"Is Your E-Book Reading Up On You?" from NPR by MARTIN KASTE

E-books are quickly going mainstream: They represent nearly one out of 10 trade books sold. It's easy to imagine a near future in which paper books are the exception, not the norm. But are book lovers ready to have their reading tracked? Most e-readers, like Amazon's Kindle, have an antenna that lets users instantly download new books. But the technology also makes it possible for the device to transmit information back to the manufacturer. "They know how fast you read because you have to click to turn the page," says Cindy Cohn, legal director at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It knows if you skip to the end to read how it turns out."

Listen to the NPR All Things Considered podcast on this story. Read the full NPR feature story here. See this story from the Economist, as well; it's on the state of the retail side of the book business, in which it states, in part:

The context for all this activity is a technological transformation in bookselling that has devastated bookstores. Amazon, whose Kindle became the first e-reader to achieve critical mass, ahead of Apple’s iPad, announced a further innovation on December 8th, making books published on the Kindle available through web browsers. This came hot on the heels of Google’s announcement that it is launching its own e-books and online e-reader. Borders, which has lost money in each of the past ten quarters, has only recently launched its e-reader, called Kobo, in partnership with Indigo, a Canadian bookseller. One of the apparent goals of Borders in offering to buy Barnes & Noble is to get its hands on its rival’s superior e-book technology. That includes the nook, an e-reader which hit the market far sooner than the Kobo, though later than the Kindle.

Read that full Economist article, here.

"So You Got an Amazon Kindle This Holiday Season: Now What?" from Mashable

Assuming you’re like me, the first thing you’ll want to do is load your device with as many free books as possible. Amazon offers thousands of free e-books in the Kindle Store, which are divided into two sections: popular classics and rotating, limited-time offers. There are a number of other resources for free e-books outside of the Kindle Store as well. Collectively, millions of titles are available through Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive (mainly historical items useful for academic work), Open Library, ManyBooks.net, LibriVox (audiobooks), Fictionwise, Bookyards and Planet eBook. In most cases, you’ll need to download the e-books and transfer them to your Kindle using a USB cable. For more information, see here. In addition, you can port any of your PDF files for reading on your Kindle device, as well as access hundreds of thousands of other (and more contemporary) titles in the Kindle Store, usually priced at $9.99 or less.

No, actually; have to disagree here. Although we definitely believe that the Kindle is the best reader out there, in terms of long form reading; it isn't by any measure at all fluid. Devices with just a thousand titles will begin to slow down all versions of the Kindle. Flipping a page gets slow even. We all use Kindles. The iPad's to heavy and gets hot; it's not ideal for long form reading. The Nook's got the same constraints as the iPad; size doesn't proportionately translate into reading values. With the cheapest model of the Kindle, you get the most bang per buck. But all that said, it still isn't fluid. So don't load up your Kindle with titles that you aren't going to read anyway. Navigating through thousands of titles can get a bit laborious. On last year's versions of all of the Kindle models, you'll experience terribly slow search through those titles. That's what the cloud's for. Remember that as long as you have access to the web, through Wi-Fi or WhisperNet, then you don't have to worry about having all of those titles on your Kindle all the time. Just pack what you need for long plane rides, and you're set. Read that Mashable article here.

It's Raining Kindles: Amazon is selling "millions" of Kindle e-book readers. - from MSNBC

Amazon.com still isn't coming clean with how many Kindle e-book readers it's selling, but at least now we know that it will be in the "millions" this holiday quarter alone. In a forum post unearthed by Daring Fireball, an official post in Amazon's Kindle forum claims that the company has already sold millions of the third-generation e-readers since the quarter began. Even if this means that just 2 million Kindles have sold over the past 73 days -- the bare minimum when all we get to chew on is "millions" -- it's still an impressive feat. The Kindle got off to a bumpy start three years ago, but no one said the e-reader revolution was going to happen overnight. Bibliophile resistance and a stiff $399 price tag kept anyone other than early adopters away.

Read that MSNBC article here.

Buying books is fun, with a glass in your hand from Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk

Author, author: Elif Batuman: Before I first acquired a Kindle, exactly one year ago, I didn't usually buy books while under the influence of alcohol. I won't say I never did it, because that would be a lie. But it wasn't a habit. After a couple of glasses of wine, I tend to fixate on the present. I have no use for five to seven days' delivery time. The Kindle is wonderful for drunk people because you can climb into bed, press one button, and The Anatomy of Melancholy instantaneously materialises before you, plucked by the so-called Whispernet out of the surrounding ether.

The Guardian piece is spot on (as the Guardian usually is), not only about the point about drunk shopping. This is exactly why the iPad and the Nook collects dust, and why our Kindle, not the DX but the smaller one; see, the reader is about portability and readability; i.e. the portability of our book collection, and the readability of the text. Bibliophiles don't care about a moving graphic of some motion of the page flipping across the screen; we also don't need the text laser-etched into our corneas. And we need something that will last a week, without having to recharge.

"The Evolution of E-Books and Our Literary Future" - The Takeaway - Wednesday, August 11, 2010

What would our world look like without paperback books? One publishing company has taken one step closer to the reality of eliminating paperback books entirely. Dorchester Publishing has decided to change its printing schedule, focusing first on e-books, followed by a print-on-demand run of paperbacks. The question is: will this be the trend for paperback book publishers to follow? Jason Boog, publishing editor at Mediabistro, and the editor of the publishing blogs GalleyCat.com and eBookNewswer.com, says sales of mass market paperbacks have decreased significantly in the past year. Boog says, "Many people are thinking this may be the end of the mass market paperback." Nancy Davenport, the Director of Library Services for the District of Columbia Library, says a shift to e-books is happening, but the library is far from obsolete. The DCLS has incorporated e-books into their book collections. Davenport says, "People come in to browse and, unless there's something they want to read on the shelves, [they then] browse the digital catalog of books."

Download The Takeaway podcast here.

Charlie Rose's Wednesday, July 28, 2010 conversation with Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO, Amazon.com

CHARLIE ROSE: Jeff Bezos is here. He is the founder and CEO of
Amazon.com, the country’s largest online retailer. The company’s
electronic reading device, the Kindle, has sold in the millions since its
debut in 2007. Amazon recently announced it is now selling more digital
books than hardcover books for the first time in its history.

Although sales of the Kindle continue to grow, the device faces
increased competition from tablet computers such as the Apple iPad. Last
week Amazon announced second quarter profit rose 45 percent from the same
quarter last year and its revenue grew 41 percent. Amazon’s stock has
since fallen because analysts expected even greater earnings performance.

I am pleased to have Jeff Bezos back at this table.

View the full conversation here, and read the full transcript here.

"No Ink, No Paper: What's The Value Of An E-Book?" from NPR by LYNN NEARY

The growing popularity of e-books has raised a difficult question in the publishing marketplace that used to have an easy answer: What's a book worth? Because they cost less to produce, consumers think e-books should be cheap. But publishers are afraid that if the price goes too low, they may never recover from the diminished expectations. Some observers wonder if the publishers' pricing strategy is short-sighted. Jason Epstein, a well-known editor, publisher and author who has worked in the business for more than a half-century, says e-books are "the most exciting event, as far as books are concerned, in 500 years." [...] The $9.99 price per e-book, set by Amazon for its Kindle e-reader, was a major source of frustration for publishers. So when Apple unveiled the iPad, which includes an e-book reader and store, they seized the opportunity to make prices more competitive. Most of the major publishing houses have negotiated a higher price for newly released e-books. But McQuivey says the inflation is a mistake.

Listen to the NPR Morning Edition podcast here. Check the full NPR feature story out here.

Charlie Rose's Thursday, February 26, 2009 conversation with Jeff Bezos

These are highlights; and there aren't really any transcripts available for this particular segment of highlights. But you can definitely check the montage out here, on CharlieRose.com. He's basically making a push for the Kindle, as Amazon's future basically rests on this thing; it's foundation. Remember that Amazon got its start in the book business, and it doesn't intend on losing its online foothold here, on this market. See this web search.