I can't even begin to count the number of articles I've seen over the past few weeks about the swiftly growing popularity of tablet computers. A week or two after the holiday season has ended, I suspect we'll start seeing solid proof—one way or the other—in the form of sales numbers, and we'll finally have a firm understanding of just how many tablet PCs are out there in the world today. That'll be an interesting and even important economic factoid for the digital reading community, of course. Because as we've been reminded of over and over again, this particular consumer trend—the suddenly massive...

It’s the week before Christmas, and the post office and local stores are full of people I’ve never seen before. Where do they shop the rest of the year, these folk? Do they live in suspended animation till December? I can only surmise that the warmer weather here in Oz wakes them up, like locusts, just to clog the supermarket aisles and make buying a postage stamp a two-hour operation. But at least they got me thinking about one of the nicest and most often overlooked aspects of purchasing e-books—you don’t have to relate to the other customers. Not that bookstore...

With about a zillion people getting Kindles for Christmas, they’re going to be wanting something to read, and not necessarily for a lot of money, either. I spotted a couple of articles highlighting some of the best works available to read for free on Kindles. One of them offers an intriguing theory on why Amazon’s quality control may be so random. The UK blog PC Pro lists a number of these works, split about evenly between public-domain works and newer titles. I’m not sure whether all of them are available in the US version of the store, international rights...

From the press release: Amazon.com, Inc. today announced that 2011 was the best holiday ever for the Kindle family as customers purchased millions of Kindle Fires and millions of Kindle e-readers. Authors also continue to benefit from the success of Kindle — the #1 and #4 best-selling Kindle books released in 2011 were both published independently by their authors using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). “We are grateful to our customers worldwide for making this the best holiday ever for Kindle,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO. “And in a huge milestone for independent publishing, we’d also like to congratulate Darcie Chan, the author of ‘The Mill River Recluse,’ and Chris Culver,...

One of the benefits of electronic media is that e-book stores are never closed for the holidays—at least for purchasers. But in some cases, for publishers, it’s another story. EbookNewser reports Apple’s iBookstore team sent an email to iBookstore sellers letting them know that the iTunes Connect app and e-book publishing platform is down from now until Thursday, December 29th for the holidays. It will not be taking any new updates during this time, and scheduled releases and pricing changes will be delayed. The iBookstore team wrote in an email to iTunes Connect users: “ We...

PaidContent writes about a holiday campaign launched by digital publisher Open Road Integrated Media. Called “The Gift of E”, the campaign centers on giving e-books for Christmas as an alternative to shopping in crowded stores. The site feature instructional videos on how to give e-books as presents. After Christmas, the campaign will focus on e-book “starter packs” for new e-reader owners. As PaidContent points out, only Kindle and Kobo so far have set up a way that individual e-books can be given as gifts; other e-tailers will allow buying gift certificates but not specific titles. That could give them...

Our sister blog GamerTell points out a set of game-related e-book deals for the holiday season. Games Workshop e-book publisher Black Library (whom we’ve covered here before) is offering a number of e-book and audiobook bundles for fans who haven’t bought in yet. Some of them are a little pricey. For example: Christmas Space Marine eBundle: Space Marines are always fun. This collection takes the best novels and novellas highlighting specific famous Space Marine battle. In total, you get seven novels and four novellas for $75.89. Though when you look at the individual books in the bundle, it doesn’t appear that you’re...

CNET has a 3-minute video that bills itself as a “Buyer’s Guide” for tablets and e-readers, though it primarily focuses on tablets, and mostly the more expensive tablets—the iPad, the Galaxy S, and Sony’s Android tablet (which I hadn’t heard of before). It paints this trio of $499 tablets as the main attraction for buyers this holiday season, then spends a little time discussing the Amazon Kindle and Kindle Fire as alternatives. In the video, CNET’s Donald Bell refers to the Kindle Fire as a “good enough product”—essentially a device that will work well as an e-reader and...

From Reddit comes the heartwarming story of a 27-year-old man whose 13-year-old brother saved his allowance all year to chip in (with other members of the family) toward buying him a Kindle for Christmas. The 13-year-old is the only child of the family who still lives with his parents, and since his father suffered congestive heart failure and has to remain bedridden most of the time, the boy has to do most of the work around the house. The family has gone through financial hard time since then, due to medical bills. Money has obviously been...

Last year at this time, I posted a story on a contrast between Kindle and Nook’s successes or failures over the holiday: Kindle sold more e-books than printed books on Christmas day, and the Nook’s servers collapsed for 24 hours. Now TeleReader Karen Mallinger posts: And yet, it has happened again. A year to the day. Servers down for 2 days now. Cannot download books, account locked up. An hour on hold waiting for Customer Service. I will be spending Monday taking back my Nook and purchasing a Kindle. To fall prey to the same...

Robert Andrews at PaidContent has a brief piece on News Corp’s UK papers The Times and The Sun getting excited about using the iPad to “break with a century-old British tradition of not publishing an edition on Christmas Day,” in the hope of catching the attention of Christmas recipients of new iPads. But these iPad editions were, Andrews points out, little more than self-promotion vehicles, containing largely Christmas stuff and editorials about how awesome the iPad and paywalls are. What little news content they did contain was often outdated by the newspaper websites, which were updated throughout the day...

On The Literary Platform, Dean Johnson of appbook developer Brandwidth takes a look at four different appbook interpretations of a holiday classic, Clement C. Moore’s poem “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”. While he finds a number of things to dislike about each of them (one rates 6/10, two 7/10, and one 8/10), he notes interesting contrasts in the approach each developer has taken. They have all interpreted the text and illustrations in different ways, with different capabilities. I find this to be one of the better arguments in favor of a vibrant and widely-available public domain—the freedom to...