer of Eureka, one of SyFy channel's most highly...

In the recent blog article on the updated Kindle for PC app, I wrote that there was no in-line dictionary yet like the one on the Kindle itself, with the summary definition at the bottom of the Kindle screen for the word your cursor might be on and the ability to get the full definition and etymology via the American Oxford Dictionary. I missed that. Jerry wrote in the comments area: "For a dictionary on Kindle for PC, I would strongly recommend installing WordWeb (http://wordweb.info/). It has hotkey functionality which allows you to look up any word...

With all the fantasy writers out there publishing their stories as ebooks, you would think they would be likelier to find a dollar on the sidewalk than actually make a sale. But the happy fact is the market is throwing us some bones. I made over $500 in the first quarter of 2010 selling my four-part fantasy series The Rys Chronicles. My sales figures break down like this: From my website I sold 88 ebooks at $4.95 each for a total of $435.60. At Smashwords and some of its retail partners I earned $145.25 for the first quarter of the year. I'm not...

This is an update to the earlier Amazon plays hardball to keep lower pricing option which gives a lot of details with sourcing of statements. Today, FAIR (a media-watch organization established in 1986) comments on the New Yorker article by Ken Auletta titled "Publish or Perish: Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and Save the book business?" That title will give a clue to the focus of the New Yorker Magazine's article (or maybe The New Yorker itself, which is sharing the financial plight of other publishing organizations). "Can they... CAN they? "topple the Kindle" (Keep Hope Alive?) followed by, can they...

My wife, Peggy, and I watched the lead story of the March 14 “60 Minutes,” where Scott Pelley interviewed author Michael Lewis, who dissected the recent financial crisis. Lewis’ new book, “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine,” was hitting the publicity jackpot. Unlike many stiff, stuffy authors, Lewis was loose, brilliant, articulate, charming and very persuasive as he detailed the stupidity and utter incompetence of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, as well as the bankers, brokers, fund managers and corporate directors who contributed to the disaster. None of them understood the toxic financial cocktail they'd mixed, nor had any clue that...

The Apple iPad will not kill the Kindle. In this installment of my Kindle shakedown series, I contend that the ideal ereader should not become a multipurpose device like the forthcoming iPad, or the HP Slate, or whatever comes next. It should instead become a fully dual-purpose device, with two screens dedicated for the two purposes of reading and writing. Some say the multipurpose iPad will kill the single-purpose Kindle. I disagree. This year I have discovered the joy of single-purpose devices. Most computers are multipurpose devices, designed to do everything but not always in the best way. I easily prefer...