ENTRIES TAGGED "iPhone"
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…
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…
Popping the Hood on the iPhone Missing Manual App
Over on Teleread, Chris Meadows has a nice review of our iPhone Missing Manual app, which echoes several other reviewers (and my own personal experience with the app): How helpful is the book? I have already found a lot of remarkably useful information just in the space of a few chapters. It would be no exaggeration to say I…
"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…
iPhone Updates: Missing Manual Already #2; More Book Apps Hit iTunes
We released David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual as an iPhone App on Friday, and by Saturday it was already the #2 for-pay App in the Books category on iTunes (where it has remained, behind only the Classics App), and it continues to gain ground. In just four days, it has become one of our top sellers of the year…
O'Reilly Ebooks: 130 Top Titles Now Available, Plus an iPhone App and Head First PDFs
While there will always be a demand for printed books, few of those books will have a life entirely disconnected from the wider digital Web. In that sense, all publishing is becoming digital publishing, and all writing is writing for the Web. That's a big shift, and it will take time for the existing players to make the transition (and…
Interstitial Publishing: A New Market from Wasted Time
To grow, publishers must either battle other publishers over market share or identify and serve new markets. Which brings us to interstitial publishing; publishing between the cracks.
History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts
A Computerworld blog post from Mike Elgan looks at recent mobile announcements from book publishers. From the perspective of technology, watching book publishers slowly grapple with the tentative migration of books to mobile platforms is painful. Interestingly, the comments attached to the piece are almost all more conservative. The music industry was holding on to physical CD sales so tightly…