Reading on mobile phones is a subject of my continued fascination. How to help people read e-books on their phones? What to do to overcome popular prejudices? Certainly, mobile phones won’t be a primary e-reader for anyone who wants to read more than occasionally, but they can be very useful as a supporting, emergency device. In a couple of days I’ll publish an article with tips on how to effectively use phones for that purpose. Now, I’d like to share with you a couple of conclusions from an excellent study released by Read It Later in January. The study’s...

There are great services like Ether Books, which are designed to reach mobile readers and populate their minds with high quality reads tailored to mobile conditions. But what to do when you are not lucky enough to be one of Ether authors? If you are a self-publisher actively using social media to find readers and draw their attention to your books (probably published in an electronic form), this post is for you. I’d like to share a simple way to make your e-book available for instant purchase by mobile phone users. As you'll see - it's...

I'm not quite sure who Read it Later is. They have a fancy website that is very poor at explaining what they do, but they have a fascinating article on how mobile is affecting how we read. According to the site the dataset for the article is: One of the world's largest digital reading platforms, RIL's 3M registered users have saved over 100 million articles and read on every major web and mobile platform. And here's a snippet (blockquotes omitted): iPhone Users This is where it gets interesting.  You’ll note four major spikes when most of the reading on...

I've often expressed the opinion here that mobile phones are a major way of bringing literature to people - far more important than the classic ereader, such as the Kindle, that we see in the rich developed countries. Now comes another example of this. From the Irish Times: Mobile phones are becoming pocket libraries for millions of avid readers in China, writes CLIFFORD COONAN in Beijing. ... Millions of Chinese have abandoned traditional books for mobile phone novels, and as smartphones start to become more popular in China, the genre is getting ever more popular. The novels are punchy and...

I've often said that mobile phones, not smartphones but plain old-fashioned mobile phones, are probably the ereading choice of the world. That's because a huge part of the world still lives in poverty, but even in those conditions a mobile phone can often be had. Now comes data that shows that Africa has over a half a billion mobile phone subscribers. Cellular-news reports: At end-3Q10, Africa accounted for 10% of the world's mobile subscriptions and was one of the world's fastest-growing regions - with the subscription numbers increasing 18% over the year to September - as a result...

Charging your ereader is always a bit of a pain, and it does cost money. Perhaps this is a good alternative way to do it. I don't have a hamster, so let us know how you make out with it. ...

E-books aren’t the only way to “TeleRead”. Whenever we receive a text message, or an instant message on line, you could say we “TelePhoneRead”—as different a form of communication from the phone calls of old as e-books are from printed books. I covered a similar article from TechCrunch a couple of weeks ago, but Om Malik of GigaOm has posted a piece on “Why we never talk anymore”—an article about the decline in phone voice communications and the rise in other forms such as text and possibly soon video. Malik talks about his personal history growing up...

I received an email about this free podcast and thought you might be interested. Here's the detail: The proliferation of mobile phones and other networked handhelds is bringing news, information, and entertainment to millions on the go around the world. For publishers, the still-fledgling mobile screen culture differs in significant ways from laptop culture. Likewise, users bring a new set of expectations about the mobile content –how much they should pay, and what the rules are for sharing it. Copyright Clearance Center(CCC)invites you to join author and digital media authority Bill Rosenblatt for a one-hour “live” call-in program looking...

Ether Books has looked at the population of devices out there and has concluded that the mobile phone is the best way to do for its ebooks, says the Inquirer. Speaking to Reuters at the London Book Fair: "The tech press may be slavering over the Ipad, Kindle and Sony Ereader as traditional publishers leap over themselves to expand their e-book offerings," Ether Books digital director Maureen Scott told Reuters. "But at Ether Books we've made the decision to go straight to distributing short works via our Iphone app to devices people already own, are familiar with and are happy...

From a press release I received this morning: The Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK’s only annual book award for fiction written by a woman, today announces the 2010 shortlist. Celebrating its fifteenth anniversary this year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world. ... Orange is partnering with mobile book specialist GoSpoken this year to offer free downloadable extracts of the shortlisted books direct to your mobile. Text extracts from all six shortlisted books will be available to download for free from today by texting ‘prize’ to 60300 from any UK mobile. The shortlist is:...

Publishers Weekly is reporting that mobile phones were the highlight of the Digital Conference at the LBF. "Mobiles are going to govern our creativity," said George Lossius, CEO of Publishing Technology. Specialised e-readers were, in his view, sustaining the market, but mobiles - with millions of owners already, offered an opportunity to increase revenues. "Mobile phones offere the best one-to-one marketing opportunity ever seen on the planet," Maureen Scott said. "People are trained to read content on their mobiles." What may be more crucial, as several speakers pointed out, was that people were used to paying for that content....

Last month, I wrote about using mobile hotspot solutions to “retrofit” 3G coverage to wifi-enabled devices such as the wifi-only iPad or third-party wifi-equipped e-book readers. It would seem like the ideal solution: not as difficult as tethering, compatible with any wifi-enabled device, and remarkably convenient to wherever a user might be. However, Kevin C. Tofel reports on GigaOm that sales of personal hotspots such as the MiFi fell 28 percent in 2009 over the previous year, according to a recent Infonetics Research Report. The report does expect sales to return in 2010 and beyond. One problem Tofel cites is that...