By Jeff Kleist Amazon has been making its own devices for quite a while now. From e-readers to tablets to a rumored smartphone, the company has been pretty successful in establishing its own Apple-style ecosystem. So it makes perfect sense that Amazon wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to take charge of the one device in the home that even Apple hasn’t been able to dominate—the television—with a “Kindle TV” set-top box. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, such a set-top box is actually in the works. Given that Amazon Instant Video still isn’t exactly ubiquitously supported on TVs, it makes sense that the company...

Buying an e-reader has become more complex, with several solid options, both in E Ink and tablet-like lines. So how do you choose? That's where a brand-new, just-launched-yesterday website called Reader Rocket wants to come in. The site is simple. Put two different e-readers head-to-head, and see which one comes out on top. I sat around and tried a lot of different combinations, and basically I agree with their conclusions. They use a variety of criteria including size of bookstore, overall reviews, features, price and battery life. They give you a detailed report, showing their conclusions, advantages of each and other options...

* Note: Click here to read Mobile Magazines, Part I — Google Play Magazines, here for Mobile Magazines, Part II — iOS Newsstand and here for Mobile Magazines, Part III — Next Issue So far this series has exclusively covered periodicals on tablets. But what if you have an e-reader? Yes, magazines and other periodicals are available for your devices as well. Of course, if you have a tablet-style device (Kindle Fire, Nook tablet line, etc.), you have access to a wide selection of magazines, similar to what you can access in the apps I've discussed earlier. However, there are even magazines and newspapers...

The New York Times has a fascinating preview up of a forthcoming tell-all from Jason Merkoski, formerly of Amazon and one of the developers of the first Kindle. Merkoski has a lot to say about both the benefits (a complete library; accessible using your phone) and drawbacks (sadness for paper fetishists) of the revolution he helped to spawn. I may change my mind once I've read a bit of the book, but the impression I got from his interview surprised me. Merkoski is ever-practical. "We can lament the older experience of reading, because that’s what we were raised with," he says. "But there’s...

This is the era of bits and bytes and multimedia and 3D printing, not just books and other texts. But Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science would still apply today in spirit even after more than eighty years. Educated originally as a mathematician, S.R. Ranganathan was a library-science genius who studied librarianship in Great Britain and worked as the librarian at the University of Madras. Accurately or not, he is said to have beaten out 900 competitors for the job. He peppered his writings with Indian philosophy, dressed Ghandi-simple, and avoided coffee and tea. His laws, spelled out in a 1931 book available from the Hathi Trust in full text, are: 1....

  If you had a pile of 300 books in your house waiting to be read, what would you do? Would you go out and buy any more books? I doubt it, even if you could battle your way to the front door. Yet if you’d got 300 books on your Kindle/iPad/other e-reader, would you stay in and click on any more ‘Buy It Now’ logos? More than possible. Because you probably wouldn’t even have noticed how many books were on there. Never mind 300, you can put 3,000 books on an e-reader and it’ll look and weigh just the same as if...

A couple days ago, a well-meaning colleague of mine, who often sends me links to news stories he finds online that may be of interest to the TeleRead community, emailed me with a real whopper. The link he sent took me to a CNET article that certainly grabbed my attention; "E-book porn flourishes on Amazon's Kindle," it was titled. Naturally, I gave it a thorough read. (For professionals reasons, of course!) But my amusement was short-lived. Because this wasn't just any old news article, although it most definitely did present itself as such. No, this was actually an opinion piece masquerading as a news item....

By Nico Vreeland Ever since we first started ChamberFour.com, I’ve been staunchly anti-Kindle. I’ve disliked like Amazon’s DRM scheme, its reluctance to adopt library e-books, its inhuman use of “Locations” instead of page numbers, its attempt to hardball Macmillan by refusing to sell Macmillan books—the list goes on. When a Sony Reader was the only decent non-Kindle choice, I bought a Sony Reader. When the Nook Color came out, I got one of those. I’ve given my sister another Sony, and my mother a Kobo, and I’ve stayed firmly Kindle-less for more than four years now. But that changed last week, when I broke down and ordered the Kindle...

It's certainly not news that the rising tide of books in the so-called "mommy porn" genre are driving sales of e-books like nothing else that has come before them. But a recent article in Ireland's Belfast Telegraph explains that erotic fiction is resulting in many more e-book library loans, too. In one Irish community, according to the article, e-book library loans rose "from 16,231 in 2011 to 19,847 in 2012." And what was the area's most popular library e-book in 2012? A steamy Harlequin romance by India Grey, titled At The Argentinean Billionaire's Bidding. Another Harelquin, Kate Walker's Bedded by the Greek Billionaire, was the second most-borrowed...

Yes, you read that headline correctly. When the DOJ lawsuit against the publishers came out last year, it became a lot more about Amazon and their alleged monopolistic practices than it was about the publishers and their alleged collusion. Now three independent bookstores are suing Amazon and the publishers for anti-trust violations around DRM. Lawsuits and most media coverage completely miss the point about Amazon's success. If a picture is truly worth 1,000 words, I'll save you a lot of reading: That's from an improptu D.C.-area get together of KindleBoards members (I'm the yellow sleeve on the bottom left.) Four Kindle owners; 12 Kindles. Think that's a...

Digital products like e-books are licensed—not sold—to a buyer, so they can’t be legally resold, shared, or loaned. (See my article on e-books and the first sale doctrine for more information.) A group called the Owners' Rights Initiative wants to change that. The ORI believes that the owner of a digital book should be allowed to sell it used.  Members of this group include some library trade groups, used resellers of paper books, and eBay. Some readers consider this a good thing, because they can get cash back on books they've read, in the very same way many readers do with paper books. But...

Does your Kindle sometimes start acting sluggish, for no apparent reason? If so, you might have an indexing issue. As you may know, when you download books to your Kindle, your device creates an index for each book to facilitate searching within a book. Most of the time, indexing goes smoothly. But sometimes not. Here's an easy tip to figure out if indexing is your problem. Go to the Search box on your Kindle's main page. The picture below shows what it looks like on a Kindle Touch. If you're using an older Kindle, your search box might look different. Type in a...