My friend Eric Burns of Websnark passes along a warning for users of the Kindle for Macintosh reader app who upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion): If one should upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7 (otherwise known as Lion), having installed Kindle-for-Mac from the Amazon website, they will be able to continue using their Kindle-for-Mac application to read what they’ve downloaded. However, when attempting to purchase new books for download or going to one’s archive of books, or even registering their account, they will find it fails. Downloading an update from Amazon will not help....

Since posting my review of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, I have been moved to go back and reread the entire thing, including the latest book that was released only recently. And a couple months ago I had purchased a $20 Groupon to Barnes & Noble, which was only good through April. So it seemed like a reasonable excuse to snag the e-books and do some reading—especially since the books were so reasonably priced. Which, in turn, was a good excuse to get around to reviewing the new Nook e-reader for the iPad, iPhone, and Windows Desktop and see...

Business Wire is carrying an Amazon press release indicating that Windows Phone 7 will be the next mobile operating system to obtain a Kindle Reader app, later this year. The app will include the standard Kindle features, such as whispersync to keep your place in the book you’re reading on whatever platform you’re reading it, and will also incorporate personalized book recommendations and the ability to send a recommendation to a friend without leaving the app. Amazon certainly isn’t letting any grass grow under its feet when it comes to targeting the most commonly-used mobile platforms. It’s just...

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...

I’m not a securities lawyer. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission may or may not be able to force Amazon to release the raw Kindle unit sales numbers, but Jeff Bezos and friends sure as hell had better stop playing games with investors and consumers. Technically an Amazon news release was right on the money in saying the Kindle unit sales growth rate tripled after the lowering of the Kindle 2’s price from $259 to $189. But that’s not the same as triple unit sales. Paul Story has explained the difference (go here and here), and hats...

MediaBistro’s eBookNewser and GalleyCat have been putting together a directory of good Twitter accounts to follow for e-book news. Gratifyingly, our very own Paul Biba tops their list. Thanks for the mention, MediaBistro! Engadget reports that Amazon and ASUS are teaming up to pre-install the Kindle Reader software on some of the netbooks and laptops ASUS sells through Amazon. Engadget speculates that the pre-installation might extend to ASUS’s forthcoming Eee Pad tablet, but expects to hear more about that at an upcoming industry event. Also found on Engadget, Amazon’s Kindle 2.5 software is now rolling...

In observance of the announced-for-summer Kindle Reader for Android, CNet’s Josh Lowensohn takes a look at the existing Kindle Reader versions for other platforms and compares how well they come off. My own review only compared the PC, iPhone, and iPad versions; it is interesting to learn more about the Blackberry and Macintosh versions. Gizmodo has spotted the Kindle in a slightly unusual place—being used by the evil lizard-aliens on the V revival. Amusingly, the Kindle in question is very blatantly displaying an “empty battery” screen. Gizmodo makes much of the fact that a Kindle, not...

TechCrunch reports that a Kindle app is coming to Android devices sometime this summer. It will require version 1.6 or later and an SD card, and will offer many of the same features as the other Kindle apps—instant download of books and free samples from Amazon as long as you have a working net connection, Whispersync to keep your reading place synchronized across multiple devices, and so on. Like other Kindle apps, it will not support newspapers, magazines, and blogs. However, unlike the Kindle apps for iPhone and iPad, it will allow purchasing books directly from Amazon without...

Adobe’s product manager for RoboHelp has posted a RoboHelp script to allow the program to generate EPUB-format e-books. I used RoboHelp during my previous job; it is basically a highly-specialized HTML editor designed to create help files, manuals, and documentation—very versatile and reasonably easy to learn. But at $999, it is not exactly the kind of thing the average self-publishing writer is going to go out and buy. (Found via The Digital Reader.) Even though the iPad sold one million units in less than a month, it does not appear that iBooks e-books are exactly flying...

And now it’s time to review an e-book app that does not have “Reader” in the name. Time to look at the big kahuna of iPad e-book readers, the one that was supposed to change the publishing industry forever: iBooks. There’s quite a lot to like in this free iPad e-reader, and only a few minor niggles. Given that it uses EPUB and is quite easy to load with content, I can use it as a replacement for Stanza on the big machine. In fact, I would say it’s as good as or even better than Stanza in...

Hard as it may be to believe, until last night I had never actually read a complete book in Amazon’s Kindle Reader software. I had several on my iPod Touch—freebies that I had downloaded and intended to check out, though not enough to have read yet. But I finally decided to give it a spin when I found a book I wanted on Amazon but not on Fictionwise. Last night I ordered the latest Mercedes Thompson novel by Patricia Briggs, Silver Borne. It was very easy; all I had to do was go to the Amazon page for the...

Just in case you needed a further antidote than Cory Doctorow to all the iPad love going around these days, Gawker has proclaimed that “the iPad backlash is here.” Most of their criticisms seem to be fairly lame, though. The biggest one, the problems staying connected with wifi, has already been addressed by Apple. Here’s a more cogent criticism, from Tumblr and Instapaper developer Marco Arment: he finds it very frustrating that that iBooks uses many private APIs that other apps cannot: I won’t be able to offer some features that iBooks has (such...