Amazon’s decision to launch the Prime shipping service several years ago was brilliant. The $79 annual fee means free two-day shipping and has created retailer loyalty like no other campaign I can think of. So isn’t it remarkable that the brick-and-mortars have mostly just watched with envy, offering their own loyalty programs that lack the [...]
Entries from November 29th, 2010
Bookstores Need to Respond to Amazon Prime…Soon
November 29th, 2010 · 6 Comments · opinion
Tags:Amazon·bookstores·primesoon·respond
Free ebooks don’t drive sales, one author finds
November 29th, 2010 · 4 Comments · free ebooks
The SF author Jeffrey Carver has come to the conclusion that offering his backlist as free ebooks just isn’t working for him. I’ve been running the free-downloads experiment for more than two years now. Here’s my conclusion: The free downloads have significantly expanded my audience, and enabled me to meet some very nice people electronically. [...]
Factors to Consider When Deciding What eReader Device to Buy
November 29th, 2010 · 11 Comments · opinion
Editor’s Note: A few days ago we posted a which one should I buy article. Rich had a different opinion on how you should choose an e-reader. Since I respect his opinion, I’m reposting it here. I’ve been pretty lax recently about writing articles for this blog. I’ve been busy trying to wrap up end-of-the-year [...]
Project Gutenberg – Pirate?
November 29th, 2010 · 13 Comments · piracy
Now this is an interesting story for a Monday morning. The SF author Greg Bear is in the middle of a wrangle with Project Gutenberg (PG) over whether some of his stories are in the public domain. He says no, PG say yes. This story hinges on SF stories originally published in magazines in the [...]
The Sony Reader is doomed
November 28th, 2010 · 30 Comments · opinion
I just posted a review of the new Sony Readers. I admit that it’s not a great review. But TBH I was rather underwhelmed by e-readers. They’re basically the same as last year’s models.
Review: Sony Touch Edition, Pocket Edition (PRS-350, PRS-650)
November 28th, 2010 · 8 Comments · hardware reviews
Sony announced this pair of e-reader in September 2010, and at long last I am posting my review. The Touch Edition and Pocket Edition are updates to Sony’s existing 5″ and 6″. Their design is an evolutionary improvement, and not revolutionary. (I really wish they’d get ahead of their competition, and I’ll get into that [...]
BAM Reader now in iTunes
November 28th, 2010 · 1 Comment · ipad pilot, iPhone app
My contact with Bluefire (makers of the Bluefire Reader) just tipped me to Books-a-Million’s new reading app for iOS, the BAM Reader. As you can probably guess, it’s based on the Bluefire Reader. If you’re not familiar with Bluefire, it’s the app that has replaced Stanza as the touchstone reading app on iOS. It doesn’t [...]
Podcast: The Future of the Internet (from 1993)
November 28th, 2010 · No Comments · podcast
The NPR show Science Friday pulled one an old show from their archive this week. It dates from 1993, and the topic is the Internet. Normally a show this old wouldn’t be all that interesting, but this is NPR’s first podcast. Also, one of the participants was using VOIP (more likely a pre-VOIP protocol). How [...]
View Quest Bookbox now available – £79.99
November 28th, 2010 · No Comments · hardware news
View Quest, a UK based consumer electronics company, have announced a new PMP\e-reader, the BookBox. It’s based on a 5″ (800×480) LCD screen with 2GB Flash, a SD card slot, but no Wifi or touchscreen. Ebook support includes ePub, PDF, TXT, FB2, PDB, and HTML.It”s also supposed to be able to support 720p video, but [...]
Google Needs To Define “Carefully”
November 28th, 2010 · 1 Comment · opinion
Google puts this self-serving spam in all of its Google Books files (which also has the side-effect of giving cover views the same damned cover for every book): Click = big So how do they explain this?
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