Engadget has a couple of first looks at the new Kindle and Kindle Touch, including a video of the Touch in action (that doesn’t seem to be working at the time of this writing). As expected, the loss of the keyboard handicaps the basic Kindle slightly, as now any letter-based interactions have to be entered through an on-screen virtual keyboard. But on the other hand, for a “pure” e-reader, typing is only something you do occasionally anyway, so it may not be that much of a handicap in the long run. Certainly Kobo and Sony don’t seem to have found...

Just as Paul has returned from his trip, I have returned from mine. And while traveling by motorcycle is cool, it pales in comparison to traveling by Tardis! Seriously, I’ve come back from GenCon with recordings of several reviews to transcribe and typed notes on a panel to put up. I hope to begin that process this evening. Thanks to the writers’ symposium programming track, there were a number of authors available, and I interviewed Michael Stackpole and Greg Stolze, both of whom have done self-e-publishing work that I have covered here. I also interviewed webcomic artist...

I am now at GenCon, the original gaming convention and now a huge event attended by dozens of gaming and media companies with an attendance in excess of 30,000 people. I’ve spent the last couple of hours mostly wandering around the dealer room, though I did get in a 30 minute interview with self-publishing writer Michael Stackpole that I will post when I have time to transcribe. It is still an impressive event. The game industry was one of the first sectors of publishing to embrace e-publishing fully. As Stackpole pointed out during our interview, game companies...

I’ve touched on the “freemium” philosophy of giving some content away for free and charging for extras before, but here’s a post on AllThingsD with some interesting new findings touching on video gaming. It covers a study by Flurry, an analytics provider for mobile games on Apple and Android devices, on the spending habits of freemium gamers. (Found via Slashdot.) Of the people who play freemium games on iOS or Android devices, the study reveals, most will never spend money on the games at all—only 3% are likely to do so—but within that 3%, the average transaction is $14...

Achievements and badges are becoming one of the hot new ideas these days. On the gaming side, the X-Box and Steam have them, and a number of games such as Plants vs. Zombies or City of Heroes have them built in. But they’ve been spreading to other realms, too: FourSquare and Yelp award them for checking in at various places, for example. And now Google News has added badges for reading particular numbers of stories in given categories. At first glance it seems a bit silly, but on further consideration there is probably method to Google’s madness. It’s another...

We’ve carried posts before that posited that e-books had not yet reached the watershed moment where they became more than an attempt to reproduce one medium in another (the way that television was originally “radio with pictures”, for instance). At the moment, they’re just “printed books on digital screens.” And while that’s fine for the people who just want another way to read printed books, video game developer Simon Meek thinks that they’re still not reaching out to modern audiences. Meek has the idea of doing for the gaming generation what PBS used to do for the television generation:...

A few days ago, the Supreme Court struck down a controversial California law requiring restriction of violent video games to minors. Without going too deeply into analysis, the court found dubious the claims that violent games were somehow more harmful to minors than other violent media—and since California wasn’t trying to regulate those other media, it was unfair for it to try to regulate video games too. As Ars Technica’s Ben Kuchera puts it: While the California law would have added an exception to the first amendment to exclude certain content from protection, in essence...

Even though this is an e-book blog, from time to time I poke my nose over into the world of computer gaming to point out some parallels. You could say that Internet game distribution is a sort of first cousin of the e-book, as they share a lot of commonalities. They’re both about telling stories—in books, you read the stories, but in games you experience them. More importantly, both started out as strictly physical means of media distribution—dead trees for books, dead dinosaur discs for games—but have moved into the digital forum where they’re more vulnerable to bit-copying...

Computer game DRM is one of the more pernicious sorts of DRM. Rather than just restricting what you can do with the content you purchase, computer game DRM can actually make your content harder to use at all, if not actively screw up your computer—making computer game piracy even more attractive than e-book DRM makes e-book piracy. Online retro game e-store Good Old Games has long recognized this; we mentioned their anti-DRM stance when they launched in 2008. Now they’ve spoken out again, in an interview with bit-tech.net. GOG’s PR and marketing manager, Lukasz Kukawski, had a few things...

I previously mentioned the OpenPandora Linux-powered gaming tablet back in April. As an entirely open Linux-powered device with a 4.3” 800x480 screen, it might have the same potential for e-book reading as any other small hand-held, and perhaps even better. Well, the $350 device is now shipping in dribs and drabs, as they become available to those who pre-ordered—but a number of the units have been set aside for immediate sale at the higher price of $500 for those who absolutely can’t wait, guaranteed to ship within 7 days. (As Engadget points out, this can’t make people who...

Michael Humphrey has an interesting blog post on Forbes where he posits the use of video games as a method of conveying current news and events. He points to the CEO of Activision comparing the Call of Duty franchise to Facebook, pointing out that media is evolving, and the latest CoD game has already racked up 600 million hours of play time in just six weeks. And he talks about a new book called Newsgames: Journalism at Play that looks at the idea of combining gaming and journalism. While Humphrey is a bit critical of the way the book...

Although this is not directly about e-books, it uses the economics of digital media in a way similar to some e-book charity efforts, and reiterates an important point about digital piracy. Back in May, I reported on the “Humble Indie Bundle”, a pack of five games that a group of indie developers was offering for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a name-your-own-price download. The group of developers has come out with a second bundle, the “Humble Indie Bundle #2”, and once more the proceeds are being split among the developers and charities EFF and Child’s Play. (This time,...