This is very odd.  If you look at the article below you will see that the Kobo Touch wins Tim Carmody's Editor's Pick as the best ereader.  (Congrats to Kobo, by the way!  A great company!) Now let's look that the other ereaders Carmody chose to compare: Sony PRS-T1 - a touch-enabled ereader that has no ads Barnes & Noble Simple Touch: a touch-enabled ereader that has no ads Kindle: low end, non-touch, ad enabled version. What's going on here? Carmody is taking a completely different category non-touch Kindle and comparing it to three higher-end touch ereaders.  In addition, one of the "Cons" he lists...

Got the following email from Wired: Your Wired subscription now includes access to the tablet edition at no additional charge. The Wired iPad® app is a full version of the magazine optimized for reading on an iPad®. Access to the Wired iPad® app is available in three easy steps Download the free Wired app from the Apple App Store. Tap the red button under "Current Magazine Subscribers" in the top right-hand corner. Use your mailing address or your account number, *****, and follow the instructions.  ...

Android Central has a look at Wired Magazine's Android application. ...

On PBS’s MediaShift, Susan Currie Sivek has a great article summing up the effect that the iPad and other digital technologies had on magazines in 2010. She starts by looking at magazine apps for the iPad: Zinio, Wired (which sold 105,000 copies in June, but was down to 32,000 by the month of September), and more. A number of these magazines are only showing 1 to 2 percent of newsstand sales for their apps. Users have been by and large unimpressed by iPad selections, calling the reading experience only “somewhat better or about the same” than print or...

Wired is reporting on this today: Google’s long awaited e-book-only bookstore, Google eBooks, puts the company in competition with Amazon, Apple and Borders for the burgeoning electronic book market. The move, limited at the start to U.S. customers only, also marks the first real retail venture for the search and online advertising behemoth, if you don’t count the Android app market. “The fundamental idea is buy anywhere and read anywhere,” said James Crawford, an engineer for Google eBooks, who emphasized that the system makes it easy to read the same book on multiple devices. “The fundamental architecture is cloud-based, and you never...

Oh my dear goat lord, WHAT IS WRONG with people? This week the fairy of stupidity came down and sprayed IdiotGlitter all over a bunch of people who tried out Virgin’s new magazine app, Project. They all hate it. They hate the navigation. They hate the file size. Did I mention they hate the navigation? I’m not sure why they don’t devote more time bemoaning the editorial direction, which is somewhere between Wired, Popular Science, and an in-flight magazine, but when it comes to iPad magazines the editorial is always considered last, because what matters is oooh shiny! There are two things about Project,...

And speaking of Christmas gifts, Wired has a guide to what to look for when buying a tablet computer. The article notes that, even though Apple is still the frontrunner, enough tablets have emerged to offer credible alternatives, and offers a number of areas in which to compare each model to decide which one is best for you (or whoever the gift’s recipient will be). One important area of consideration is the type, size, resolution, and dot pitch of screen, which can be important for readability. You should also consider wireless connections, because for media-rich applications it is important...

On our sister blog Appletell, Ed McKell reports on the way that his iPad apps have, over time, started taking longer and longer, until lately he started the backup before he went to bed and it still was only 2/3 done when he got up seven hours later! McKell learned from research in forums that others were having similar (pardon the pun) issues caused by magazine apps, and decided to experiment with deleting the Wired magazine app which was storing 3GB of back issues, to see if it had any effect. To his surprise, without the Wired app...

The iPad was supposed to be the digital savior of the magazine industry at a time when people are foregoing paper subscriptions to take their media experiences on-line. But is it? Adweek’s Brian Morrissey has an article looking at the way the high hopes of magazine publishers who came out with iPad editions are colliding with reality. Part of the problem is the high per-issue cost of such apps, with no way to buy discounted subscriptions yet. But a larger part of it is that the apps simply aren’t put together in the way that readers would...

Tony Brownfield on Wired has a look at the best free e-books for iPad and iPod that are “actually readable.” But on looking at it, it turns out to be a lot less than I’d hoped it would be. I had hoped it would be talking about books in some particular new format that was especially easy to read on Apple devices. However, I was more than a little disappointed: by “free” it seems to mean “public domain”, and by “actually readable” it seems to mean “that I like”. (Also, it drops an F-bomb. Why?) The titles...

From the Wired How-to Wiki: The book is an antiquated method of delivering words to your brain. Just as the iPod compressed massive record collections onto tiny go-anywhere devices, so the e-book readers are putting entire libraries onto paper-thin portable devices you can shove in your (oversized) pocket. Want to ditch the heavy backpack full of books and join the digital book revolution? Here's out guide to creating a digital copy of just about any book -- whether it's your own masterpiece or an old paper copy of Cervantes -- into a digital book. This article is part of a wiki anyone can...

Peter Kafka at All Things D’s MediaMemo has an interesting piece looking at the size problems with Condé Nast’s magazine iPad apps, such as the ones for Wired and the New Yorker. Wired’s app weighs in at half a gig for a monthly publication, and the New Yorker is 173 megabytes for a weekly. Kafka explains that the blame can be placed on Adobe’s magazine app, which “essentially functions as an image reader”, turning each magazine page into “several big photos” rather than presenting it as text. The problem with presenting it as text in HTML, New Yorker...