Kindle Fire vs. Nook Tablet from School Library Journal on Vimeo....

The Sun has an op-ed by “chick-lit writer” Adele Parks—another one of those conversion stories about e-book doubters who become e-book evangelists. In Parks’s case, she became curious enough to buy a Kindle after learning she was selling a huge number of e-books. After buying the Kindle, she discovered she liked it so much she has used it it constantly ever since—though mostly for travel and commuting, where a slim device that can replace a ton of books is most useful. She will “always choose a ‘proper’ book” for reading at home. Parks does not have an...

A couple of weeks ago I blogged a post by author Will Entrekin about why he felt Amazon’s Kindle Select program (in which authors give Amazon exclusivity over their work in return for getting paid for Kindle Prime subscriber e-library checkouts) was a very good deal. Now I see another post, by Christopher Wright on Eviscerati.org, about why self-publishing authors might want to stay far away. Wright compares Kindle Select to Michael Roberts’s MP3.com independent music distribution site, which allowed independent musicians (such as Wright) to upload mp3 tracks to catch the attention of the Internet audience. ...

From The Bookseller: Self-published crime writer Kerry Wilkinson claimed the top spot in the UK Kindle bestseller chart for the last quarter of 2011, Amazon has revealed, as speculation mounts that the online retailer is planning to open its own physical store to push its exclusive book sales. Wilkinson, from Lancashire, published his novel Locked In, one of a series featuring detective Jessica Daniel, using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing tool, and sold “hundred of thousands of copies” of it in the three months before Christmas, according to Amazon. The e-book is currently selling for 98p and...

Remember that Amazon retail store rumor from a few days ago? Well, Good E-Reader has heard more from anonymous “Amazon sources close to the situation.” According to their sources, Amazon is going to roll out a retail store in Seattle within the next few months to test the waters and see if a chain of such stores could be profitable. “They intend on going with the small boutique route with the main emphasis on books from their growing line of Amazon Exclusives and selling their e-readers and tablets,” Good E-Reader’s Michael Kozlowski writes. As a small boutique,...

From an email I received this afternoon from Bluefire. Several months ago we released Bluefire Reader for Android. While the app is available in the Amazon App Store for Android, it’s not available in the Kindle Fire App Store. Amazon has blocked most third-party ebook apps. We think that’s a shame and wanted to make Bluefire Reader available for you to download to your Kindle Fire. The instructions below guide you through the steps for installing Bluefire Reader for Android on your Kindle Fire. Note that you should open this page in the browser...

That's the title of an article in PC World.  Here's a snippet: I am not suggesting that you ditch your laptop and just use the Kindle Fire as your primary mobile computing device (although I have argued in the past that you could conceivably get away with that with the iPad). However, if you are traveling and you only want to take one device, it is nice to know that the Kindle Fire is capable of meeting your needs at least in the short term. Although Amazon targets the Kindle Fire as a consumer device, it does come pre-loaded with the QuickOffice app. QuickOffice...

From an article in Andrys Basten's A Kindle World Blog: This is the new but not yet announced page by Amazon forKindle Touch International, now buyable by customers in countries outside the U.S. finally - for $139 U.S. from Amazon U.S. This is for the Kindle Touch WiFi only, but on that page there is an international table that tells you whether your country is on the list for delivery of this model.  The internationaal page was discovered by the Canadian "Nathan" who is able to see the non-U.S. page(s). Amazon has stores in France, Germany, Spain, and the UK and Kindle...

On a related note to the post about graphical e-book standards I made earlier today, TOC general manager (and sometime TeleRead contributor) Joe Wilkert has written an op-ed for Publishers Weekly decrying the fragmentation of the e-book market through platform lock-in and DRM. Wilkert suggests that EPUB could be a solution to this if Amazon could be convinced to adopt it and drop DRM. (Well, of course it could. Heck, pretty much any e-book format would work if Amazon dropped DRM, thanks to Calibre.) He reiterates the usual music-industry-based arguments for ditching DRM. Several...

From the blurb: A blockbuster box set of five thrilling novels from five best-selling writers, for less than the price of a single Patterson, King, or Grisham novel.ULTIMATE THRILLER BOX SET5 irresistible set-ups: A crime novelist imprisoned in a desert cabin by a villain more sinister than any he has ever written... A detective's race against the clock to find a missing teenager...Twin brothers caught up in a deadly game to settle sins of the past...A lowly security guard struggling to realize his private eye fantasies... The US government conducting secret testing on the most heinous and intriguing of...

You can find it here.  From the blurb: Imagine a person severely disabled by a stroke who, with electrodes implanted in his brain, can type on a computer just by thinking of the letters. Or a man, blind for 20 years, driving a car around a parking lot via a camera hard-wired into his brain. Plots for science fiction? No, it's already happened, according to future technologies expert Naam. In an excellent and comprehensive survey, Naam investigates a wide swath of cutting-edge techniques that in a few years may be as common as plastic...

From The Bookseller: Amazon.co.uk increased Kindle e-book sales by five times in its fourth quarter but its parent company Amazon.com announced a sharp fall in profits as it failed to meet analysts' expectations in its financial results today. Meanwhile the company has had a setback in the US, with Barnes & Noble saying they will not stock physical books published by Amazon.com. ... In the UK, Amazon said sales of Kindle e-books in the last three months had increased five-fold in comparison to the same period in 2010 and it received twice as many orders for Kindle...