On paidContent, Gregory Galant suggests a way that the magazine industry could help itself stay afloat that does not involve making an iPad app. He points out that in its focus on digital, the industry seems to be ignoring certain other aspects of the overall magazine customer service experience—most notably the subscription process. Galant reports that his own experience resubscribing to a magazine involved being billed on an actual physical invoice that came in the mail. “In Japan you can buy a coke from a vending machine with your phone,” Galant points out. “The magazine industry’s still mailing invoices?”...

PaidContent reported a few days ago that the Associated Press has branched out into digital distribution by making content available through tablet-based reading apps Pulse and Flipboard. The AP is not providing the readers with all its content, but making available “a selection of international and national news and associated images.” This will include special coverage focusing on this year’s Presidential race, in both cases. Given the AP’s past parsimonious behavior, I find it a little funny that it’s taking so readily to social newsreading apps that will let their users share AP content with their friends and on...

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting article looking in some detail at exactly how Amazon has changed Android to form the basis of the Kindle Fire. I had been curious as to the nature of the changes, and this piece lays them out clearly as well as the reasoning behind them. The major change Amazon made was stripping a lot of stuff out of the operating system, the same way it stripped down the hardware. In fact, stripping down the hardware—leaving out things like the camera, accelerometer, or location services—is the major reason for what it pulled out of Android. Without...

People think of the Kindle Fire as an Android tablet, but that’s not quite completely correct. The Fire runs a heavily-modified version of Android 2.3, a version of Android that Google did not even intend to be used by tablets (and consequently blocked access to the Android Store on devices that used it and did not hew to a smartphone profile). ReadWriteWeb reports that this is leading app developers to have to make some tough decisions: do they make an app that can run on Fire’s nonstandard Android but may not run on other devices (or look good...

Amazon issued a press release today touting the thousands of apps it will have available for its Kindle Fire. It name-dropped a number of popular apps that will be available through its app store, including “Netflix, Rhapsody, Pandora, Twitter, Comics by comiXology, Facebook, The Weather Channel and popular games from Zynga, EA, Gameloft, PopCap and Rovio.” It also pointed out that the apps will be 1-click purchasable, and have been tested for Kindle Fire compatibility. Most of the press release is made up of statements from the developers and publishers of the aforementioned apps talking about how awesome it...

As part of its show interviewing Steve Jobs’s biographer, CBS’s 60 Minutes took a good look at the way iPad apps can help autistic people communicate. (We covered this in June of last year.) The video segment is 13 minutes long, but for people who don’t have that much time 60 Minutes also posted the script in the form of an article. The story covers both adults and children, and shows ways that the iPad provides communication tools to let parents and teachers learn things about autistic children that they never knew before. One ten-year-old autistic child was thought...

Barnes & Noble is dropping support for the eReader app for the BlackBerry. The software will still work on BlackBerries, but it will no longer allow new content to be purchased through it, and any old or new content purchased will have to be sideloaded onto the BlackBerry rather than downloaded through the app. I wonder if this means they’ll be replacing it with a “Nook” app, the way the B&N eReader for iOS transformed into a Nook app? Most of the commenters on the story don’t seem to think so, and I would think if it were the...

Lest we forget, there’s one more e-reading-related company whose name starts with “A” that is about to make major product announcements in the next week or so. Apple’s iPhone and iPod show is coming up, and rumor has it that Apple will be killing off the iPod Classic and Shuffle lines altogether this year. Ars Technica looks at the rumor and finds the reasoning behind it sound. Thanks to the emergence of cloud-based services, there is no longer as much need to carry a 160GB hard drive full of music around in your pocket. ...

PaidContent reports that the UK newspaper The Guardian is using an intriguing bifurcated strategy for its mobile apps. The Android app for the paper will be free (subsidized by advertising), whereas the iOS version will cost “the equivalent of four daily print copies [£3.99] for an entire year’s mobile app access.” It’s tempting to wonder why anyone would want an app dedicated to only one newspaper taking up room on their tablet or smartphone at all, let alone one you have to pay for. But the Guardian seems to be aware of that, too. The article indicates that...

I’ve already mentioned the deals Flipboard has been cutting with magazines to carry their content, but the people behind the iPad social media reading app seem not to be content to rest on their laurels. Flipboard Chairman and CEO Mike McCue has said the company hopes to enter into agreements to carry movies and episodes of TV shows via its platform. McCue plans to get started on this project by the end of the year. McCue also plans to create an iPhone/iPod Touch version within a few weeks. (I have scant hope it will work on my old 1st-generation...

We don't know whether someone at Kobo voluntarily decided to do it, or whether the Apple ebook police demanded it (but the second option is a lot more likely), but the two links to the Kobo web store have been removed from the News feed of its iOS app. If there's any good news to this, it's that the post still lays the blame for the store removal squarely on Apple. At least as of today. Via The Digital Reader ...

This was announced back in June but the collection has grown significantly since that date. It now includes 45K titles, up from 19K. Here is more from the press release: BiblioLabs, LLC and the British Library have launched their British Library 19th Century Historical Collection App for iPad - now available on the App Store. The App was announced in June with an initial offering of a thousand 19th century books - it now makes some 45,000 titles available to subscribers, expanding to over 60,000 titles by the end of the year. For just £1.99 a month in the UK...