Various Internet news sources (such as Gizmodo) are reporting on a specific portion of a New York Times interview with Bill Gates’s wife Melinda—the portion focusing on her attitude toward Apple products in her household. It seems that Melinda Gates has very particular attitudes toward what brand of products make it through her front door. Do you own an iPod, which is made by Apple? No, I have a Zune. What if one of your children says, “Mom, I have to have an iPod?”...

IntoMobile is reporting that Dark Horse will be releasing an iOS app. When released there will be over 150 titles including Dark Horse’s popular horror anthology Creepy, Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and B.P.R.D., Joss Whedon’s Fray and Serenity, Felicia Day’s The Guild, BioWare’s Mass Effect, Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Gerard Way’s Umbrella Academy, Eric Powell’s The Goon and many more. The article says that Dark Horse will be offering many of the #1 issues for free and that there will be bundles comprising story arcs over multiple issues at prices from $2.99 to $5.99. Next year some titles will be synchronize...

Dear Author has taken a close look at the new Bluefire Reader - and likes what they see: I wanted to let all the iOS users (iPad, iTouch, iPhone, etc) of the awesome new app called Bluefire Reader. What’s so awesome about this? You can read any standard encrypted ePub and PDF using Bluefire on an iOS device. I was able to get my Harlequin Books, NetGalley Arcs, Sony books all on the iPhone and iPad and read them WITHOUT STRIPPING THE DRM. ... So my friends who have spent years buying PDFs and ePubs, this is the App for...

From the Kobo blog: Here are some more details about the newest features: -Highlight your favorite passages in any book you get from the Kobo store or books you add to your Kobo library that you purchased elsewhere (remember that with Kobo you can bring content from other eBook services to your Kobo library on the iPad or iPhone). -Add notes to your highlights and come back to them at any time with the easy to use bookmarking features. -Add your own EPUB and PDF books using iTunes, Safari or Mail...

The Kindle app was updated today. Here's what they say is new in version 2.3: Books display in two columns when reading in landscape orientation on iPad Book Extras including character lists, plot sumaires and series information are available for many popular books. Book Extras are powered by the Shelfari.com community and can be accessed from the Go To menu while reading Bug fixes that improve stability...

On his blog, Aaron Pressman comments on a recent post by John Gruber comparing the Kindle to an iPod. Pressman wrote a Businessweek blog post several years ago predicting that “the Kindle would be the iPod of books.” Gruber specifically compares the Kindle to the iPod Nano, a comparison with which Pressman heartily agrees: To me, both devices share some of the same strengths and weaknesses. Most notably, both have an excellent focus on doing one thing perfectly (music playing/reading) while doing other things poorly or not at all. There’s also the attractively low...

Every night I end the day by heading to the App Store on my iPad and using the Release Date option to scroll through all the new apps that were released that day. (Yes, I lead a fairly dull life.) Weekdays typically have the largest number of new apps, but even on a big day there are only a few dozen new ones to scan. Surely there's a better way to see what new apps have been released, right? I haven't found one, but at least AppAdvice helps me find the diamonds in the rough. This $1.99...

On our sister blog Appletell, Bill Stiteler writes about the contortions he had to go through to get a DRM-restricted Overdrive audiobook from his local public library onto his iPod. It turned into a time-consuming process that took far longer than should be necessary for something as simple as checking out a library book. (We covered a webcomic’s look at library audiobook DRM back in March.) Even though the Overdrive Media Console is available for both Mac and PC, only some of its content can be downloaded through the Mac version. Stiteler had to boot into Windows (and...

From the press release: Random House, Inc., the largest U.S. trade-book publisher, announced today a partnership with digital media agency Smashing Ideas to develop book-based children's Apps for mobile devices. Seattle-based Smashing Ideas is a cutting edge developer of immersive, interactive experiences for all screens, building digital products and destinations around brand characters in the children and youth markets. Random House Children's Books will work in close collaboration with Smashing Ideas' newly formed ePublishing group—led by the co-creator and developer of the smash hit, Alice for iPad—and with key Random House children's books authors, illustrators and brands to produce...

Ben Kunz at Bloomberg Businessweek has an interesting post on Apple’s pricing practices. Kunz posits that Apple uses psychological pricing tricks such as reference prices and price “decoys” to boost sales of more expensive items. I can’t say I agree with all of his points, but he brings up some interesting things to consider. Kunz first discusses price decoys, items that don’t really look like very good deals in order to make slightly better items look much better. He suggests that the rumored 7” iPad is such a price decoy, to make a 10”, more featureful version look...

Only one more day remains until we discover the newest things Steve Jobs has up his sleeve, and our sister blog Appletell has a roundup of all the recent rumors I’ve already looked at the rumors that the iPod Touch is going to gain cameras, Facetime, and the Retina Display here and here, suggesting it may become not only a better e-book reader than ever before but also a better communication tool—essentially, a wifi-only cell phone without the cell. And it will even get the “cell” back if it is paired with an unlimited 3G-to-wifi plan...

By now Stanza is the most robust e-reading application for iOS. It’s packed with features other apps, like Kindle or iBooks are missing. However it has one big disadvantage: no cloud-based bookshelf. The application is associated to a device not an account. There is no way to sync books and bookmarks like in Kindle. It’s fine when you have one device. Things get complicated to those iPhone or iPod Touch users who are buying iPads. They realize that to read books they collected in Stanza, they need to download them again. There are a few ways to transfer books to Stanza. I’d...