How many hours do you spend sitting at your computer for work and pleasure? How many hours are you willing to spend reading an ebook on your work computer? How many additional hours are you willing to spend to search through ebook websites to find an ebook to read? I find these latter two questions to be the ones that haunt me as I try to find an ebook to buy and read. I broached this topic in an earlier article, Finding the Needle in a Haystack of Needles (II): eBooksellers, but didn’t really delve into the problem of reading on...

It looks like another chapter in Fictionwise’s existence has come to a close. Fictionwise is ending its Micropay e-book rebate program. Until June 2010 Fictionwise had a Micropay System that allowed deposits by members and supported micropay rebate promotions on some ebooks. Rebates and deposits for this system have been discontinued due to eBook industry changes and other factors. If you have an existing balance you may still use it until it is exhausted, but no further deposits may be made and there will be no further Micropay Rebates other than Buywise Large Transaction Rebates....

I have “bought” more than 400 ebooks since I received my Sony Reader as a gift 2.5 years ago. I put “bought” in quotes because about half of the ebooks I “bought” were free ebooks; the other half I paid for. But I’ve noticed a significant downward trend in my buying of ebooks in the past few months, and I have finally realized why that is occurring: frustration with the ebookseller experience. Before someone jumps up and says how wonderful and easy the buying is at Amazon with the wireless downloading to the Kindle and the 1-click payment system, let me...

Received the following email from reader John Hagewood. Anyone got any insight into this? I purchased many many books from ereader.com from 2000 until 2009, going way back to the palm digital media and peanut press days. For years, they were my favorite seller...loved the format, the reader, and the social DRM. A lot of what I purchased were Star Trek books. I was just revisiting my library there today via the PC and the iPhone, updating my expired CC and trying to reset my unlock codes. Then I started clicking through from my bookshelf to...

It’s been just over a year since Amazon bought Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, and as I reviewed Stanza the other day I glanced back over some of the old blog entries TeleRead writers made back then. I thought it would be interesting to look at a couple of those predictions or opinions in light of how the past year has gone. David Rothman wanted Washington to see the acquisition as a signal to investigate the e-book industry for possible monopoly practices: Washington often bungles things, but at least we can vote the bastards out...

I’ve already looked at the other two of the original “big three” iPhone e-book apps. The third of these apps is Stanza, the EPUB reader from Lexcycle. Stanza has a lot in common with eReader. They’re both great apps for the iPhone, their reading models are similar, and Stanza even shares the ability to download and read eReader-format e-books—even those protected by DRM. And like eReader, Stanza’s future in the iPad era is uncertain. Lexcycle COO Neelan Choksi said in a comment posted on Lexcycle’s forum on March 15th, “Currently, there is no work being done to customize...

Every Friday I’ll post a listing of my favorite articles for the preceding week. Purely a subjective judgment. iPad Review: Getting started by Chris Meadows iPhone/iPad e-book app review: Fictionwise/Barnes & Noble eReader, by Chris Meadows iPhone/iPad e-book app review: Amazon Kindle Reader by Chris Meadows iPhone/iPad e-book app review: GoodReader by Chris Meadows Michael Tamblyn of Kobo talks about what he has learned Commentary on New Yorker piece on altruistic publishers and devil Bezos by Andrys Basten Shelved! Google Books–My Library (Library Guides Series: Technical) by Tony Bandy ODFToEPub coverts OpenOffice documents to EPub The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome now online iPhone/iPad e-book app review: iBooks...

In an article mainly covering the new features of the Nook’s firmware update (which we already mentioned here), CNet lets slip this interesting tidbit about a forthcoming iPad version of its eReader app, which could be available as soon as May: Barnes & Noble reps said the new iPad app is completely redesigned from the ground up. Interestingly, the company is also working on a totally new iPhone app, but it will come out after the iPad app and be offered as a separate download for iPhone and iPod Touch users. Unlike Amazon's...

I began writing this as part of the review of eReader that I posted earlier, brought on by thinking about eReader and Stanza’s failure to get high-resolution iPad versions, but I thought that it deserved its own separate post. Make no mistake, there has been a certain amount of anti-corporate paranoia going around about smaller, much-beloved e-book companies bought up by larger corporations ever since MobiPocket planned to release an iPhone version of its reader but was allegedly stifled by its new owner Amazon. Just look at what happened when Stanza vanished from the app...

This review represents an update to the review I posted looking at version 1.3 of the reader back in December, 2008. For the most part, I am copying the text of the eReader portion of that review and changing the parts of it that are no longer true. In this, as in future reviews in this series, I will focus the interview on the iPhone reading experience, then cover how the iPad experience differs afterward. eReader (now in v2.1.1) is the grande dame of iPhone e-reading applications, tracing its lineage back more than ten years to the...

I just got an email from Kobo about the new Kitty Kelly Oprah biography. They are selling it for $9.99. This peaked my interest and so I did a bit of a search to find out what other stores are selling it for. Here's what I found: Kobo: $9.99 Amazon: $13.50 Diesel Ebooks: $28.95/ePub, $25.05/Mobi Sony Reader Store: $13.50 Books On Board: $30 Fictionwise: not listed Caveat Emptor! ...

Received the following email from Joanna and thought I should pass it on: It's a newsworthy day :) Apparently Fictionwise has removed books from the agency publishers as they ramp up for tomorrow's big change. Someone on Mobile Read reported that the titles are off the website and have been removed from people's wish lists as well. I can confirm that my own wish list of 3-odd books is down to 3 titles now, and some of them are already at the higher prices (although a book on my Kobo wish list seems to have gone down in price!) Many people...