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?
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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.”

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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.
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According to Amazon, during the last 30 days customers have bought more Kindle e-books than hardback and paper books combined for the top 10, 25, 100, and 1000 bestselling books on Amazon.

In April-June 2010, for every 100 hardcover books sold by Amazon, 143 Kindle books were bought.

Steve Kessel, Senior vice-president of Amazon Kindle said:

“For the top 10 bestselling books on Amazon.com, customers are choosing Kindle books over hardcover and paperback books combined at a rate of greater than 2 to 1. Kindle books are also outselling print books for the top 25, 100, and 1,000 bestsellers—it’s across the board. [...] This is remarkable when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover and paperback books for 15 years, and Kindle books for just 36 months.”

Amazon also announced more new Kindle 3, launched August 27, have been sold in the last two months than Kindle 2 were sold during the Oct-Dec 2009 quarter, which was a record-breaking holiday quarter for Amazon last year.

Since several days the section beneath “Your Active Kindle Subscriptions” is empty. It just says “No subscriptions found.”

When you click the “Your active Kindle subscriptions” link in the upper right corner of the “Manage your Kindle” page, you will get an error message:
“Looking for Something? We’re sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site ”

I wonder, what Amazon is doing there. It’s quite annoying when you just wanted to terminate a subscription and maybe now have to pay for another month.

What you still can see are your inactive subscriptions and you also can activate them. Since I am receiving subscriptions (blogs, newspapers) on my Kindle, I guess there went something wrong on amazon.com, or they are planing for something new.

Well, they should tell the user, what’s going on!

As Amazon’s press release headlines the new Kindle for Android update makes Kindle for Android “even better”.

The new features are:

. search the full text of Kindle books by voice or text,
. seamlessly look up words and phrases in Wikipedia,
. lock screen orientation in portrait or landscape mode,
. and view details about a book on Shelfari, the books-focused
. social networking site — “all without leaving the app.”

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Both, the Kindle 3 WiFi and the Kindle 3 3G + WiFi are back in stock on Amazon.com. You can order a Kindle today and will receive it within a day or in about 5 days depending on shipping method and your actual location

Kindle and Kindle DX

Kindle (Free 3G + Wi-Fi, 6″, White or Graphite): $189

Kindle (Wi-Fi, 6″, Graphite): $139

Kindle DX (Free 3G, 9.7″, Graphite): $379

Kindle DX, either 2nd generation white or Graphite with a newer screen, are also in stock and available for immediate shipping.

With the DX the question is, why is the demand for the DX lower compared to the Kindle 3? One reason could be that with Kindle 3 WiFi out it’s inevitable that at some point Kindle DX WiFi will follow and perhaps with a price reduction?
On the other hand it may just be the price that let more buyers turn to the Kindle 3, since not everyone wants to pay nearly $400 for an e-reader – for just $100 more you can get an iPad.

A third reason could be, that from what I saw in forums throughout the web, most buyers of Kindle e-readers are women who are more interested in romance and other novels and thus are satisfied with a small device that fits into their purses. The larger DX is just more suitable for readers who also read a lot of PDFs and magazines.

There is a video on youtube where an e-reader owner compares different e-reader displays with an airport approach chart. He has got actually a Youtube Channel with even more videos.

Here is the video that shows 5 e-readers displaying the same chart. In this comparison there is one flaw, when he says you can not turn the Kindle DX to landscape mode in order to zoom the shown pdf. Actually you can by just turning the DX and then it would show the graphics in a much more zoomed state than any of the other readers.