If you haven't already seen it, run—don't walk!—over to this post from The Digital Reader, where our pal Nate has a review of what he's referring to as "the world's smallest e-reader," the TrekStor Pyrus Mini. And let me tell you, this thing looks ridiculously, incredibly small. (And as someone who absolutely loves miniature consumer electronics, let me assure you that I mean that in a good way.) One of the post's commenters, the inimitable Mike Cane, has requested that Nate post a photo of the Pyrus Mini next to the super-tiny Kobo Mini—and frankly, we'd love to see that as well. But if you've ever seen a Kobo Mini in...

If you have a Kindle 4 (that's the one with the hardware controller and no keyboard), Amazon just released an software update. I don't have a Kindle 4, so I haven't been able to test it out. There are no release notes, and the folks on Kindleboards are saying it downloads very quickly, leading them to believe that it's just a patch. Have any of you downloaded and tried it out? Notice anything different? * * * I just tried the update myself, and didn't run into any trouble. Couple of things I should probably point out, though, especially for anyone who's not really...

  By Adrian Diaconescu   Though you can fly, drive, take the bus or even walk from American to Canadian soil whenever you want, Amazon has never been as open to Canada as it has to the States. Case in point, the latest Kindle e-readers, available in the U.S. ever since September 2012, but released up north just now. The delay has been definitely disappointing, not to mention illogical, but if you’re still looking to score one of the new members of the Kindle family you’re in for some pretty nice deals. The cheapest device goes for just CAD $89, which is basically the same price...

Our friends over at Good E-Reader alerted us this morning to a Valentine's  Day promotion that's being planned by the good folks at Kobo: Starting this Friday, January 25, and running all the way through Valentine's Day (Thursday, February 14), the fantastic and too-small-to-be-believed Kobo Mini e-reader will be available for just $59.99—that's a full $20 off the Mini's regular retail price. According to Good E-Reader, "Patrons will ... also get a free [SnapBack] case in the color of their choice." Where can you take advantage of the deal? Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as if it'll be offered online, although I'm not...

Greetings all! I've been a TeleRead reader for three or four years now, and I'm thrilled to finally be a contributing writer for my favorite blog. I've been reading e-books for close to 15 years now. My first "e-reader" was a Handspring Visor Deluxe (pictured at right). Anyone remember that sweet little device? 160 x 160 pixels of black-and-white goodness. Today, I just laugh when people ask, "Isn't it hard to read on such a small screen?" when they see me reading on my iPhone. Peanut Press was my first e-book store. The closing of eReader.com was a sad day for me...

We've written a few times in the past about Worldreader, the Seattle-based nonprofit that provides Amazon Kindle devices and e-books to schoolchildren in Uganda, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania. And now, according to an item posted earlier this week on a news site known as GhanaWeb, DHL Express and Worldreader have announced a mutually-benficial partnership. "Through the partnership," according to the article, "DHL Express will deliver Worldreader’s educational products to African countries, enabling the non-profit organization to purchase more e-readers and books for distribution to those in need." From the article: "DHL Express was the first international express company to operate in Africa and is the only carrier...

E-Reader-info has some information about the forthcoming hyper-cheap “Beagle” e-reader from txtr, which is scheduled to sell for €9.90 (or about USD $13.00). This could very well be the cheapest E Ink reader ever seen, though the reason becomes obvious when you realize that it’s technically only about half of an e-reader, and that it will also be subsidized by cell phone carriers the way that cell phones commonly are. The idea behind the device is that it serves as a viewing device for e-books that are actually rendered into images by an associated smartphone, and uploaded over Bluetooth. This lets...

Publishing Perspectives has a guest post discussing BookShout, a startup that currently works in conjunction with three of the Big Six publishers (it’s in discussions with the other three), plus Wiley, to allow importation of your Amazon and Barnes & Noble e-book purchases into its own e-reader apps. It does this by you giving it your Amazon and Barnes & Noble log-in IDs and passwords. It then logs in on your behalf, and slurps down your e-book purchase records. I first saw this mentioned a couple of weeks ago on FutureBook, where Baldur Bjarnason pointed out what a "phenomenally bad idea"...

You may have noticed I haven’t posted anything at The Digital Reader lately. It was a fun run, but sometimes things just don’t work out. Fortunately, Dan Eldridge was kind enough to extend an offer to me to write here again, and I’m happy to be back where I was for six years before leaving. Here’s to at least another six!                 And it’s almost as if current events were welcoming me back, because what should happen on the day of my return but one of the things I’ve been either calling for or predicting (depending on how much prescience you’re willing...

Reuters had an interview today from Demos Paneros, president of U.S. Retail for office chain Staples, Inc., in which he said that Amazon is providing Staples “up to five or six tablet SKUs”. A number of news sources, including our own sister blog Gadgetell, have seized on this to suggest that there are “five or six” new tablets coming from Amazon. However, Gizmodo points out that “five or six SKUs” simply means that there will be five or six different options for the same one or two tablets. A 7” 8 GB tablet will have a different SKU than...

We’ve carried a few stories on how airlines are using iPads to replace heavy flight manuals and save a bunch of fuel. Now from Australia comes a story about Qantas saving considerably more weight by issuing relatively low-weight iPads as its in-flight entertainment system. (Competitor airline Virgin Australia has already been doing something similar with the Galaxy Tab.) This allows it to remove the old traditional in-flight entertainment system which could weigh as much as two tons. Qantas’s iPad program will let passengers access “more than 200 hours of entertainment programs” for streaming while Virgin will be providing on-board...

From Andrys Basten's A Kindle World Blog: Recently, a family member recently told me he was frustrated by trying to read webpages with tiny fonts, and I saw a Kindle news blog saying not much had been done to improve the Kindle Fire. I replied that the new Kindle Fire feature, Reading View for web-article reading that isolates the article, is done VERY well, and it’s brought me back to Amazon's Silk browser from Dolphin HD (Android) web browers which I had far preferred until Amazon’s Reading View feature was added to its Silk browser.   The new feature makes a huge difference...