I actually made a private pact with myself yesterday that we wouldn't run any more Google stories on TeleRead, at least for a few days. Over the past couple weeks, it almost feels as if the site has morphed into something of a Google wire service. But then Joanna Cabot filed her daily Morning Links roundup this morning, and one of the items nearly took my breath away: Google has decided to kill off the print editions of all its Frommer's travel guidebooks. The Frommer's brand, don't forget, was sold to Google just seven months ago by its previous owner, Wiley, for a...

Google Has Ceased Publication of Frommer's Guidebooks (Good e-Reader) The Monetization Dilemma for Media (Paid Content) Scholastic Adds HarperCollins Children's Books to Storia Platform (DBW) Books aren't Dead Yet (Salon) Kindle Daily Deals: Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz (and 3 others) ...

Good news for our readers in Mexico. You can now get books through Google Play, in addition to apps. Slashgear kindly reported on it for those of us who can't read Spanish. (It was announced yesterday on Google+ Mexico.) According to Slashgear: Publishing houses offering content for users in Mexico include Random House Mondadori and Planeta, according to a statement made on the Google Mexico G+ profile. In addition to local titles, international titles are also available, providing access to bestselling novels from overseas. The article discussed reading on smartphones and tablets, but didn't mention e-readers, so my first question, having never used...

Our own Juli Monroe was first to bring Google's weak Evernote wannabe to my attention. It seemed like a weak offering (no Web clipper, no iOS app, and so on) and I didn't pay it much attention. But then the comments started rolling in. Susan, on our own site, had this to say: "Two words about Google Keep: Google Notebooks. I kept all my stuff in there for years, then Google cancelled Notebooks. I drank my coffee to iGoogle and Google Reader for years too, both of which are headed to the trash pile. I’m taking a pass on any new...

This evening, everyone in the tech world is talking about Google Keep, Google's answer to Evernote. So if I were reading, I'd want to know how it compares to Evernote. Fortunately, right now Keep is a really simple app, so the question is easy to answer. The biggest difference right now between Keep and Evernote is device accessibility. The only devices right now that can take full advantage of Keep are those running Android 4.2+ (Jelly Bean). To run it at all requires at least Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). So if you're running an iOS device or an older Android device,...

The Google Reader option from the Gmail menu bar is gone as of today. You can see the lack in the screenshot from my account, below. It used to be located between Blogger and Finance (note the red arrow). I suddenly realized how thoroughly I'd made the switch to Feedly because I didn't notice this on my own. I picked it up from a Tech Crunch article. The link is still present from other Google products, and of course it's still available on a Google search, but this is just another indication that the venerable RSS feed reader is on its inevitable...

If there is one thing that writing about technology has taught me, it's that things change, fast. People lament the publishing  'power' of Amazon and they forget that before Amazon, Fictionwise was the e-book destination. Remember Hotmail? Not the leader now, are they? Remember Netscape? Also gone. Things change, fast. And here is my latest example. A week ago, I spent probably 80 percent of my online time on Google products. I used Google Drive to store documents and work on them at home and at school. I used Gmail and Google Calendar for both contacts and scheduling, YouTube for video watching, Google Reader for...

By Stephen Silver Google, as you may have noticed, discontinues stuff all the time. But when it does, my life is usually minimally affected. Remember Google Wave, which was supposed to revolutionize communications? I couldn’t tell you to this day exactly what that was or what it was supposed to do, and I just sort of shrugged when Google killed it in 2010. Google Viewer, Google Checkout, Google Health, GOOG-411, Froogle, Knol… these were all things I rather never used, or used once or twice and decided they weren’t for me. That’s part of what makes this week’s announcement of the impending...

My morning routine for work is simple: • Respond to email • Check my Google Reader Those two things always happen right away. Well, it seems Google will force me to find a new morning routine. The company announced its Google Reader service will cease all operations this summer. Gone. It’s going away. I follow more than 300 blogs in my Google Reader related to book publishing, journalism and trading cards. That may seem like a lot of blogs, but when you consider that not all of these blogs update every day, it's really not. I seem to always have ,ore than enough time to skim...

There is a risk to relying on cloud services, as I’ve found to my chagrin time and again: they may not always be there when you need them. Etherpad servers have crashed, taking the only copy of my writing with them. Web-based IM service Meebo shut down, leaving me scrambling to find a replacement. And now comes the latest blow: Google plans to close down its Google Reader RSS reader service (along with a number of other, lesser-used services) as of July 1. I used Google Reader exclusively to find stories to reblog when I was writing more actively here—I would...

So it’s been a full year since Google’s Play Store went live (how time does fly,) and the Web-based media store is celebrating by offering deep discounts in all departments. Free tunes, apps, gift cards and cheap movies are only a few items that the service is advertising. You definitely don’t want to miss these deals. Starting today, you can redeem a free $15 gift card to use on your first purchase from Fancy, the crowd-curated gift shop. Also, ten percent off you next hotel booking from the Hotels.com app, a digital  $20 gift card for use with the Gyft app...

Note: This giveaway has ended. Click here to read about the winners. It's a TeleRead Giveaway! The name of author and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki has held a lot of weight for a long time in the go-go-go entrepreneurial start-up scene—especially among the tech community in Silicon Valley, where Kawasaki lives, works, and cranks out book after book about social media, marketing, the entrepreneurial mindset, and succeeding wildly at business ventures large or small. But with the recent publication of his latest tome, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur - How to Publish a Book, Kawasaki has ventured into the realm of digital self-publishing. He describes the...