That's the title of an article in PC World.  Here's a snippet: I am not suggesting that you ditch your laptop and just use the Kindle Fire as your primary mobile computing device (although I have argued in the past that you could conceivably get away with that with the iPad). However, if you are traveling and you only want to take one device, it is nice to know that the Kindle Fire is capable of meeting your needs at least in the short term. Although Amazon targets the Kindle Fire as a consumer device, it does come pre-loaded with the QuickOffice app. QuickOffice...

From an article in Andrys Basten's A Kindle World Blog: This is the new but not yet announced page by Amazon forKindle Touch International, now buyable by customers in countries outside the U.S. finally - for $139 U.S. from Amazon U.S. This is for the Kindle Touch WiFi only, but on that page there is an international table that tells you whether your country is on the list for delivery of this model.  The internationaal page was discovered by the Canadian "Nathan" who is able to see the non-U.S. page(s). Amazon has stores in France, Germany, Spain, and the UK and Kindle...

On a related note to the post about graphical e-book standards I made earlier today, TOC general manager (and sometime TeleRead contributor) Joe Wilkert has written an op-ed for Publishers Weekly decrying the fragmentation of the e-book market through platform lock-in and DRM. Wilkert suggests that EPUB could be a solution to this if Amazon could be convinced to adopt it and drop DRM. (Well, of course it could. Heck, pretty much any e-book format would work if Amazon dropped DRM, thanks to Calibre.) He reiterates the usual music-industry-based arguments for ditching DRM. Several...

New Features Implement the ability to automatically add books to calibre from a specified folder. Conversion: When automatically inserting page breaks, do not put a page break before a or tag if it is immediately preceded by another or tag. Driver for EZReader T730 and Pint-of-View PlayTab Pro Bug Fixes Fix device entry not visible in menubar even when it has been added via Preferences->Toolbars. Fix metadata plugboards not applied when auto sending news by email Fix regression in 0.8.34 that broke recipes that used skip_ad_pages() but not get_browser(). Restore device support on FreeBSD, by using HAL Get books: Show no more than 10 results from the Gandalf store Content server: Fix metadata not...

Chris Walters, a respected tech commenter, and the guy who sat in for me while I took my cross-country motorcycle trip last year, has gotten so fed up with the bloating in the new Kobo app that he just doesn't use it any more.  Here is a part of his post from his Booksprung blog: I no longer enjoy launching the Kobo app on my iPhone or iPad. I stopped looking forward to interacting with it a few updates ago, and now I actually avoid it. This has been building for a while. A year ago, I praised Kobo for being ahead of...

From the Flurry blog.  More in the article.  It goes on to say that Amazon, like Apple, and unlike other tablet makers, understands that it is content, not technical specs and hardware, that sell units. The increase in market share is due largely to the entry of the Kindle Fire by Amazon.  With Flurry in tens of thousands of Android apps, including many of the most popular, the company estimates that it tracks over 20% of all consumer sessions on more than 90% of all Android devices each day.  A session is defined as the launch and...

That's the title of an article in Dear Author.  Anyone reading on the Android platform should go over and take a look.  I'm new to Android, myself, and so found it quite helpful.  I was unaware that so many apps were available. Everyday more and more folks are getting Android based phones and tablets. For readers these devices can be a great way to read both on the go and in a more relaxed setting. The problem comes when looking for reading apps. There are so many out there and searching the Android Market often dosn’t give great results unless you...

The Consumerist has a cautionary tale today. An Amazon customer bought a Kindle, but the package went astray in shipment.  Amazon immediately sent another one, however: My suspicions were confirmed. Someone else had gotten their hands on the first Kindle lost in shipment and because the Kindle came preloaded with my name, email, address and credit card information, this person(s) was able to make purchases on this Kindle. I spoke with the customer service agents who after understanding did their best to help me. They refunded all the purchases that were made. By the time I discovered this, the fraudulent user had...

New Features Allow calibre to be run simultaneously in two different user accounts on windows. Driver for Motorola Photon and Point of View PlayTab Add a checkbox to preferences->plugins to show only user installed plugins Add a restart calibre button to the warning dialog that pops up after changing some preference that requires a restart Bug Fixes Fix regression in 0.8.36 that caused the remove format from book function to only delete the entry from the database and not delete the actual file from the disk Fix regression in 0.8.36 that caused the calibredb command to not properly refresh the format information in the GUI E-book viewer: Preserve...

Presented at Digital Book World, Verso Advertising has posted the 46 slides from its 2011 Survey of Book Buying Behavior.  Note that Verso is an advertising agency, not a polling firm and we don't have any information about the competence of the company to conduct such surveys.  However, it is still probably worth reviewing. The ereaders/ebooks portion starts at slide 24 and here are some of the points made on their "Implications" slides, beginning at slide number 41: E-reader owners reaching Early Majority with 15.8% penetration, double that of the 2010 Survey ... However resistance remains high and seems to be intensifying at...

CNet has an article about Google’s stripped-down Chromebook laptops, and their placement in schools. In a speech at the Florida Educational Technology Converence yesterday, Rajen Sheth, Google’s leader of Chromebook work for business and education, announced that hundreds of schools across 41 states have outfitted at least one classroom with Chromebooks. Three schools in Illinois, Iowa, and South Carolina will be outfitting all their students with the devices—over 27,000 in all. The schools appreciate the advantages the device offers of constant updates, cloud storage, and “invisibility” in terms of booting and use—teachers can focus on instruction rather than technical...

From a MocoNews Article by Laura Hazard Owen: Last year was widely perceived to be a year of outrageous e-book growth, but some new research suggests otherwise. According to new data from Bowker and the Book Industry Study Group, the number of book buyers who also purchased an e-book increased by 17 percent in 2011, compared to 9 percent in 2010 – well below the 25 to 30 percent growth that some had hoped for. E-books now make up 26 percent of adult fiction purchases, compared to 11 percent of children’s book purchases and 3 percent...