ENTRIES TAGGED "mobile"

Report: Large-Form Kindle to Target Textbooks and Newspapers

The Wall Street Journal says a large-form Kindle — rumored to make its debut tomorrow — will be partially targeted at the textbook market: Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school's chief…

Jakob Nielsen: Kindle Content Must be Kindle-Specific

Jakob Nielsen offers an in-depth look at Kindle formatting best practices: For Kindle, it's certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can't repurpose website content, either. For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle. Write Kindle-specific headlines and create Kindle-specific article structures. [Link included in original post.] (Via Joe Wikert's Twitter stream) Related Stories:…

Kindle Comes to the iPhone

Users of the iPhone and iPod Touch can now tap into Amazon's Kindle store with the free Kindle for iPhone application. From The New York Times: The move comes a week after Amazon started shipping the updated version of its Kindle reading device. It signals that the company may be more interested in becoming the pre-eminent retailer of e-books than…

The Fastest-Growing Category in the iTunes App Store: Books

At least as measured in terms of number of unique applications, Books have grown the fastest over the last 12 weeks. (Data for this post limited to apps on the U.S. iTunes store through 3/1/2009.) Granted releasing an e-book for the iPhone is a lot easier than writing a gaming application using the iPhone SDK. Roughly 6 out 10 of…

The "O'Reilly Bump" and Bookworm

During his TOC Keynote, Tim O'Reilly talked about how the status he confers through "retweets" on Twitter are really just another form of publishing, not much different from the status we confer on authors by publishing them, or speakers by featuring them (especially at multiple conferences), or hackers by inviting them to Foo Camp. On the Web, the effects are…

Safari Books Online Goes Mobile

Mobile SafariLike much of the publishing world, I’m eager to hear about Amazon’s latest version of the Kindle. But that’s not the only news today. I’m sitting here at TOC and talking to John Chodacki from Safari Books Online and, with a smile on his face, he’s showing me beta version of m.safaribooksonline.com. The smile is well deserved. It looks great, it’s fast, and I love the stripped-down navigation and lack of clutter.

Computerworld: The Coming Ebook Revolution

Last week I linked to a phenomenal piece over on ArsTechnica on the future of digital books (and in the process neglected to thank Peter Brantley for the link). Today Mike Shatzkin (a co-author on the StartWithXML Report) passed along a pointer to another great article, this one from Computerworld's Mike Elgan listing six reasons that ebooks are about to…

Google Opens Mobile Access to Public-Domain Books

Via a Google press release, word that visiting books.google.com/m provides mobile access to 1.5 million public-domain books from within Google Book Search: Today, we're making it possible for anyone with an Android or an iPhone to find and read more than 1.5 million public domain books in the US (more than half a million outside the US) in the…

"Kindle Killer" Might be Hyperbole, but a Lot to Like About Shortcovers

The email invitation I received to check out shortcovers — a new hybrid Web/mobile reading site from Canada’s Indigo Books & Music — touted it as a “Kindle Killer.” While there’s a lot to like about shortcovers, there’s some shortcomings to that moniker. First, it’s not a device, it’s a Web site with a companion iPhone app (presumably wending its…

iPhone App Outperforms Most Print (Computer) Books This Holiday Season

Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It's hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice for testing the iPhone App waters. But while we knew it would do well, we've been quite pleased with just how well: If the iPhone App by itself had been…