The Sun has an op-ed by “chick-lit writer” Adele Parks—another one of those conversion stories about e-book doubters who become e-book evangelists. In Parks’s case, she became curious enough to buy a Kindle after learning she was selling a huge number of e-books. After buying the Kindle, she discovered she liked it so much she has used it it constantly ever since—though mostly for travel and commuting, where a slim device that can replace a ton of books is most useful. She will “always choose a ‘proper’ book” for reading at home. Parks does not have an...

On Salon.com, Laura Miller takes a look at the current crop of interactive, “enhanced” books and discusses some of their major shortcomings. The problem with these books, she points out, is that the interactive “bells and whistles” can distract from the actual storytelling: I sat down with my iPad to read “The Yellow Submarine” with a friend’s 7-year-old twins, and within 10 minutes, we were embroiled in a conflict that captured the central, nagging problem with the enhanced e-book concept. Desmond liked playing with the interactive features — the digital equivalent of the tabs and flaps...

On CNet, Scott Stein writes about why a $79 Kindle has replaced his iPad as his e-book-reading device of choice. The reasons aren’t really new, and indeed have popped up any time anyone has ever compared e-ink devices to tablets for reading: eyestrain-reducing e-ink screens, less potential for distraction, longer battery life, and less potential for being stolen (and less of a loss if it is). It’s going to be interesting to see what happens as screen display technology gets better and lets tablets steal some of the screen-readability and battery life benefits of e-readers. Will dedicated e-readers...

Engadget has the press release from Kobo on the completion of its purchase by e-commerce company Rakuten. Kobo’s HQ will remain in Toronto, though Rakuten is based in Japan. Given that Rakuten owns a lot of popular e-commerce and other industry sites already (including e-tailer Buy.com), it has the potential to give Kobo a lot more expansion and marketing opportunities than its erstwhile partner, the late Borders. Will that be enough to let Kobo catch up with Amazon, or even maintain its lead in international areas Amazon doesn’t service yet? That remains to be seen. But if there...

Caveat emptor! The Wall Street Journal MarketWatch covers a warning from anti-counterfeiting security firm OpSec that unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers are gearing up to fool unwary consumers with too-good-to-be-true listings for “name brand” e-reader and tablet products that turn out to look and work nothing like the real things. OpSec advises customers to know what realistic prices are for the real product, research what it looks like so they can tell the difference, check to make sure the model number given is real, and make sure there’s a warranty before buying. Poor spelling and grammar in auction listings can be...

I haven’t posted much over the last few days, partly because of some trying times my family is going through right now. On New Year’s Eve, my Mom was in a farm equipment accident and ended up having her right arm amputated a few inches below the shoulder. It’s been hitting the family pretty hard, but we’ve had a lot of support from friends and family. It may take some time, but sooner or later we’ll be all right—or at least as all right as we can be under the circumstances. We’re all trying to think of ways that...

On Posterous, blogger Diego Basch writes about how the Amazon Kindle has changed his reading habits. It’s an interesting testimonial on how e-readers can change the way we interact with our books. As a result of having plenty of unread books on his Kindle, Basch now finds he doesn’t watch TV anymore—there isn’t ever a time when he no “next” book to keep him from watching something on the tube. He also finds that he goes through books a lot faster than he used to because he can also read them on the Kindle app on his computer or...

Google has just added offline reading to its Google Books app for the Chrome web browser. They tout this as offering the ability to read e-books on a plane, or when the Internet has gone down for some reason. To read your Google eBooks offline, you’ll need to install the Google Books app from our Chrome Web Store and ensure your Google eBooks are available to read offline. Please see this article in our Help Center and follow the simple step-by-step process to enable offline reading for your ebooks. Of course, it only takes...

It seems like every time you turn around these days, you see another scare or sob story about “the death of the book” showing up on major media outlets. It’s a bit refreshing, therefore, to see The Guardian’s publishing section spotlight four different publishing efforts that show there is a future in e-books. The article first covers Unbound (which we covered here and here), a startup that brings 18th- and 19th-century subscription publishing into the digital age. On the site, writers can pitch their prospective e-book projects to would-be readers, who can then choose to pledge money toward...

PaidContent reports that, after seeing a great deal of growth in 2010 (especially in the 4th quarter), e-reader sales in China have fallen off considerably for two of the last three quarters according to Analysys International’s Enfodesk. The third quarter of 2010 saw a growth rate of 9.9% and the fourth saw 20.1%, but the first quarter of 2011 showed a 4.2% decline, followed by 2.2% growth and another 5.1% decline in subsequent quarters. Enfodesk places the blame on problems at Chinese e-reader maker Hanvon, and suggests one of the major causes is a lack of content for e-readers...

The bloom may be off the Kindle Fire rose. The New York Times reports that a number of Kindle Fire users are returning the device with a litany of complaints, including the lack of an external volume control, a power button that is easy to hit by accident, sluggish applications and web browsing, and lack of privacy. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen predicted the Kindle Fire would be a “failure.” Amazon, however, says that the Fire is its most successful product ever, and an Amazon spokesman has told the New York Times that it will be rolling out an over-the-air...

FutureBook looks at South Korean company Kyobo’s new color “e-ink” reader, whose Mirasol screen has the same read-in-direct-sunlight capability as black and white e-ink. The device has a 5.7” 1024x768 pixel video-capable multitouch touchscreen, wifi, and English-language text-to-speech. It runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a 1 GHz Qualcomm SnapDragon processor, and costs $300.  FutureBook’s conclusions are not very complimentary. It would appear to be halfway between a smartphone and a tablet. It reads ebooks but is that its main draw and in our opinion it fails on some basic counts. It is not a smartphone. Size...