Wednesday online book retailing giant Amazon.com unveiled the newest version of the Kindle e-book reader. The new model, the Kindle DX, is a bigger-screened, more expensive version ($489!) of Amazon’s popular gadget. The DX is thin and light, can display more shades of gray (perfect for b/w newspaper and magazine content), and, says InformationWeek, it […]

Today’s New York Times profiles a new technology from Hewlett Packard, MagCloud, that enables indie publishers to print small batches of custom magazines. Individuals and businesses create their custom magazines, and upload them to the MagCloud site in high-resolution PDF format. No money changes hands until MagCloud receives a customer order, and prints out copies […]

Technology and new media conference South By Southwest Interactive (SxSWi) is just wrapping up in Austin, Texas.  The five day event featured panel discussions, “celebrity geek” interviews, vendor exhibits — and lots and lots of parties. We have asked some of our friends and colleagues who attended this year’s SxSWi to share their highlights and […]

Amazon has released a new Kindle iPhone App that expands the reach of the Kindle platform to Apple’s popular iPhone and iPod touch.

Will the Kindle iPhone application help make Amazon’s ebook platform relevant, or is it just another speedbump on the road to a more open ereading future?

Publishers Weekly magazine reports today what may be the first offer of its kind from traditional publishing. Book publisher Thomas Nelson has launched “NelsonFree,” a program which gives readers their content in several different formats – as a hardcover book, an e-book, and an audiobook, all for the purchase price of a single volume. Thomas […]

Amazon has announced that it plans to cripple one of the features of the new Kindle 2, its text-to-speech feature, to avoid angering publishers wanting to sell audio books: Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are […]

Tim O’Reilly has published an opinion piece today saying that the Kindle must open up or die: Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years. In developing the business plan for the Kindle, Amazon was no […]

Amazon.com today introduced Amazon Kindle 2, the new reading device that offers, in their words, Kindle’s “revolutionary wireless delivery of content” in a slimmer, sleeker package. The book reader retails for $359 and is scheduled to ship beginning February 24. Amazon is taking pre-orders here. Amazon enthuses that the new Kindle model has a longer […]

Venerable newspaper The New York Times is considering charging readers for access to its website, less than two years after discontinuing an earlier Times Select online-subscription service. In an online question-and-answer session, Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor, discussed how the newspaper has been debating whether to charge for online access to the newspaper’s content: […]

It’s the Kindle’s first birthday, and, it still hasn’t become the iPod of eBook readers, as some predicted. Now Silicon Valley Insider’s Dan Frommer is wondering what Amazon can do to turn the Zune into a hit.  Here’s the answer: the Kindle needs to become a new media device. The Kindle is a basically an expensive […]