I received the following email from Clytie Siddall, from Renmark, in the Riverland of South Australia. Is anyone else having similar problems with Fictionwise? Email begins: My purchasing at Fictionwise has dwindled from a flood to a trickle since the imposition of "geographic limitations", but I still prefer to buy ebooks there if I can. I also signed up last year (before the imposition) for another 5 years of the Buywise club. Under the current publishing conditions, we customers are told that we will still be eligible for Buywise discounts for the life of our already-paid subscription, and that we can...

According to iTunes: Wattpad: IOS4, enhanced part navigation, add My Profile tab eReader: fixed a book deletion problem for the on-device bookshelf. Changed the background on the iPad for the Find and Color Picker dialogs so that the controls can be seen easeir Kobo: choose from left or fully justified text layout from reading settings. Enjoy an improved animated page turn effect. Performance and stability improvements....

Well, right now it’s snowing down below and the devil is skiing to work. I was convinced that there was no way a version of Fictionwise’s eReader would come out for iPad, now that Barnes & Noble was busy trying to push the Nook and its own tied-in eReader at all costs. In April, Fictionwise’s customer service outright said there were then “no plans to update the iPhone eReader app for iPad.” But in the last couple of weeks, surprise surprise, out came a new iPad-compatible eReader. I’m still not entirely sure why. Are Barnes & Noble still...

The real secret weapon for authors these days has nothing to do with self-publishing versus Big Publishing, or posting the book here versus posting it there. The real secret weapon? Treat your book like any other product and provide superior customer service! Here is a brief example of an author who went the extra mile and made such a positive impression on me that he'll have my eyeballs---for the duration of the free sample, anyway---for any book he ever puts out again. Joe Haldeman, I salute you and you have won me as a fan. THE CRISIS The short version is, I lost...

Engadget reports that Verizon is getting a pair of e-book reading devices—one 7”, one 10”—in September, and the name “Entourage” has been thrown around in connection with them. Are they going to be made by the company Entourage, currently known for the dual-screened Edge? Are they going to be dual-screened like the Edge, or just tablets? Nobody knows at this point. On the other hand, our sister blog Gadgetell reports that Sharp is releasing 5.5” and 10.8” color LCD tablets through Verizon later this year (see also this TeleRead story), with 3G enabled. Is this something entirely different...

eReader has been updated to 2.1.2. According to the App Store it has been updated for iOS 4 and now natively supports the iPad....

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...