No, this doesn't mean I've given up on my Kindle Touch. It still has its uses, but I am really liking the Google Nexus 7 as a e-reader. For all my complaints in my earlier post about the Kindle app for Android, reading on it is a beautiful thing. The screen is gorgeous, and the text is clear and sharp. I've almost completely stopped reading on my iPad because the screen resolution is so much better on the Nexus 7. As soon as Instapaper is updated to add page flipping in the Android version, the only reading I'll be doing on...

So I was sitting on the worst part of the plane flight, right after they told me to shut off all electronic devices. Being a good traveler, I stowed my Kindle and looked around for something to do. Ah! SkyMall magazine. Always a good way to waste a few minutes. In and around the usual silliness, I found a couple of items that would actually be useful to an e-book reader. What do you think of these? 1. iPad Power Case ($129.95) iPad batteries are good, but they can't stand up to marathon reading sessions. This one sports a 9000mAh battery, which should give...

"One of the biggest mistakes we as a society in general, and industry in specific make is that we mistake medium for the message. Those who can keep their eye on the message—Amazon and Netflix for example—profit handsomely. On the flip-side you have Flickr." —Om Malik This particular time of year—the stretch between Christmas and, say, the first week or two of January—seems to always result in some sort of consumer-relevant trend story that is repeated over and over again in the media, ad nauseum, until most people simply begin thinking of the story as nothing less than pure...

  By Andy Richardson, CEO of Influential Software The future wasn’t meant to look like this. According to e-book evangelists, freeing the book from its paper format was going to herald a new era of reading. Physical book sales would wither and e-book sales soar as a new generation of reader, converted by the convenience of digital reading, thumbed through Twilight on their phones. I believe this was a fatally flawed reading of the future, for multiple reasons: It was based on the notion that e-book sales were automatically ‘additive’ to the overall book market, when publishers had no way of tracking whether e-book...

With the End of the World coming up on the 21st of December and all, we need to consider our reading options carefully. (Here’s a tip: don’t start the Wheel of Time series.) Nate Hoffelder has a piece on Digital Reading in a Post-Apocalyptic World over at the Other Place that got me thinking ... Maw was kinda upset the day the Apocalypse came. I remember her yellin’ at Paw: "Bruce! You’re a CPA! What the hell use are YOU gonna be?" But Paw, he just took it calm. "Elsie," he said, "I got on to the file-sharin’ sites before the power went down." He held up...

Barnes & Noble Launches PubIt! in the UK (Publishers Weekly) 'Books, I Think, Are Dead': Joe Queenan Talks About 'One for the Books' (Arts Beat, nytimes.com) Author Andrew Piper: Turning Pages Is Important, Therefore Reading Ebooks Isn't Reading (Techdirt) Kindle Daily Deal: Pines by Blake Crouch {and} Gooney Bird and the Room Mother by Lois Lowry * * *        ...

By Stephen Silver | for Entertainment Tell I used to read books and magazines. Really, I did. I’ve subscribed to Sports Illustrated for as long as I’ve known how to read, and prided myself for most of my life on how many books I could read, and on how full my bookshelf was. Heck,  I even used to read a newspaper on a semi-regular basis. Thanks to the digital revolution, sadly, those days are over in my house. Downstairs, I’ve got a stack of magazines eight inches high; upstairs, my stack of unread books is taller than both of my children. No, I...

Just a few days ago—last Friday, in fact—we posted an item here on TeleRead that included more than a half-dozen TV commercials featuring e-readers. A series of television ads featuring the iPad mini have since begun airing. And interestingly enough, one of the two spots—it shows off the benefits of iBooks—is actually touting the device as something of a beefed-up e-reader. (The 30-second spot is below.) In other iPad mini news, a brief item about the new commercials on TNW says Apple is claiming that "it 'practically sold out' of the iPad mini in its first weekend of availability, with combined sales of 3...

Well, it’s been fun, but I’ve just made my last post to TeleRead as a regular contributor. Starting tomorrow, I’m moving to The Digital Reader, to write for my friend Nate Hoffelder. It’s important to note that there are no hard feelings between me and NAPCO or new editor-in-chief Dan Eldridge, who I’m confident will do a great job keeping TeleRead true to the vision of founder David Rothman. I just don’t have the time to write as much as I used to anymore. Still, you may see the occasional bit of content from me pop up here from...

Better be careful if you use that e-reader while walking. The Washington Post has an Associated Press story on walker distraction causing accidents and injuries. According to the AP, reports of distracted walkers being treated at hospitals have more than quadrupled over the last 7 years, and there are almost certainly plenty of such accidents that don’t get reported. It’s unclear how many of these accidents can be attributed to personal electronics, but it may be due at least in part to e-reading’s rapid surge in popularity over the last few years. Of course, e-reading is far from the...

OnlineUniversities.com has a post by Justin Marquis Ph.D. looking at the alarming trend of declining reading rates over the last few decades, and bringing up the recent Pew study showing that e-reader owners read more as a possible harbinger of ways to reduce the trend. People who read more, Marquis points out, become more “interesting, engaged, and intellectual”. They have a higher degree of emotional as well as standard literacy, developing empathy through repeatedly putting themselves in the place of the characters they read about. Adolescents who don’t develop good reading habits are at a disadvantage in college where...

Colleen Taylor of TechCrunch has interviewed Jonathan Klein, CEO of stock photo company Getty Images, about photo sharing on the Internet. And according to Klein, social network Pinterest could soon have a digital copyright problem on its hands. The site allows users to share, or “pin”, random photos or other artwork from the Internet, sharing them with friends and creating “pinboards”, or digital collages, about subjects that interest them. At the moment, since it is not advertising or otherwise deriving revenue from the pictures, a number of picture sources, such as Getty Images, have been watching but not taking...