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...

Apple may have forced usability downgrades on all of its ebookseller competition, but Kobo has found an amusing way to place an active link to its website back on the iOS app. When the updated, store-free version of the Kobo app was released a couple of weekends ago, it replaced the store with a news feed that's updated periodically. As The Digital Reader noted, this feed was bare when the new app first came out, but now that the media coverage has died down it's displaying a few posts—and the topmost post has two forbidden items: a link to the...

The Poetry Foundation's free poetry app, released for the iPhone last year, can now be installed on iPads and Android devices too. Here's more info from the press release: The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is pleased to announce that its POETRY app is now available for the first time for Android and iPad. The free app has been updated for all mobile devices, including the iPhone. The updated POETRY app now offers audio versions of many of the 1,700-plus poems included in its virtual poetry library, links to biographies of poets whose work is featured in the app, source...

The Spanish company, which launched earlier this month, has just announced a free iPad app. The app uses a sliding pane interface similar to Twitter's iPad app, but for now it's pretty bare bones. The same might be said for the company's book selection at the present, at least based on the comment a reader named Michael left on our earlier post. He wrote: Near as I could tell, almost all of their content consists of English-language works in the public domain. Covers for those books cleverly use some sort of random pattern generator. There are a few Spanish-language books with...

After several days of seeing ebookseller apps undergoing store-ectomies, pretty much all that was left as of this morning was Amazon's Kindle app and Barnes & Noble's Nook app. Now Amazon has released an update that removes its own store link. But this side-step of Apple's money grab comes with good news, too: as with the Android version of Kindle, you can now access around 100 Kindle magazine and newspaper subscriptions via the iOS app. Of the major ebooksellers, it appears Nook is the last app standing. Will it release a trimmed-down app in the coming hours? (I should note that...

Nate at The Digital Reader has spent the weekend keeping track of what's happening to ebook apps available through Apple's App Store now that their new guidelines are in effect, and today he discovered that Nook Kids' latest update, released on Friday, removed a link to the Nook ebookstore. In a more extreme case, the Google Books app disappeared entirely last Thursday, with no explanation or info on whether it will return. Among the big retailers, this leaves the standard Nook app, which hasn't been updated since last October, and the Amazon Kindle app, which was last updated in April. Both...

Kobo released an update to its iOS app today, and as we expected, direct access to the Kobo Store has disappeared. You can still shop for ebooks using Kobo's own website, but you'll have to navigate to it yourself. You'll also have to create any new accounts via the website—Apple is determined not to make this easy on any iBooks competitors or their prospective customers. Via The Digital Reader...

From an OverDrive blog post: The days of having to dig your library card out when you’re trying to download an eBook at the doctor’s office (or park, or airport terminal, or a bar mitzvah) are over. With the latest update to OverDrive-powered mobile sites, users will have the option for their devices to store their library card numbers. Starting now, when customers check out a title, the device will have a box where they can check “Remember me on this device.” The device will then hold the characters in its memory for 90 days after each use. This is...