Morning Coffee – 1 June 2016

Here are nine stories to read this morning. Dear Mommy Blogger (Josi Denise) How can we find the time for pleasure reading? (TeleRead) The Bookseller Tells Us that 73% of UK Youth Prefer Paper Books, But ... (The Digital Reader) No! Don’t hit ‘Publish’! Oh, oh, now what do we do? (TNM) The return...

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from The Digital Reader

BBC Relaunches Its “Get Reading” Campaign as “Love to Read”

Last November  the BBC announced Get Reading, a digital and social media campaign to promote the love of books across BBC's tv and radio shows as well as online. Now The Bookseller reports that the BBC relaunched the campaign this week at the Hay Festival. The campaign is now called Love to Read,...

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from The Digital Reader

Has Your Kindle Fire Tablet Flipped/Reversed Its Screen?

When Amazon launched the new $50 Fire tablet last fall, one way they cut costs was to ship the tablet with only a 90-day warranty, and make a full year's warranty an optional upgrade. Lately I have come to regret being too cheap to spring for the better warranty. For the past couple weeks I have...

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from The Digital Reader

How to Suggest New Kindle Features to Amazon

Few people know this, but there’s a simple way for anyone to suggest new Kindle features. If you would like a Kindle with a 6.8" screen, built-in speakers and audio ability, or an all-bold option for text, you can tell Amazon what you think. The retailer has a dedicated email address...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 31 May 2016

Here are eight stories to read this morning. Best Way to do Historical Research (The Alliance of Independent Authors) Clive Barker's Books of Blood (My Year of Horrible Reading) If It’s “Constructive,” It’s Not Journalism (Simple Justice) Infinite Complexity: On Translating David Foster Wallace...

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from The Digital Reader

There’s No Such Thing as Common Sense, and There Never Was

The topic of common sense recently came up in the comment section of this blog, and after initially responding with a comment I thought it would be worthwhile to expand on my comment and explain why "Common Sense" is a misnomer. Let's start with the comment that set me off. Felix Torres left a...

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from The Digital Reader

New Survey Shows 26% of Brazilians Have Read an eBook in the Past 3 Months

A new survey by the Instituto Pró-Livro has revealed that ebooks are slow to catch on in Brazil. According to the 4th edition of the Retratos da Leitura no Brasil survey report, ebooks have been read by 26% of survey respondents. The survey showed that the number of ebook readers in Brazil grew 6%...

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from The Digital Reader

New User Reports Confirm the Kindle Oasis not Charging from the Battery Case

It's been some two weeks since I first raised the question as to whether some Kindle Oasis units had a defective connection with their battery case, and as new evidence comes in that question is becoming less a question than a known defect affecting a small number of Oasis owners. Over the past...

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from The Digital Reader

Infographic: Fifty Words Which Should Exist in English

English is a language known for following other languages down dark alleyways just to clout them over the head and rifle through their pockets for spare vocabulary. All this borrowing (and not to mention outright theft) has given us a language whose rules would best be described as crazy, and the...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 30 May 2016

Here are xxxx stories to read this morning. 20 Signs You’re the Biggest Book Nerd in Your Friend Group (Barnes & Noble Reads) FIVE REASONS I QUIT READING A BOOK (Book Riot) How the Textbook Industry Tries to Hook Your Prof (WIRED) National digital library for Canada? Law professor talks up idea...

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from The Digital Reader

Newspaper Trade Group Takes Ad-Blocking Fight to FTC

Web publishers are responding to the increasing use of ad blockers by either getting their site whitelisted with the blocking services or by nagging or banning ad block users. Axel Springer has even filed a handful of lawsuits against ad block developers in Germany (and lost every time). And now...

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from The Digital Reader

Paul Biba’s eBook, eLibrary and ePublishing news compilation for week ending Saturday, May 28

Editor's Note: The following is a compilation of tweets from @PaulKBiba, the former editor of Teleread. New Digital Collection: “Runaway Slave Ads Portray Grim Period of U.S. History” (InfoDocket) Author Sues Simon & Schuster Over eBook Royalties on a Book It Doesn’t Publish (The Digital...

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from The Digital Reader

The EchoSim Project Brings (Some) Amazon Alexa Features to Your Web Browser

Amazon's virtual assistant is available in a $90 to $200 household appliance, via Android and iOS apps, and now in your web browser. Well, mostly available. Inspired by a hackathon project, Amazon has released EchoSim, a virtual Echo which is less Alexa in your web browser than it is a tool for...

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from The Digital Reader

British Businessman Thwarts Comic Book Titans on Superhero Trademark

For nearly forty years Marvel and DC have jointly defended a trademark on the word superhero, but now these two titans have been thwarted by a solitary hero London businessman. The Guardian reports: But after a two-and-a-half-year wrangle with Graham Jules, it is the combined might of the comic...

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from The Digital Reader

Apple Launches Its Third Annual “Discover New Big Five Authors” Promotion

Apple has launched its third annual  Discover New (Big Five) Authors promotion, featuring ebooks from publishers like HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, and Hachette. The promotion runs over the course of what Americans would call the Labor Day weekend, and it lets iBooks users download the ebooks for...

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from The Digital Reader

New Report States the Obvious: Indie Authors a Threat to Legacy Publishers

Indie authors, as well as outside pundits like Data Guy, have been saying for years now that self-published authors are a threat to the livelihood of the legacy publishing industry. The Bookseller has a story this morning on a new report from Enders Analysis which basically repeats some of the...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 27 May 2016

Here are ten stories to read this morning. Business Musings: The Grant of Rights Clause (Contracts/Dealbreakers) (Kristine Kathryn Rusch) Consumers believe they have more rights than they really do in digital media (TeleRead) Hollywood films drive Australian library book tastes (SMH) Is Patreon the...

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from The Digital Reader

“Should It be Legal to Resell eBooks?” Is the Wrong Question

Ars Technica UK is using the ongoing court case against Tom Kabinet to ask whether consumers should have the right to resell digital content, but I think they're asking the wrong question. This two-year-old used ebook marketplace is currently waiting a ruling by the Supreme Court of the Netherlands...

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from The Digital Reader

Alphabet’s Google Beats Oracle in U.S. Android Trial

A U.S. jury handed Alphabet's Google a major victory on Thursday in a long-running copyright lawsuit against Oracle Corp, saying the law allowed Google's use of Oracle's software to create its Android smartphone operating system. The jury unanimously upheld claims by Google that its use of Oracle's...

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from The Digital Reader

“Should It be Legal to Resell eBooks?” Is the Wrong Question

Ars Technica UK is using the ongoing court case against Tom Kabinet to ask whether consumers should have the right to resell digital content, but I think they're asking the wrong question. This two-year-old used ebook marketplace is currently waiting a ruling by the Supreme Court of the Netherlands...

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from The Digital Reader

Dasung Paperlike E-ink Monitor Up for Pre-Order on Indiegogo, $799

With two limited production runs and a single retail partner, it's not exactly easy to get your hands on a Paperlike E-ink monitor, but now is your chance to get in line to pre-order a Paperlike at a discount. A few days back Dasung quietly launched an Indiegogo campaign for the Paperlike. (The...

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from The Digital Reader

Beta-Testers Wanted for PDF Worksheet

Do we have any teachers or textbook/continuing-ed authors in the house? Last night I was inspired to take my recent post on coming up with names and rework it so that it is more about going through the process of finding the names and less about talking about the process. I created a PDF which...

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from The Digital Reader

Macmillan Acquires Self-Pub Distributor Pronoun

When Vook announced last May that it was reorganizing as Pronoun and pivoting to offer a distribution platform which was free to authors, many people were left wondering just how Pronoun would keep the lights on. They said they were going to generate revenue from outside development work, which...

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from The Digital Reader

BookBub Now Selling CPM Ads in Its Deals Newsletters

Bookbub has long charged authors and publishers fees in order to be accepted into one of its ebook deal newsletter, but it has always set a certain standard for quality (reviews) and editorial fit. Now it is setting aside those standards, and is going to start listing straight adverts in its...

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from The Digital Reader

Oppo’s Smartphone Prototype Can Fold in Half

Foldable smartphone screens have been a dream since long before Polymer Vision launched, and it's still a dream after the startup folded. Now Chinese smartphone maker Oppo is the latest to try to make it a reality. Oppo has just shown off what sources say is a prototype of an Android tablet with a...

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from The Digital Reader

Brooklyn English Teacher Suspended for Providing Books to Students

An  award-winning veteran English teacher has been put on administrative leave in retaliation for his ongoing conflict with his high school's curriculum decisions. From the NYPost: Todd Friedman, a 29-year public-school veteran who teaches at Midwood High School, was put on administrative duty —...

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from The Digital Reader

Infographic: Don’t Panic – Use a Towel

The 25th of May is Towel Day, an annual tribute to the late author Douglas Adams (1952-2001). In celebration  of that day, here is an infographic on the proper use of a towel. Do you know where your towel is? PixelVulture You just finished reading Infographic: Don’t Panic – Use a Towel...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 25 May 2016

Here are ten stories to read this morning. Amazon Kindle Oasis: E-reader for the one percent (ZDNet) Can I Publish This Photograph of the Mona Lisa? (An American Editor) Do you have to poop when you're in a bookstore? (Coryographies) Do you own the copyright to your own tech? (TNW) Fisking Porter...

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from The Digital Reader

Up Close With E-ink’s New High Resolution Color ePaper Displays

I was suspicious when E-ink announced its newest color epaper display today; no E-ink screen could really look as good as what you can get from a high-quality inkjet printer. But now that I have seen some first-hand photos and a video of the screens on display at SID Display Week, damned if I...

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from The Digital Reader

Judy Blume: Author, Teacher, Bookseller

Author Judy Blume is well known for her YA and kids books, and now she has added a new accolade for her c.v.: bookseller. The Guardian and USA Today report that Blume has opened a bookstore in Key West, Florida: New Jersey-born author Judy Blume and husband George Cooper now spend a good part of...

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from The Digital Reader

E-ink Debuts Flexible 32″ Mobius Display

For the past few years E-ink's signage offerings were limited to either a 13" or smaller flexible Mobius E-ink screen, or a 32" and up inflexible screen. Now E-ink has combined the two. The screen manufacturer is in San Francisco this week at SID Display Week, where they showed off their new...

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from The Digital Reader

Russell Smith Fails to Read Between the Lines of the eBook Debate: a Fisking

Russell Smith weighed in on the latest occurrence of the "ebooks didn't kill paper" trope, but his attempted debunking of the trope missed half of the story. Writing over at The Globe and Mail on Sunday, Smith proclaims: People in publishing are wielding statistics against each other, in the...

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from The Digital Reader

Comixology Unlimited is a Fountain of Graphic Novels and Digital Comics for just $6 a Month

It was around this time last year that I predicted that Comixology would launch an all-you-read subscription comic book service. Today that service launched. Comixology announced on Tuesday that it is launching Comixology Unlimited, a $6 a month service which lets you read as many comic books as...

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from The Digital Reader

Amazon Reveals List of Biggest Book-Buying Cities in the US

  On Monday Amazon announced its annual list of what it would call the most well-read cities in the US, only that's not quite what the list says. Do you know how the mainstream press likes to take limited book publishing industry stats and misinterpret them as representing the entire book...

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from The Digital Reader

Amazon Will No Longer Offer Refunds on Kindles or Fire Tablets After Price Drops

For the longest time Amazon has had a policy of refunding the difference between the sale price of a Kindle or Fire tablet and the price you paid last week. Now that policy is going away. Recode is reporting on a Reddit thread where a lot of Amazon customers are suddenly saying that Amazon will no...

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from The Digital Reader

It’s Time for Something New (Or, How You Can Hire Me)

Earlier this year I announced that I was stepping back from the blog and looking for something new. Today I would like to announce that I have found it. I am taking my six-plus  years as a web publisher and opening my own web design firm. It's called Valiant Chicken Digital. I've built the site,...

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from The Digital Reader

Daring Heist Results in Stolen Little Free Library in Brazil

Little Free Libraries have to contend with vandalism and bureaucracy here in the US, but in Brazil they are being stolen outright. The Tribuna do Ceara reports that the local biblioteca compartilhada, or shared library, project had recently suffered the loss of one of its little free libraries....

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from The Digital Reader

Waterstones Closes OverDrive-Powered eBookstore, Hands Customers to Kobo

For as long as UK bookseller Waterstones sold Kindle hardware, it also ran its own ebookstore where it sold Epub and audiobooks through an OverDrive-powered ebookstore. But then the Kindle displays were chucked last October, and now the ebook section of the Waterstones website is also on the...

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from The Digital Reader

So You Want to Write a Novel (video)

In lieu of the usual Monday morning infographic, here's a video about the reasonable aspirations of newbie writers. As we all know, great writers spring into existence wholly formed, with all of their ideas and works already fully fleshed out and ready to be transcribed. Enjoy. image by Wiertz...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 23 May 2016

Here are seven stories to read this morning. Amazon's screenwriting tool lets you easily share scripts (Engadget) Can You Cheat At Reading? (BookRiot) Court Says Google Doesn't Have A First Amendment Right To Drop A Site From Its Search Results (Techdirt) Do Overused Words Lose Their Meaning?...

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from The Digital Reader

Author Sues Simon & Schuster Over eBook Royalties on a Book It Doesn’t Publish

There's a story going around this weekend about a new class action lawsuit filed against Simon & Schuster. Doctor and author Sheldon Blau is alleging that S&S is paying him for ebooks as sales when they are in fact licensed, only the story is not nearly that simple. From Copylaw: A book is...

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from The Digital Reader

Reports of the Death of the Star Trek Axanar Lawsuit Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

There's a story going around this weekend to the effect that the lawsuit Paramount filed against the indie Star Trek fan film Axanar "is going away". While that is great news (Anaxar looks to be a better Star Trek movie than Paramount's SF movie) it's still too early to celebrate the settlement....

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from The Digital Reader

Fire Tablet Update 5.2.7.1 Stores Kindle ebooks on microSD Card

Amazon's last major update to the Fire tablet let you save internal storage by storing audiobooks on the microSD card. Now Amazon is expanding that option to include ebooks. Amazon is reportedly rolling out a new update for Fire OS 5 Bellini which adds the "On Deck" anticipatory video download...

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from The Digital Reader

Ellora’s Cave Now Threatening RWA With Bogus Defamation Lawsuit(?)

The romance publisher Ellora's Cave has moved on from trying to silence book bloggers with a SLAPP lawsuit; now it is reportedly making threats against the Romance Writers of America. The RWA is the leading writers association for the romance genre. While it has no legal authority, it does have...

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from The Digital Reader

A Million Android Apps Are Coming to Chromebooks Next Month – Just Not Yours

I have some good news and some bad news about the long-anticipated merging of Chrome and Android. Google announced at the I/O conference this week that last month's rumors  about Chromebooks getting Android apps were (mostly) true. PC World, Wired, and other sites are reporting that Android apps...

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from The Digital Reader

Project Ara is Alive, Igor!

After years of waiting, Google's long-delayed modular smartphone program will finally be shipping to developers this fall - only it won't be quite the ambitious and bold design we had been expecting. Liliputing, Ars Technica, and other sites are reporting that Google will be shipping the next round...

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from The Digital Reader

Australian Gov’t Proposes a Economically-Justified Reduction in the Copyright Term; Authors Protest

The Australian Productivity Commission's draft report on reforming that nation's copyright laws is continuing to spark incendiary rhetoric.   Before, publishers were protesting the recommended lifting of trade barriers on book imports, and now authors are objecting to a proposed reduction in...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 20 May 2016

Here are seven  stories to read this morning. Bookslut was born in an era of internet freedom. Today's web has killed it (The Guardian) Do you still need paper books at home for kids? (Teleread) Epicurious is the latest publisher to crack down on ad blockers (Digiday) Going back to a mechanical...

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from The Digital Reader

To Hell With Fair Use: IBM Patents a Printer Which Doesn’t Belong to Its Buyer

DRM has long enabled a file's creator to limit how it is used. We've seen this most often in PDFs, but also office docs and even ebooks, where for example Adobe has a print/readaloud tag in Epub ebooks which can be disabled the publisher. Now IBM has taken this old idea and applied it to printers....

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from The Digital Reader

UK Nook Owners Now Discarding Their “Useless” eReaders

When B&N announced that it was closing its Nook UK Store and handing its customers off to Sainsbury's, I predicted that some Nook owners would find themselves with worthless hardware which neither B&N nor Sainsbury's would support, and sadly, that has come to pass. While some former Nook...

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from The Digital Reader

Barnes & Noble Makes a $10 Million a Year Committment to Hawk Samsung Tablets

When B&N cut a deal with Samsung in 2014 to sell rebranded Samsung Galaxy Tabs, it committed to selling a million tablets in the first 12 months (plus an optional three-month extension). B&N never met that goal; instead their digital revenues dropped quarter after quarter, but that hasn't...

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from The Digital Reader

Oracle Gave Amazon a Discount on Java to Keep Android Off the Paperwhite – Wait, What?

The ongoing Oracle v Google patent infringement spat is currently in week Nth of its retrial, and this week's testimony is shedding new light on otherwise closely-held deals between Amazon and Oracle. Techcrunch reports that Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz testified that Oracle gave Amazon a steep...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 19 May 2016

Here are seven stories to read this morning. A Dozen Bad Ideas That Were Raised At The Copyright Office's DMCA Roundtables (Techdirt) Google’s 1st Amendment defense to search censorship fails in court (Ars Technica) IBM invents printer that checks for copyrights (The Register) The Machine Stops:...

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from The Digital Reader

Will Google Home Read Your eBooks to You? (All Evidence Points to No)

With Google having revealed their take on the Amazon Echo today, the Google Home, many are wondering whether this Wifi-equipped speaker will match the Echo feature for feature. In particular, the ebook world is wondering whether the Google Home will be able to read ebooks: Of course, the...

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from The Digital Reader

Chess: Intellectual Pursuit or Just Another Board Game?

If you've been following the topic of "moral decay" (or as it should be called, railing against innocuous activities) then you've probably read that old chestnut about chess being bad for you. As the myth goes, back in 1859 an unnamed pundit railed against chess in Scientific American, calling it...

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from The Digital Reader

Retrospective: How Facebook Has Manipulated What You See on Its Service

News broke last week that Facebook had been censoring news stories in its "trending news" widget for political reasons. While a single report is not enough to prove anything, the company's past actions give the allegations a lot of credibility. Here's Gizmodo with the original story: Facebook...

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from The Digital Reader

Amazon Has an Alexa-Powered Tablet in the Works, and is Going to be Selling it in Their New Retail Stores

A couple different Amazon Revelations have dropped in the past 24 hours. The tl;dr version is that Amazon's next accessible/IoT/home automation gadget could look like a tablet, and it might be sold in the new retail stores Amazon is planning to open. The WSJ has details on the Alexa tablet story...

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from The Digital Reader

Moring Coffee – 18 May 2016

Here are seven stories to read this morning. Academic Publishing Meets Open Access (Bloomberg View) Five interesting facts about Adobe legacy eBook RMSDK (Medium) Five Reasons PDFs Are Better Than Epub (The Digital Reader) I'm a fucking webmaster (TNW) Out-of-print Trump bio will remain...

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from The Digital Reader

New Pernicious Adobe Epub DRM Found in the Wild

In early 2014 Adobe announced a new type of ebook DRM which had the dual properties of being unbreakable as well as incompatible with existing ebook readers and apps. After initially planning to force everyone to switch to the new DRM in less than six months (which would leave millions of ereader...

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from The Digital Reader

Fire TV Will Soon Read Your Kindle eBooks to You

On Tuesday Amazon announced plans to add new Alexa voice features to the Fire TV. Soon you will be able to talk to your set top box and have Amazon's virtual digital assistant play videos, search for info on local businesses and restaurants, launch apps, check the weather, and more. And it's that...

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from The Digital Reader

Move Over BookBub, Fussy Librarian – Goodreads is Getting Into eBook Discounts

Amazon announced on Tuesday that Goodreads is launching Goodreads Deals, a daily email newsletter which offers GR members discounted ebook deals personalized to the books listed in their shelves. From the Goodreads blog: Book lovers can never have too many books. But sometimes feeding your reading...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 17 May 2016

Here are seven stories to read this morning. The craze for adult colouring books shows how we've all become infants (The Telegraph) A few thoughts on standardisation, W3C, and the IDPF (Baldur Bjarnason) Introducing Spaces, a tool for small group sharing (Official Google Blog) New Publishing Models...

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from The Digital Reader

Is Your Kindle Oasis Not Charging From the Case Battery?

When I reviewed the Kindle Oasis on Saturday, one of my complaints was that the much ballyhooed battery died in only three days. At the time I had written that off to the Oasis not living up to Amazon's marketing claims, but now I wonder if there was a more specific cause. There's a new discussion...

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from The Digital Reader

Second-Gen Dasung Paperlike E-ink Monitor Now Available at Retail, I Go Hands On

When Dasung shipped the Paperlike 13.3" E-ink monitor last year, I was hard-pressed to say anything nice or to recommend the monitor to any but the absolutely desperate. The drivers simply didn't work, and I had heard several complaints of hardware failure. Fortunately, at least one of those...

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from The Digital Reader

Infographic: Fahrenheit 451, by the Numbers

Ray Bradbury's seminal work, Fahrenheit 451, is taught in school's across the US, but how much do you know about it. Did you know Ray Bradbury wrote the novel in 9 days on a rented typewriter? I did, and you can find more details like that in the following infographic. I think the most interesting...

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from The Digital Reader

B&N Education’s New Cosmetics Dept is the Death Knell for College Bookstore

Over the past five years B&N has been replacing more and more of the books in its retail stores with pasta, 3d printers, alcohol, and other merchandise. It's gotten to the point where I'm not sure if you can call B&N a bookstore chain any longer, and now the college bookstores run by...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 16 May 2016

Here are seven stories to read this morning. Are Amazon Ebook Giveaways a Scam? (The Passive Voice) Business Musings: Long-Term Thinking: The Option Clause (Contracts/Dealbreakers) (Kristine Kathryn Rusch) A Concise History of My Many Failed Book Clubs (BookRiot) Lucky 7: Indie bookstores rise for...

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from The Digital Reader

Kindle Unlimited Payout Jumps as as Funding Pool Holds Steady in April 2016

Amazon announced on Friday that the funding pool for Kindle Unlimited remained unchanged in April 2016, at $14.9 million. At the same time, authors and publishers are reporting that the per-page payout had jumped slightly, to just under half a cent per page. In other words, it looks like the fears...

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from The Digital Reader

Publishing Industry Fads Have Been Happening for Nearly 400 Years

If you thought that the way the publishing industry jumps on the latest werehamster/interurban fantasy/cyclops detective/moody vampire/hipster zombie* fad is a new development, you would be wrong. Atlas Obscura has a post up last week which details one of the first know fads in publishing, It dates...

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from The Digital Reader

Oxford English Dictionary Adds 19 Singlish, 12 Hong Kong Words in Latest Update

Looking for some words to use as inspiration for conversations in your next novel, or as a source of names? The Oxford English Dictionary has just released its latest update. For years now the OED has been adding slang words from British and American English, and now they've expanded their focus to...

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How to Make Your Own Kindle Audio Adapter for Less Than $5

Last week Amazon announced Voiceview for Kindle,  an accessibility feature for blind and visually impaired Kindle owners. Voiceview is accessed through the Kindle audio adapter, which comes bundled with a $140 Kindle Paperwhite 3 and a $20 credit. The audio adapter is also available separately as a...

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Panasonic Demos NFC-Powered E-ink Shelf Labels (video)

Earlier this week Panasonic posted a video which shows a shelf label prototype which can be powered by the smartphone used to update the label. This is not the first wirelessly powered E-ink display (in fact, E-ink even has a design up for license) but it is good to see yet another company working...

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Kindle Oasis: Half a Kindle Paperwhite, at Three Times the Price

Amazon pulled off the most amazing stunt when they announced the Kindle Oasis last month. They convinced the tech blogosphere that an ereader with no unique features beyond an awkwardly-conceived, mandatory case was the best ereader ever. I, on the other hand, am underwhelmed. I got a Kindle Oasis...

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Nielsen: Big Five US eBook Sales Down in 2015

A few weeks back the American Association of Publisher reported that the major trade publishers saw steep declines in ebook revenue in 2015, and now market research firm Nielsen Bookscan is chiming in with similar data. PW reports that Nielsen shares its latest stats at BEA 2016 this week: Unit...

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No, eBook Sales Have Not Fallen in the UK

There's a story going around today which reminds us why one should always understand the limitations of a set of statistics before one repeats them in a news article. The Telegraph took a look at the UK Publisher Association's annual stats for 2015 and used them as the basis for recycling that old...

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Donald Trump: Amazon has “a Huge Antitrust Problem”

Now that Trump is the presumptive GOP candidate for president, some pundits have said that he would tone down his rhetoric and start wooing the mainstream voters he had driven over into the Democrat's camp. Judging by a recent interview where the candidate echoed his previous remarks about Amazon,...

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Morning Coffee – 13 May 2016

Here are eleven stories to read this morning. 24 Things No One Tells You About Book Publishing (BuzzFeed News) Books and How We Talk About Immigration (Book Riot) The business case for community engagement and audience-focused journalism (Talking New Media) The Convertible Cloud: Ebook Conversion...

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Tim Berners-Lee: Let’s Merge eBook, Web Trade Groups to Make Spying on Readers Easier

There's a story going around for the past couple weeks about the IDPF and the W3C, and a proposed merger between the two groups. One manages web standards, and the other is responsible for screwing up ebook standards like Epub3. Since one is a closely related subset of the other, someone had the...

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Move Over Lexi – Roger Puts Amazon Alexa in Your iPhone for Free

If you love the Amazon Echo and its virtual assistant Alexa and want to find a way to take it with you on the go, these new iPhone aps are  for you. Over the past week, two different iPhone apps have crossed my desk which add Alexa to the iPhone. One app, Lexi, costs $5 in iTunes, while the other...

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Voiceview for Kindle Works on the Kindle Oasis and Voyage, and Other Things Amazon Didn’t Tell You

When Amazon launched Voiceview for Kindle on Tuesday, they announced  it with a $140 Kindle Paperwhite bundle and the promise that the feature would be coming to other Kindle models eventually. That day has arrived. My loaner review unit arrived on Thursday morning, and the first thing I did after...

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Morning Coffee – 12 May 2016

Here are nine stories to read this morning. The Art of Paying Attention (Writers Unboxed) As BEA opens: A New Global Ebook Report (PP) BEA 2016: Bragging Rights for Baen Books (PW) Building Your Professional Author Website: WordPress vs Squarespace (Jane Friedman) Cory Doctorow: Peace In Our Time...

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Blast From the Past: Hands On With Amazon’s Second Accessible eReader, the Kindle Keyboard (video)

Yesterday's news about the new Voiceview for Kindle accessibility feature has lead many news sites to proclaim that it is Amazon's first accessible ereader. Given that the feature came bundled with a new Paperwhite, that statement wasn't quite true, but more importantly Amazon has released a couple...

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Kindle Audio Adapter Now Sold Separately

When Amazon announced Voiceview for Kindle yesterday, many current Kindle owners were frustrated that the new accessibility feature required a hardware accessory which could only be bought with a new Kindle Paperwhite as part of a $140 bundle. Now there's a cheaper option. A reader has tipped me to...

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Breaking News: Agency Price Controls Reduce eBook Sales

There's still no proof that Amazon is behind the return to agency, but evidence continues to grow that publishers have shot themselves in the foot by taking control of their ebook prices. PW noted last week that three major US publishers have reported declining ebook revenue. E-book sales at...

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Audible Expands OneBook Sharing Program to All Users

Last July I broke the news that Audible was beta-testing a program where listeners could share an audiobook in their library with a friend, more or less giving away a copy at Audible's expense. That program, Audible Onebook, is now open to all Audible customers. Audible announced on Wednesday that...

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Morning Coffee – 11 May 2016

Here are five stories to read this morning. Discover Books Donates Large Numbers of Books (Internet Archive Blogs) Easier downloads of OverDrive library books on the way for Kobos (Teleread) Listening: A Writer’s Tool (Indies Unlimited) Minnesota Legislators Go Crazy, Pushing Dangerous PRINCE Act...

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Amazon Takes Aim at Youtube With New Video Platform

Between KDP, Createspace, Audible's ACX, the Amazon Appstore, and Comixology Submit, Amazon has at least five different ways for creators to monetize their content. And now they have unveiled a sixth. Amazon launched a service on Tuesday that allows users to post videos and earn royalties from...

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VoiceView for Kindle is Amazon’s Accessibility Solution

When the Kindle Oasis went through the FCC last month, one of the test reports inexplicably mentioned an "iPod Earphone". This made no sense at the time (the Oasis doesn't have a headphone jack) but with today's launch of the Kindle Audio Adapter accessory that detail suddenly makes a lot more...

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Hands On with the FreeWrite Hipster Typewriter (video)

Still on the fence with the Freewrite after yesterday's review? Here are a few new reviews to help you make up your mind. I was following up on Kaz Augustin's scathing review of the hipster typewriter this morning when I found a couple hands on videos on Youtube as well as another review. One...

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Is Amazon Purging eBook Promotion Newsletters?

Amazon's greatest secret strength is its affiliate program. It gives web publishers a financial incentive to push customers to shop at Amazon, and this in turn has lead to a whole cottage industry of sites which find and promote Kindle ebook deals. Now Amazon's latest policy enforcement action is...

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Morning Coffee – 10 May 2016

Here are nine stories to read this morning. Article critical of transgender movement sets off debate about 'The Antioch Review' (InsideHigherEd) Barnes & Noble Founder Retires, Leaving His Imprint On Bookstore's History (NPR) Copyright and the Public Domain (Digitization 101) Global outlook:...

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After Penalizing Sites for Interstitial Adverts, Google Launches Interstitial Adverts for Adsense

After years of forbidding sites from putting Adsense ads on interstitial pages and penalizing sites for app install ads, guess what Google just did? The ad network giant has launched a new interstitial ad unit for mobile sites. I was browsing my admin pages in Adsense today when a banner...

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HoloFlex: A Flexible Smartphone with a Faux Holographic Display

The Human Media Lab at Queen's University in Ontario is now showing off their latest in a long line of unique mobile devices which will never leave the lab. The Holoflex is a prototype Android smartphone which runs Android 5.1 Lollipop on a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 CPU with 2GB of RAM and a...

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Freewrite: How NOT to do Software

The first user reviews of the Freewrite retro word processor are coming in, and that's not good news for the device's maker, Astrohaus. Author and publisher K S Augustin has graciously responded to my request for user reviews and has agreed to let me post her review. She's not impressed by the...

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Infographic: A Muggle’s Guide to Visiting Harry Potter Locations

The Harry Potter series may be finished (or more accurately, on hiatus) but the fun doesn't have to end. The following infographic details eleven locations you can visit which were used in the Harry Potter movies. (The 12th location is a movie studio, but the sets no longer exist, so ... ) All of...

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Morning Coffee – 9 May 2016

Here are xxxx stories to read this morning. 50 best cult books (The Telegraph) Against the "Serious Reader" (Book Riot) Amazon 1-star review farming on Craigslist: How safe is your book? (TeleRead) How Literature Became Word Perfect (New Republic) Is Reading eBooks Really Worse for Your Brain Than...

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Icarus A4 13″ Android eReader Goes Up for Pre-Order on IndieGogo (video)

What with the Sony DPT-S1 and Onyx Boox Max being the only two 13" ereaders on the market (*), plus-sized models are rather thin on the ground. But soon we could have another option. The Dutch ereader importer Icarus has launched a new crowd-funding campaign last week to finance the launch of the...

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Nate’s Simple Trick for Coming Up With Names for Shit

For some writers, stringing words together to tell a story is the easy part. The words just flow in a pattern that creates itself, leaving us as little more than stenographers taking notation in the form of a first draft as the words move through our heads. For some of those same writers the hard...

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English Headmaster Rails Against Kids No Longer Being Forced to Read Dead White Guys

Another of those exhortations to read more dead white men and less frivolous modern trash crossed my desk this evening. Graeme Whiting, the headmaster for The Acorn School (a private school in the UK) thinks children's minds are being warped by reading modern trash: Sensationalism is the key for...

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Penguin Fined $30,000 for Hoax Cancer-Curing Cookbook

A story crossed my desk this week which reminded me that Knopf isn't the only division of Penguin Random House  which neglect its fact-checking responsibilities. Business Insider reports that Penguin was fined $30,000 AUD by an Australian consumer protection agency for publishing Belle Gibson’s...

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DRMed eBooks Vanish in Kobo Library Update

It may have arrived a couple days too late for the international Day Against DRM, but Kobo has just given us yet another reminder of why one should always strip DRM from one's ebooks and rescue them. Several Kobo users are reporting over at MobileRead that the latest update to the Kobo website has...

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Penguin Random House Opens Pilot Bookstore in Puerto Rico

There was a time when US publishers owned their own bookstores (DoubleDay even had a chain of stores), but that ended decades ago as the stores were sold off or shuttered. Now Penguin Random House may be signalling a return to what is a common practice is Europe. Last week the publisher officially...

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Morning Coffee – 6 May 2016

Here are six stories to read this morning. Business Musings: Agents and Estates (Contracts/Dealbreakers/Estates) (Kristine Kathryn Rusch) Impressions of Scribd’s New Terms (Juli Monroe) Long-Form Reading Shows Signs of Life in Our Mobile News World (Pew Research Center) The Sci-Fi Novel Secretly...

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Goodreads Launches Kindle eBook Giveaway Program

For the past couple months Amazon has enabled authors and publishers to give away ebooks as contest prizes via Amazon.com - so long as the ebooks were paid for. Now Amazon is offering authors a better option. On Tuesday Goodreads announced a new Kindle ebook giveaway program. The author or...

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The Star Trek Writing Contest Was a Feeder Pool for Vanity Press Author Solutions

When Simon & Schuster revived the Star Trek: Strange New World Writing Contest last October, I was dismayed to learn that S&S was letting its vanity press business partner, Author Solutions, run the contest. This gave the impression that S&S was less interested in recruiting new authors...

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Morning Coffee – 5 May 2016

Here are six stories to read this morning. Can we trust latest UK government library usage figures? (TeleRead) Kindle Tricks - Tips for Your Kindle (Women's Day) The most ridiculous adult colouring books (The Independent) The Ubiquitous Bookstore, Or Why Amazon is Winning at Publishing (Ink, Bits,...

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No, Removing Book Import Restrictions Won’t Kill Australia’s Book Industry

Australia is going through another of its periodic attempts to reform its import laws right now, and its local book publishing industry is once again opposing the change. The Guardian weighed in on the debate today when it gave a platform to Australian publisher Susan Hawthorne. Naturally, she...

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Xkcd, Kerning, Full-Width Justification, Kerning, and Light Sabers

Between its strips on kerning, dates, and diacritics, the webcomic xkcd has shown itself to be adept at poking fun at bad formatting. Today the webcomic turned its attention to kerning again, this time focuses on the unsolved problem of full-width justification. The bane of ebook readers and...

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HarperCollins Just Sounded the Death Knell of the Direct-to-Consumer Sales Fad

Bookshout announced on Wednesday that HarperCollins is killing its retail website and outsourcing the functions to the ebook retail startup Bookshout. The startup's apps will replace the HarperCollins' branded ebook apps, and the startup will also "provide ebook fulfillment for direct-to-consumer...

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Morning Coffee – 4 May 2016

Here are xxxx stories to read this morning. AdBlock Plus teams up with Flattr to help readers pay publishers (TechCrunch) Book Snatching — Clearly the most violent act in the history of reading (No Shelf Required) EPUB e-readers disagree: When non-breaking spaces break standards (TeleRead) How...

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Bookstores Can Triple Their Sales by Offering Print/eBook Bundles

When it comes to Shelfie's ebook/print bundles, it's pretty clear how consumers and publishers benefit; one gets a discount on their digital purchase, and the other gets a reader's email address (marketing opportunities). But there's one question no one seems to be asking: how do bookstores...

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Onyx Boox Max 13.3″ Android eReader Up for Pre-Order on Amazon’s UK, US, Canada Sites

The Onyx Boox Max is a document reader which runs Android and sports a  13.3" E-ink screen. The first orders are just beginning to ship from ereader-store.de, and today a second retailer started taking pre-orders on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.co.uk. A new China-based retailer is asking $650...

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Publisher Has Trouble Giving Away “Mein Kampf” Blood Money

The Boston Globe reports that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is having trouble giving away the profits from sales of an English translation of Mein Kampf. For the past 16 years HMH has been donating its blood money organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles,...

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Repost: Cambridge University, PlasticLogic Produce World’s First Flexible Graphene-Based Display (video)

Editor's Note: With Gangzhou OED drawing a lot of attention for its announcement of graphene-based epaper, I thought my readers would be interested in a similar report on PlasticLogic's graphene epaper demo. This story was originally published in September 2014, and the tech is not on the market...

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Infographic: The Author Behind the Pseudonym

It may surprise you, but many authors have chosen to publish under a pen name. Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, JK Rowling publishes her mystery novels as Robert Galbraith, Isaac Asimov wrote several books as Paul French, and John le Carre was born David John Moore Cornwell. For some,...

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U-Cal Press, Calif. Digital Library Partner to Build Open Source Academic Publishing Platform

The consumer trade ebook market may get the majority of the press attention but it's not the total sum of the digital publishing industry. In academic publishing, for example, the print book is dying off, and taking college bookstores with it. This has lead to the development of new digital...

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Guangzhou OED’s Graphene ePaper Arrived Five Years Too Late

Guangzhou OED got its start in developing a knockoff epaper screen tech which rivaled E-ink, but now this Chinese company says they have developed a new graphene backplane which (if the marketing materials are to be believed) promises to be lighter and stronger than E-ink's existing glass-based...

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Morning Coffee – 2 May 2016

Here are nine stories to read this morning. 1944 memo from manager sick of "gobbledygook" (Boing Boing) Audiobooks: An effective tool for improving literacy (No Shelf Required) Authors out of thousands of dollars after event is abruptly canceled (The Passive Voice) E-books don't smell: One more...

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Goodwill’s Auction Site is the El Dorado for Cheap e-Reading Hardware

A bargain hunter over at Mobileread has tipped me to what is probably the single best auction site for used electronics and other junk: Goodwill. As readers in the US know, Goodwill is a chain of thrift stores that resell donated items and uses the money to fund community programs. But what you...

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Kindle Oasis Teardown Reveals Freescale CPU, Tiny Battery, But No Visible Wireless Chip

We still don't know that the Kindle Oasis shipped with a Bluetooth chip, but the first teardown has offered hints that the case might be able to do more than just hold a change. An eager hacker over at MobileRead has ripped open his Kindle Oasis, and revealed that it has a 245 mAh battery, runs on...

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Is it Really a Coloring eBook if You Print it Yourself?

Coloring books are so popular that they've had a direct impact on industry revenues, caused a shortage of colored pencils, and drawn the attention of snobbish literati.   In fact, this industry is so popular that many creators have taken to self-publishing coloring books and selling them...

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