Amazon Kindle-Gate: Purchased copies of Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 disappear

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Handhelds, Wireless / WiFi

I have no idea what to even say about this, other than that we are severely, severely disappointed with Amazon and how they are allowing their publishers to treat Kindle users. In a nuthsell, Kindle users who purchased George Orwell’s 1984 and/or Animal Farm found yesterday that those two titles had mysteriously disappeared from their Kindles, and that they were credited $.99 for each purchase. Why? That’s because the publisher decided that they no longer wanted to sell the books on the Kindle Store. Now, that’s all fine, but did they really have to take it away from those who had already made the purchase?

The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.

Click to continue reading Amazon Kindle-Gate: Purchased copies of Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 disappear

Read More | Amazon Kindle Mysterious Orwell Refunds

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eReader Lowers Prices

Posted by Sheila Franklin Categories: Corporate News, Misc. Tech

Fictionwise, in an effort to compete with Amazon, has lowered its pricing in its company eReader. While Kindle customers pay $9.95 for newly released books, Fictionwise, now owned by Barnes & Noble, promises no e-book priced over $12.95, all new and New York Times best sellers will be $9.95 or less and buyers will get a 15% reward on all purchases. Now if they could find a way to incorporate “book smell” we might consider the expense.

Read More | jkOnTheRun

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Scribd Adds E-Commerce

Posted by Sheila Franklin Categories: Corporate News, Internet

Pay attention, starving novelists. Scribd has begun beta testing an e-commerce platform to sell documents. The site, which already claims 60 million readers and millions of documents, will allow the publishers to set prices and DRM options, and receive 80% of the revenue. Scribd’s objective is to obtain new content and they plan to work on an iPhone app. Prices are currently set from $1.00 for a graphic novel to $5,000.00 for a market research report.

Read More | Scribd via Forbes

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Brother SV-100B Document Viewer

Posted by Sheila Franklin Categories: Corporate News, Misc. Tech

Brother’s SV-100B Document Viewer is a mere 15.5mm thick and weighs 600g. It has a 9.7-inch black and white display (1200x825) that can be viewed under direct sunlight and a miniSD card slot. A 2GB card can support up to 10,000 pages of information and its lithium-ion rechargeable battery will run up to 83 hours. At a size of 237×247×15.5 mm, Brother claims its reader has a life span of 5 years or 37 million pages.

Read More | Fareast Gizmos

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ebook Price Searches Availability, Best Price

Posted by Sheila Franklin Categories:

Just bought an e-book but not sure where you can get the best deal for content? ebook price.info allows you to search for a book by author, title or ISBN. It will then display results from sites such as ebooks.com, Amazon and ereadable. You can also find what is available by format and the site will suggest other titles by the same author. Some books even feature a synopsis. The site is really simple to use and worth checking out before you purchase.

Read More | ebook Price

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Fujitsu FLEPia Color e-Book

Posted by Sheila Franklin Categories: Corporate News, Misc. Tech, Wireless / WiFi

Fujitsu has the honor of developing the first color e-paper mobile terminal. FLEPia is thin and lightweight and has a simple to view 8-inch display with up to 260,000 colors in HD. It also has Bluetooth and high-speed wireless LAN capability. When completely charged, it provides up to 40 hrs. of usage only for re-draw. When used with a 4GB SD card, the e-book can store up to 5,000 conventional sized paperbacks which equals out to 300 pages long at 600KB per book.

Read More | Fareast Gizmos

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Sony Adds 500,000 Books for Reader

Posted by Sheila Franklin Categories: Corporate News, Google, Internet, Misc. Tech

Sony is offereing its Reader users half a million public domain books. The Google optimized books are added to the 100,000 already available for the e-book. Included are such titles as “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,”  “The Awakening” and “The Letters of Jane Austen.” Google has been encoding books in the open electronic format ePub to make such titles more available to Sony and other e-book distributors.

Read More | NY Times

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Amazon releases Kindle for iPhone

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Books, New Apps, Free Apps

We knew that Amazon was planning on bringing their Kindle e-books to other devices, but we didn’t think it would happen this soon. This evening, Kindle for iPhone was released on the App Store, available for free. In a nutshell, you are able to associate your iPhone or iPod touch with your Amazon account, and can then buy Kindle book content and have it sent to your phone for reading. Kindle for iPhone is also compatible with the Whispersync service, which allows you to continue reading any Kindle content from where you left off, no matter which device you are reading on. That means you can start reading on your iPhone, stop, then power on your Kindle and continue from the same page you left off on. Very nice.

If you are a Kindle or Kindle 2 owner, and you’ve purchased books for those devices, when you download Kindle for iPhone you’ll have an Archived Items category that will list all your purchased books, which you can access immediately. In using the app, we found that it works extremely well—not as well as a Kindle, mind you, but as an extra way to read the e-books (or as a way to save yourself the $359 Kindle price tag,) the app shines. Go ahead and hit the App Store to grab Kindle for iPhone.

Read More | Kindle for iPhone

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Amazon Kindle 2 review

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Features, Handhelds, Product Reviews

We’ve spent a few days with the Amazon Kindle 2, which has been the talk of the gadget world this week. We know some of you are wondering if you should pick one up, so we are here to give you our thoughts on the latest iteration of Amazon’s e-book reader. If you’re like us, you already know that the Kindle 2 is available for purchase now, and you likely have one in your hands - but for the rest of you, join us for our full review of the Kindle 2 (and if you missed it, check out our Kindle 2 gallery.)

Okay, so while we were working on the review, we sent a couple of questions out to some of our Twitter peeps asking what they thought of the device, and Lisa from EllisLab hit us back with so much info, that we are using her feedback to break this down for you. Sometimes you need the point of view of a “real world” user anyway, as opposed to one of us gadget fiends. So what we will do is give some of our thoughts on the Kindle 2, and then bring in Lisa’s thoughts as well.

The Kindle 2 was announced on February 9th, and just started shipping on February 24th. The announcement came with the promise of a 25% improvement in battery life, 20% faster page turns, a better screen that supports up to 16 shades of gray (as opposed to 4 shades with the original,) and a much thinner design.

Click to continue reading Amazon Kindle 2 review

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Daily Show: Jeff Bezos on the Kindle 2

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Handhelds, Videos

We are fans of The Daily Show for reasons like this - only Jon Stewart can get this type of reaction from powerful mogul like Jeff Bezos. Watch as Bezos comes on The Daily Show to let the world know about the Kindle 2, while Jon makes fun of just about every aspect of the product, from the price, to the notion of e-paper. Great stuff.

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