So Amazon targets real books as competitors to their Kindle reading device instead of the recent iPad mockeries. Well since at the moment it is hard to get enough LC-Screens anyway…

Amazon announced a special deal on the Kindle 3G and Kindle DX for Mother’s Day coming up.

With every purchase of either the 3G or DX, you can get a $25 Amazon Gift Card along with it.  If you go to the product page for either item, Amazon includes details on how to include the $25 Gift Card.

Amazon said the promotion will run while supplies last.

Kindle owners will be able to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 US libraries.

The books can be read on Kindle and free Kindle reading apps. Furthermore, Amazon enables notes, highlights and sync via whispernet, so when you check out a book again or maybe buy it, your notes and highlights will be available to you.

The lending function is available to all Kindle generations as to all free Kindle apps for Android, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, PC, Mac, BlackBerry or Windows Phone.

Amazon is working with OverDrive, which is the leading provider of digital content solutions for over 11,000 public and educational libraries in the United States.

So finally Amazon erases one big disadvantage to the EPUB-eReaders out there.

In a Gizmodo article they say that you will lose your Kindle back issues of a magazine if you cancel your subscription. This is just plain wrong!

Back-issues on a Kindle are not deleted to cancellation of a subscription. They will reside on the device until you manually delete them. But they might vanish if the issue is more then seven issues old. If you want to keep older issues you have to secure them manually.

Here is the specific part of the Kindle help page:
Read entire post …

“Amazon Introduces New Kindle Family Member: Kindle with Special Offers for $114”
That is $25 less for the #1 bestselling latest-generation Kindle plus special offers and sponsored screensavers.

Special offers in the initial weeks include:
. $10 for $20 Amazon.com Gift Card,
. $1 for an album in the Amazon MP3 Store, and
. a $100 Gift Card with a new Amazon Rewards Visa Card

There is no $25 lower price for the Kindle 3G model, that still costs $189. The use of the 3G wireless for updating the screensavers and the ads may be just to expensive. That way the difference between the lowest-priced Kindle and the 3G model will be $75 now rather than $50.

Read entire post …

Recently the New York Times errected a pay wall for its website. Web readers who aren’t already NY Times subscribers will get 20 article views per month for free and have to pay, if they want to read more. Except when they where send to the NYT by a search engine or a social network. And of course there are other ways around this pay wall, since it seems to be implemented with JavaScript only. There is even alread a free New York Times Twitter autofeed. So Times publisher Arthur Sulzburger did mention that there would be daily limits on links from search engines.

Popcorn anyone?
Read entire post …

Amazon have updated the Kindle4Mac reading app.
Some of the improvements in the latest update:

Use the built-in dictionary to seamlessly look up the definitions of English words without interrupting your reading.
Real page numbers for thousands of books in the Kindle Store. Now you can easily reference and cite passages, and read alongside others in a book club or class.
If several other readers have highlighted a particular passage, then that passage will be highlighted in your book.
Choose whether you’d like to browse your library in a tile view or in a list view.
You can download the app from Amazon or from the Mac App Store.

Amazon has updated its website to include a new section for apps, games, and other active content “Kindle Games & Active Content“. So far there are only 23 titles in this section right now, but that will obviously increase.

The other new category “Kindle Editions with Audio/Video” is for enhanced Kindle ebooks. It contains up to 250 at the moment.

Stephen King might be called an early adopter if it comes to digital publishing and e-books. As early as March 2000 King published the story “Riding the Bullet” as an e-book that could be downloaded from the Web onto hand-held devices or computers.

When the second generation of Amazon’s Kindle went on sale in February 2009, King wrote the novella “Ur” exclusively the Kindle platform.

So far “Ur” earned him $80.000 for a work of three days, as he points out: “I didn’t do ‘Ur’ for money. I did it because it was interesting. [...] It took three days, and I’ve made about $80,000. You can’t get that for short fiction from Playboy or anybody else. It’s ridiculous.”

Read entire post …

In a press release Amazon announces a Windows Phone 7 Kindle app for later this year. The app will include all standard Kindle features. It will also be able to sync via Whispersync to keep your place in the book you’re reading with your other Kindle apps or Kindle device if you own one or two. It will also incorporate new features built into a Kindle app for the first time, such as personalized book recommendations on your Kindle app home screen and the ability to send a book suggestion to a friend from any book in your library without leaving the app.
Read entire post …