Amazon Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers

Assuming Apple doesn't reject it, this should mean you can read Kindle books just as easily as Apple's iBooks. Be interesting to see reviews of the reading experience on both apps.

An Apology from Amazon - kindle Discussion Forum

An Apology from Amazon - kindle Discussion Forum

Jeff Bezos:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

A nice apology. I think the whole situation is good to remind people about how paying for things online doesn’t always confer ownership. Part of me still wonders if Amazon didn’t do it on purpose to maybe give them some arguing power down the road against copy protection.

September 4 Update: Amazon is giving free downloads of the books to affected customers.

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others - Pogue's Posts Blog - NYTimes.com

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

Decreases my already low level of desire to get a Kindle. Stick around for the punchline at the end.

Why the newspaper still beats the Amazon Kindle

Why the newspaper still beats the Amazon Kindle

Sadly: “But both versions of the Kindle are missing what makes print newspapers such a perfect delivery vehicle for news: graphic design.” Hopefully they can improve on this in time.

Jeff Bezos: Kindle Books and Readers Are Separate Businesses - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Jeff Bezos: Kindle Books and Readers Are Separate Businesses

I’m glad to hear this. A standard of some sorts for ebooks would help people designing devices know what their users are going to see, so that eventually ebook designers know what constrains they’re dealing with.

Kindle Content Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Kindle Content Design

As I’ve argued before, I think newspapers could go far on the Kindle (and other such devices). There are some good guidelines here for design, but I wonder how they’d change between the Kindle and the DX? With the DX you can more closely copy the print layout. Would that be better?

Watchmen, X-Men, and Jimmy Corrigan: Putting Our Favorite Comics on the Kindle - Gearlog

Watchmen, X-Men, and Jimmy Corrigan: Putting Our Favorite Comics on the Kindle

Handheld devices with big screens are the future of comics if they don’t die out first.

PADD

(I’ve deleted and started this post over five times now. For some reason I can’t put words together about this topic I’m happy with.)

The Kindle 2 doesn’t appeal to much more than the Kindle did. Though I can see some uses for e-readers, and there are good arguments for their advantages, especially in saving printing and distributions costs for publishers, I really like reading novels.

What I’d like is not a book reader but a magazine reader. I actually feel guilty reading newspapers and magazines because I’ll often only read a few articles. I look at all that paper that was printed for my to read just a small percentage of the words. Sure, most of the articles are online, but the Web isn’t a great place to read newspapers or magazines. You get a column of text with maybe some embedded photos. None of the nice layout you get on the real deal. You often don’t get the sidebars or inset graphs, or if you do, they’re squeezed into what the Web can do.

I’d like to see a device with some size to it, maybe 7″×10″ or so with a color screen that can display a full page of magazine text. Give it pinch-to-zoom like the iPhone has for smaller text, and a sensor to let it flip to landscape for double-page spreads. Then you just need a subscription service (I think the Kindle already has this) where you can pull down each new edition of a publication when it comes out. Ditto for comic books. Lots of time is being spent trying to replicate comics on the Web, but reading tiny lettered text on a computer monitor feels unnatural. On a handheld device I think it’d work very nicely.

In other words, someone please invent this.

A Clever Trick for Automatically Finding Deals You Want at Amazon

A Clever Trick for Automatically Finding Deals You Want at Amazon

How to create an RSS feed that filters Amazon’s Gold Box for specified search terms.

Amazon MP3 Store

Amazon has launched its own music download store, offering 256 kbps mp3 files with no copy protection for 89¢-99¢. Daring Fireball has a review, and Buzzfeed has links to a few more articles and reviews about it.

The Harry-est Town in America

The Harry-est Town in America

Go Falls Church!

Amazon.com: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling

Amazon.com: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling

Pre-order the new book, save 46%, and, if you use this link, I’ll get a small commission.

Amazon Customers Vote Homepage

Amazon Customers Vote Homepage

Amazon’s taking sign-ups for the Wii and PS3. Instead of first come, first serve, they’re doing a drawing.

Abusing Amazon images

Abusing Amazon images

I’m pretty sure I linked to this before, but this is a good resource for pulling artwork from Amazon.com.

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists | Applefritter

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists | Applefritter

Homework (after reading this): now that you know what sorts of things the public can find out about you, think about how much Amazon itself knows about you. Or Google, or Microsoft, or Yahoo!

MOSe Use: Generating Amazon and IMDb Favicons

I’ve added a little bit of MOSe to my site. Any links to Amazon or IMDb will automatically have a little favicon after them - unless you’re using Internet Explorer, which can’t keep up with the CSS. This will save me a little bit of coding (and having to remember to code in the img tags after the links). I’ve also done away with the concept of linking the name of a book to its official webpage because, well, who cares? Everyone just wants to go to the amazon page anyway.

For more information on the idea of MOSe’s, see:

• Mezzoblue
• as days pass by
• webgraphics
• MyDimension
• Mike Pick

Here’s the CSS I that I have:

a[href^="http://www.amazon"] { background: url(http://www.davextreme.com/davextreme/mt/ archives/Amazonlogo.gif) right center no-repeat; padding-right: 12px; } a[href^="http://www.imdb"] { background: url(http://www.davextreme.com/davextreme/mt/ archives/IMDblogo.gif) right center no-repeat; padding-right: 22px; } a[href^="http://us.imdb"] { background: url(http://www.davextreme.com/davextreme/mt/ archives/IMDblogo.gif) right center no-repeat; padding-right: 22px; } 

It doesn’t validate at the moment, and I’m not quite sure why, but it still looks nifty!

Downloading Album Art Made Easy

I ran across a neat little iTunes script today while reading Plastic Bag. You just select a song or group of songs in iTunes, go to the script menu, selected “Fetch Art,” and it’ll connect to Amazon.com and download the album cover for every item in the database. Then you can select the songs and copy them into iTunes, so that when you play music you’ll be able to see the cover art for the album. The script works perfectly and I now have artwork for almost all of my music. Fetch Art for iTunes is a free download.