e-books

Apple's upcoming iPad includes the iBooks apps, which combines e-book reader software with an iTunes-like service for selling books. I was somewhat surprised by iBooks. I had just assumed that Apple was going to let existing e-book distributors like Amazon.com and FictionWise install apps on the iPad and sell books that way. But I should not have been surprised. Why wouldn't Apple want to have its own e-book store?

In today's podcast: European Ombudsman accuses EC of maladministation in Intel case; Sony e-reader won't arrive in time for holidays; and Chinese defense ministry's Web site gets attacked too.

On the same day that Google won a partial victory in the EU legal battle over trademarks, it may be headed back to the drawing board in its fight to hold the rights to millions of out-of-print and orphaned books.

Back in March, I reviewed two e-readers: Amazon's Kindle 2 and the Sony Reader PRS-700. While I preferred the Reader's interface, the Kindle was obviously ahead of the game. Now -- maybe not so much.

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Recently, there has been a minor price war among the vendors of e-book readers. Why? Because Amazon may not have quite the lock on the market it thought it did.

In Thursday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches reactions to Amazon's Kindle DX launch: bigger, better, pricier. But the savior of newspapers? Srsly? Not to mention Error'd...

President Obama wants to simultaneously improve education while getting costs under control. School districts are so stressed financially that they're laying off teachers and ending valuable programs. Here's one modest proposal from the tech blogosphere: Get rid of paper textbooks in favor of digital books and materials for high school and college students as a way to both improve education and cut costs.

After a week of reading books via the Kindle for iPhone app, this reviewer is going back to ink on paper.

In Tuesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches Amazon launch its "new, improved" e-book reader. Not to mention corpulence pedagogy...

Reading digital versions of books isn't new to me -- or many of my colleagues. We've been downloading public-domain books (mostly from Project Gutenberg, which has been around seemingly forever) and reading them off PDAs and other digital devices for years. Now, it looks like mainstream companies like Amazon and Google have finally caught up.

Verizon Wireless executive Tony Lewis told Reuters this week that he expected competitors to the Amazon Kindle eBook reader to "arrive" in 2009, and hinted that Verizon would sell them to customers like cell phones.

At first, the idea of Verizon selling Kindle competitors sounds insane. Their business plan would presumably involve charging customers connection fees for accessing an online electronic bookstore. This sounds crazy for two reasons: 

NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- Facing a downturn in book buying, and competition from online e-books, publishers are increasingly turning to cell phones.

MYKONOS, GREECE -- Everyone's talking about Amazon Kindle sales -- everyone except Amazon, that is. Sure, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' mouth is moving. He just isn't saying anything. Bezos said at the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference this week that “There will be a second version, a third version, a tenth version (presumably there won't be fourth through ninth versions).

SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. -- Half of Japan's bestselling books last year -- half! -- started out as cell phone-based books, according to the New York Times. Will cell phones become the medium of choice worldwide for novels and full-length non-fiction books?

In the outside world, where technologically-related acronyms don't necessarily reign supreme, the term WGA doesn't refer to Windows Genuine Advantage, but to the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike for about a month to try to force the Hollywood studios to give them a bigger slice of the digital pie. And now writers of more traditional content are starting to wonder whether they need to worry as well.