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....

Some people are worried that Steve Jobs may be starting to erect walls around another garden. It’s starting with relatively small things. CNet points out that, starting with the new MacBook Air, Apple is no longer shipping Flash preinstalled on its Macintoshes. Flash will still work on them, of course, but now users will have to install it themselves. It hardly needs saying that Jobs has been loudly critical of Flash in the past, to the point of insisting it will never come to iOS and for a while that it must not even be used...

I am probably an anomaly in the digital age. I do not own any Apple products (except the free version of QuickTime that has been forced on me) and have no plans to acquire any Apple products. I am not particularly impressed by the iPad or the iPod, and see the iPhone as just a money sinkhole. I used to think how great it would be to be able to build a computer to my own specifications and use the MacOS, but that never occurred because Apple doesn’t permit it. Of course, that was also in the days when I believed...

I wasn’t sure whether to cover this story, given that it does not seem to have a great deal to do with e-books on the face of it. But on the other hand, it relates to the viability of developing for the iPhone and iPad as a whole, and e-book applications (both reader apps and stand-alone encapsulated appbooks) have to be developed just like anything else. Apple’s OS 4.0 SDK includes a new license agreement—new terms that developers must abide by. And one of these terms is a prohibition on “applications that link to Documented APIs through an...

Spent the evening at Best Buy, alternating playing Beatles Rock Band with hanging around the iPad and Macintosh display island. I couldn’t get iBooks to open on the iPad I tried, even after resetting, though I noticed someone else had it open and was looking at it on another unit. I did play some iPad Rock Band and Plants vs. Zombies, however, as well as surfing the web from the iPad and a Mac set up on the same island, and Twittering a bit. I even moderated some TeleRead comments and spam with it! And I talked to...

Amazon has released a Kindle Reader for Mac OS X desktop (Intel-based, running 10.5 and above). It can be downloaded here. According to the articles, it is pretty basic at the moment, but the press release states it will be adding additional features soon. Like the Windows version, the Mac Kindle Reader will download books from your Kindle library, and synchronize your place across all your Kindle platforms. Like a number of other music vendors before it, Australian ISP BigPond is shutting down the DRM servers for the DRM-protected WMA files it used to sell (before switching entirely...

Today Valve Software officially announced that its Steam digital game distribution platform will be coming to the Macintosh in April. But they are not stopping there. Macintosh owners who have already purchased the PC version of compatible Valve games (those built on the Source engine, such as Half-Life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead) will get the Macintosh version free. (And this will continue into the future, too: buying a new game will get you both versions from now on.) Imagine if buying the Kindle version of an e-book bought you the eReader version, too for one price—and...