Despite many predictions to the contrary, eBook readers are still going strong. They may not be as flashy as tablets, but they are great devices with long battery lives, clear readable screens, and lightweight both in size and on your wallet. Most people tend to pick an eBook reader based on their bookstore preferences, what [...]
Amazon Buys Goodreads, but Is It a Good Deal?
Amazon announced today that they’re buying Goodreads, a social book site that lets you review books you’ve read, and look for recommendations based on your reading list and the books your friends are reading. Needless to say, this is a slam dunk match for Amazon and Goodreads, as they really can complement each other nicely. There are [...]
Is an eBook a Book, or Is It Something Else?
The fine folks at Forbes raised an interesting question this week: are eBooks really books? Their take is that eBooks are more like software, due to their digital nature. And yes, they are looking specifically at the education markets. But this touches on a larger debate, one that comes up quite often. Opponents of eBooks [...]
Papertrell Aims to Turn Reference Books into Apps
In general, I tend to shy away from the “app-ification” of eBooks. If it’s a book, I want to just sit down and read it. I like eBooks, but I don’t need unnecessary videos, music, etc. However, the exception is reference books, cookbooks, and anything else where it’s not a linear process to read from [...]
GoodReader Releases SDK for 3rd-party iPhone and iPad App Developers
If you’re not in high-tech and are reading this web site from the point of view of a typical consumer, here’s a bit of jargon for you: Software development kit, or SDK. An SDK is a package of software that companies offer (sometimes for a fee, sometimes not) to encourage other companies and individual programmers [...]
Goodbye Spin Magazine After 27 Years
Last summer, after BuzzMedia bought Spin Magazine, it announced it was cancelling the November / December issue as part of a ‘brand evaluation’. Well … over the holidays we learned that print was NOT in fact part of the ‘moving forward’ plan, and the magazine has been killed off in favor of focusing on online efforts. [...]
Pre-Order with Amazon Now, and Get Your Book In . . . 23 Years?
So I like science fiction. I also enjoy stories that take place in really cold places (“Antarctica”, “Kolymsky Heights”, “Archangel”), and I’m also fond of Steampunk, Victoriana, and the Edwardian Era. And the book “Aurorarama” attempts to blend all those elements together, along with a lot of word-play, inside jokes, odd allusions, and (let’s be [...]
Byook Enhanced eBooks Review
Various developers have been trying since the original iPad to make enhanced and video eBooks a success. There seems to be this impression that books+tablet+video=profit! Yet plain old eBooks have managed to hold their ground quite nicely, leaving the question of whether there’s really a market for a book with video, music, and other bells [...]
Are eTextbooks Fully Baked Yet?
Digital textbooks always sound like a great idea on paper. They save money! And children don’t struggle under the weight of giant books! What’s not to like? Well, there’s the medium for reading on them for starters. Kindles crashed and burned on the college level, and while iPads are great, they are also expensive and [...]
Does The Shutdown of “The Daily” Mean Anything For Digital Magazines?
New broke this week that “The Daily”, Rupert Murdoch's iPad-only newspaper, was being shut down. The four people who read it were probably heartbroken. Sarcasm aside, the real question is whether the death of The Daily is indicative of a larger issue. Businessweek brought this question up, pointing out that Newsweek plans to go all-digital [...]



























