Kindle for iOS received a major update yesterday, allowing it to work with the VoiceOver features of the iPhone and iPad. This is a good thing for the blind and visually impaired. It also has application for sighted readers who don’t mind computer text-to-speech voices and want to listen to their books on the go. I tested it out for a bit. VoiceOver takes some getting used to, if you’ve never used it. I had to relearn most of the ways I interact with my iPad, but I finally figured it out well enough to get my Kindle app reading to me. If you’ve ever used...

This is kind of a good news/bad news story. The good news is that Hachette is going to be offering its full catalog to libraries, including new releases. No windowing! The other piece of good news is that the books won't expire, unlike library books from HarperCollins, Penguin and Macmillan. I really like the no-expiration part. I always fee a bit guilty when I check out a HarperCollins book, start it and realize I don't like it. There went one of the 26 lends... The bad news is the pricing, although it's not all bad news, considering that the books won't expire. The...

Today marks an important day in Internet history. April 30, 1993, was the day the World Wide Web entered the public domain, which allowed the rest of us to use it on a royalty-free basis. Want to see the first ever web page? Not much to look at by today's standards, but still very cool. Apart from providing us all with animated cat gifs from now until the end of time, this is also an important milestone for e-books and e-reading. Without the Internet, we wouldn't have had Project Gutenberg in its easy to search and access format. (Project Gutenberg began in 1971,...

Have you ever run across a solution looking for a problem? Unfortunately, that's my reaction to Perdrix TXT, a new e-reading app for iPhone and iPad. The developer contacted me over the weekend and gave me a promo code for a free review copy, and I gave it a look. Here's what they say about the app on their site: Getting closer to the real book experience… Focused on book immersion, this app features innovative design such as book side views, life-like bookmark and a separate Search screen. Read free e-books and plain text files. At a quick glance that sounds good. The app...

I mentioned earlier that it's been spring cleaning week here. Well, in amongst one of those random boxes of this and that, I unearthed this gem: my first-ever e-book reader! Back when I purchased this puppy for $50 plus shipping off eBay (a fortune!), it was 2005 and I was living in New Zealand for a year, doing a graduate program. The town I lived in was the fourth-largest in the country, but to my jaded North American city girl eyes, it was hardly a bustling metropolis. There were cows five minutes up the road from me. There was a sheep...

If you're like me, you keep a close eye on your app updates on your iDevice. This morning, as I was leaving the house for an early morning meeting, I noticed an app update available. Good thing I always check what's new before updating. This was the first time I've ever seen this message: Note: There is a known issue with this update. If you are an existing Kindle for iOS user, we recommend you do not install this update at this time. Reports around the Web talk about people losing their books on their device, especially samples, because the app forces...

By Nico Vreeland Ever since we first started ChamberFour.com, I’ve been staunchly anti-Kindle. I’ve disliked like Amazon’s DRM scheme, its reluctance to adopt library e-books, its inhuman use of “Locations” instead of page numbers, its attempt to hardball Macmillan by refusing to sell Macmillan books—the list goes on. When a Sony Reader was the only decent non-Kindle choice, I bought a Sony Reader. When the Nook Color came out, I got one of those. I’ve given my sister another Sony, and my mother a Kobo, and I’ve stayed firmly Kindle-less for more than four years now. But that changed last week, when I broke down and ordered the Kindle...

Remember how I wrote that Whispersync was so important that I'd put up with a less feature-full app to have syncing between my Touch and Nexus 7? Oh, how things change. After Moon+ Reader was reinstated in the app store, I bought a copy to play around with. I figured it would be like other e-reading apps I've tried: I'll use it for a couple of books, but find it's just not compelling enough to make me switch from the Kindle app. Not so with Moon+ Reader. It's a great app, and worth taking the extra step of manually syncing between my...

Author Rita Toews reached out to me recently and mentioned that Read an E-Book Week—that would be March 3-9—is currently in the process of gearing up for its 2013 festivities. This will be the event's 11th consecutive year, by the way. And Toews tells me that any author, publisher or vendor who's interested in being a part of this year's celebration of e-books is welcome to contact her via email, at r[dot]toews[at]shaw[dot]ca. Naturally, you'll also want to keep your browser tuned to the event's official website, where you'll find information about everything from the event's origins and the history of the e-book. Incidentally,...

Yesterday, we filled you in on the fact that the Berlin-based digital reading platform known as Readmill was very close to releasing an e-reading app for the iPhone, and as it happens ... the app was officially released today. (Quite a coincidence, no?) According to the company, the newly-released app (appropriately enough, it's called Readmill for iPhone) was designed to create what they're referring to as "a seamless mobile reading experience for users." Readmill, after all, is already available as an app for the iPad. And so Readmill built the new app partially to cater towards the growing number of people wanting to...

Move over iBooks, there's a new e-reader for iPad in town: Marvin. I heard about it from a KindleKorner reader, and it's almost enough to make me wish I'd bought an iPad Mini instead of a Nexus 7. First, the basic information. Marvin is free, for now, but their website indicates that will end at some time. It opens DRM-free EPUBs, but they say they're working on more formats. I'm hoping for MOBI to come soon. It's an iPad-only app, but an iPhone version is coming. So, why another e-book app? Because this one is just amazing. Want complete control of how your...

The infographic embedded below isn't new; I'm pretty sure it was created about six months ago, in fact. But aside from its fantastic art, it always shares a truly important message: The vast majority of Americans don't read. Check out the graphic's first three stats, for instance, if you want to feel instantly depressed. (One-third of high school grads never read another book for the rest of their lives? Really?!) I initially found that statistic pretty hard to believe. And unlike most infographics, this one doesn't list its sources. (Shady!) So I decided to do a little research of my own. A Pew study we've...