TIP: Gutenberg E-Books direct to Kindle - repeat + Update

UPDATE2 - 9/18/10 - Original posting was April 2, 2009

In addition to the convenient Magic Catalog for Project Gutenberg, which is available for use on the Kindle for searches, browsing, and direct downloading of its free books to the Kindle (see below), Project Gutenberg recently made a MOBILE-device-oriented version of its website, which will of course work more quickly than the main website, via wireless conection with all Kindles.  The 'go to' address is http://m.gutenberg.org - but with Kindles it's better not to enter the "http://" part.

UPDATE3 - 9/20/10 for Kindle 3 users (Kindle 2 users experience no problem in this case):
In the comments area, Bart reports that the mobile-device-oriented URL m.gutenberg.org does not recognize input in the search field from a Kindle 3.  It does recognize input from a Kindle 2 or DX.

  However, on the K3, I can successfully go to the main site - gutenberg.org - and search & download a "Kindle" format file, but the webpage print is smaller because that fits the regular screen contents into the space of the 6" Kindle screen.  While you can use Archive Mode to view the lists, I would not as it takes too long to gather and display these and it can SEEM to freeze the K3 although it's just taking its time.   Don't choose it for lists...

The Project Gutenberg MAGIC CATALOG for the Kindle
In my wanderings through online columns about the Kindle, I've found that about 95% of those never mention that the 30,000 free books from Project Gutenberg are instantly available to the Kindle at no added cost for direct download to the device.  Instead, most tend to promulgate the fable that you can get books only from Amazon.

  The 30,000 free Project Gutenberg books are laid out well and proof-read.
  This tip allows you to directly download a Project Gutenberg book to the Kindle, although that will work only where 3G whispernet web-browsing is enabled already or via WiFi.

International Kindle users who live outside the U.S. and who do not have 3G web-browsing enabled in their countries (a gray area right now) and who don't have WiFi capability can download these free books to their computers instead (choosing "Kindle" or "mobi" or "prc" format) and then move them to their Kindles with the USB cable that is part of the Kindle power cord.

Originally posted April 2, 2009
TIP OF THE DAY: James Adcock tells us how to download chosen Project Gutenbook books direct to our Kindles.  First, you need to get the catalog on to your Kindle, and you can download it by webbing via your Kindle to http://www.freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html
(mucho typing on that Kindle keyboard, however).
  On the Kindle, use this shortcut instead: http://bit.ly/gutmagic

After downloading "The Magic Catalog of the Project Gutenberg E-Books (MOBI Edition) to your Kindle (or transferring it from your computer to the Kindle if you don't want to type in the long URL on the Kindle), follow James's instructions which are:

"Use your Kindle's Search Feature to find your favorite Author and/or Title.  Click to go to that page.  Click again on the Author: Title listing and your chosen E-Book will automagically download directly from the Project Gutenberg website to your Kindle..."

Thanks, James!

Added tip from James - How to use mobipocket.com's mobigen.exe, to easily convert EPUB books (at the DOS prompt) to MOBI versions.  Downside, any illustrations in a book are not included at this point.

ADDED UPDATE, along with Sept. 18, 2010 update
Also, the 1 million free Google books in ePub: How to get one converted to Kindle
Not only can you convert any of these to a Kindle book via a free tool (with most illustrations intact), there is also a publishing website that offers to do conversions of free-Google-books for you upon request and will give you a link to the completed Kindle-ready copy, on their website, for you and any other interested parties, to download.  See the details here

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US: Kindle Fire  7" tablet - $199 Kindle NoTouch ("Kindle") - $79/$109 Kindle Touch, WiFi - $99/$139 Kindle Touch, 3G/WiFi - $149/$189 Kindle Keybd 3G - $189, Free, slow web Kindle DX - $379, Free, slow web

UK: Kindle Basic, NoTouch - £89 Kindle Touch WiFi, UK - £109 Kindle Touch 3G/WiFi, UK - £169 Kindle Keyboard 3G, UK - £149   Keybd: w/ Free, slow 3G WEB

OTHER International Kindle NoTouch Basic - $109 Kindle Touch WiFi - $139 Kindle Touch 3G/WiFi - $189 Kindle Keybd 3G - $189   Keybd: w/ Free, slow 3G WEB

Check often: Temporarily-free recently published Kindle books
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.  Liked-books under $1
UK-Only: recently published free books, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

  *Click* to Return to the HOME PAGE.  Or click on the web browser's BACK button

Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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Alert re updated Project Gutenberg blog article

This is just an entry to compensate for Google Reader's inability to 'see' the Project Gutenberg article updated today. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
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New Zealand gets the Kindle. Non-Amazon e-books for Kindle - how to get them

New Zealand is finally getting the Kindle 3, according to this report by Stuff in New Zealand and the linked Amazon product page.

 The Kindle will be meeting Whitcoulls' Kobo e-reader head-on there, and the Stuff news reporter believes the company PR that the Kobo "appears to have a much larger range of e-books available; more than two million [books]," but this includes the 500,000 free Google Books and the 30,000 Project Gutenberg books.   The free Google Books are also available for the Kindle in two ways - see:

1. How to get a free Google book converted to Kindle format (for free, by the Retroread site, or with the flexible free utility Calibre), and also

2. check out how to download to the Kindle the Project Gutenberg Magic Catalog of 30,000 free e-books which allows Kindle owners to browse and search the catalog and then click to download what they want in Kindle's "MOBI" format (with no download charges in both cases).

  A thorough review of the Kobo is at Laptop Magazine, and what is unusual is that it will be more expensive than the Kindle while having no 3G or WiFi features, no built-in dictionary, no Search feature, no highlighting and notes and it is much criticized for being unusually slow, even for an e-Ink reader.  How this unit stays at all competitive now unless the company upgrades the unit is a real question.  Its website has a comparison chart that has not modified the Nook or Kindle pricing though they've been lowered for about 3 weeks.

Stuff has some good news for New Zealanders in that Martin Taylor, the director of the Digital Publishing Forum says the group expects to launch a digital warehouse that would let publishers manage and distribute e-books in the next few months.
  "We're working with about 40 local publishers who have put their hands up and I would guess hundreds, possibly a thousand, New Zealand books will be available [through the warehouse], {which will} broker with e-book distributors on behalf of publishers and the forum is in talks with several e-book retailers now, including Amazon and Whitcoulls.

Many other sources for free e-books direct to the Kindle at no charge are also mentioned at the Finding Free Kindle Books and Sources page, which I'll redo soon, as it's not well-organized for all the info that's there.  That info is on most footers of the blog articles here.


Kindle 3   (UK: Kindle 3),   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
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Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!

Kindle Newsbits 8-10-2010

KINDLE 3 SHIPPING DATES - AN AMAZON STATEMENT
Paul Biba at the excellent Teleread site alerts us to an email from Amazon's Director of Communications, Andrew "Drew" Herdener, to Examiner.com in response to customer reactions to various Amazon account messages (apparently, system glitches) advising that the new Kindles would be shipped in Sept-Oct.

  The Examiner reports:

' “Customers who placed an order before 8 pm PST on August 1st, their Kindles will still ship by the August 27th release date,” Herdener wrote, no doubt relieving plenty of customers who were able to pre-order their less expensive and now sold out Kindle models before the deadline.

Those who placed an order after that date should get them about a week later, says the site. '

As of Monday, Kindle customer reps were giving contradictory answers on shipping dates.  I'd go by the public statement Drew Herdener chose to make.

PROJECT GUTENBERG INTRODUCES A NEW MOBILE-DEVICE-OPTIMIZED SITE
James Adcock, who helped provide the Magic Catalog for Project Gutenberg book browsing and searching ON the Kindle and then downloading direct to the Kindle, has announced the new mobile version of the Project Gutenberg website, which is itself browsable from the Kindle, using the built-in experimental browser, if enabled for your country.  Direct download of Kindle-readable MOBI files to the Kindle carry no charges, as they don't go through the Amazon servers.

The URL or location address is http://m.gutenberg.org, and I'm glad to see the increasing number of worthwhile sites providing special mobile-device access versions of their pages.

DER SPIEGEL INTERVIEWS RANDOM HOUSE CEO MARCUS DOHLE ON PLANS FOR THE E-BOOK AGE, APPLE, AND THE PRINTED BOOK
Reader Dan Krodel alerts us to an interesting interview with the head of Random House which features the topics of Random House's "plans for the e-book age, the company's tough negotiations with Apple and why the printed book will continue to dominate publishing."

The questions are unusually blunt.  An example pops up right away, when asking Dohle about the skepticism surrounding his appointment 2 years ago: "Aren't you worried about embarrassing yourself while making small talk about literature with authors and agents?"  And that starts it off.  Dan Brown's marketing/networking instincts bring him into the picture right away also.

The interview is a good read and I highly recommend it.  I'll include here some of Dohle's thoughts on the changing world of books today.

  A bit of Amazon/Apple background.  Random House was the only one of the Big6 publishers to decline Steve Jobs's offer to do an Apple Agency Agreement that would prohibit other online bookstores from offering lower book prices than Apple's recommended higher pricing for/by publishers with 30% to Apple.  Since Random House did not think this wise for its own profitability in the U.S. market, their books are not eligible to be sold at the Apple's iBooks store in the U.S., even though they are the largest book publisher around.

Some thoughts by Dohle on the impact of e-books:

' I see myself as someone who has to strike a balance between creativity and profitability.  Of course, I read a lot more today, which is also because I always have my books with me, not always in printed form, but on my electronic reading devices.  I read whenever I have a few minutes to spare.
...
I'm pleased to see a reader who's reading on his iPad or Kindle.  Without these devices, perhaps we wouldn't be able to reach that person at that very moment, because he might have left his book at home. But we always have him on the electronic reader.  That minute of reading is a gift.

...I grew up with printed paper, but I have to admit that I'm surprised at how quickly the digital business is growing, especially in the United States.  Nevertheless, the printed book will still dominate for a long time to come.
...

[Re turnover from e-books]
  It's around 8 percent in the US right now, which represents a huge increase. I can imagine that we'll end up above 10 percent next year.
...

[On Amazon's announcement that it sold 180 digital titles for every 100 Amazon hardcover books in the U.S. and re analysts' estimate that in 10 years or so printed books will comprise only 25% of books sold]

  I don't agree with that prognosis. I think it's too aggressive, too much hype.  The market share for electronic books, even in the United States, will more likely be between 25 and 50 percent by 2015.  But this development still represents a huge opportunity for us.  It creates new growth.

  I meet people in America who say: I started reading again because of my e-reader -- and so did my children.

[Random House and Penguin are listening to readers.  Will Macmillan's Sargent?]

[On Random House's hesitation to partner with Apple's online iBookstore]

In the English-language market, unlike Germany, there is no such thing as a fixed book price agreement. The bookseller sets the retail price. In Apple's iBookstore, it's up to the publishers to set prices for the reader.  Apple stays out of it and gets a commission.  We have to examine this very closely to determine whether we are willing to make this drastic change to our business model. '

Dohle expands on all this, including his previously stated reasoning that booksellers have taken the risk in these markets and have experience in finding the right price points to reach as many readers as possible.  He explains:

'... it's also a question of the distribution of risk.  Until now, we have sold content, developed and marketed talent and calculated our prices accordingly.  In the United States, the book trade has structured retail prices in keeping with individual market conditions.  It needs to be determined whether publishers really can, and should, do both things in the future. '

SPIEGEL then asks Dohle, "Do you really believe you can do without Apple?"

And for Dohle's artful answer, in all fairness to the magazine, you'll need to go to the Der Spiegel site to read that.

He also comments on the possibility that much lower pricing devalues books and doesn't like seeing it taken to what publishers see as extremes, but he doesn't blame only the e-book movement.

It isn't as if pricing pressure only arose as a result of digital books.  It's just as prevalent in the print world.  Many countries don't have fixed book prices, and there we, as a publisher, have no influence on retail prices...
...
... it isn't always true that digital books are always cheaper than printed ones.  Sometimes printed books are sold for less at Wal-Mart, for example, than the digital version in an e-book store.

  In other words, there is no reason to claim that the digital business alone is ratcheting up pricing pressure in the book industry. '

Dohle also talks about the trend toward 'enhanced' books, using supplementary video, and wonders if readers are willing to pay more for those.

' ... the book as a medium is also changing. There are cookbooks that explain to you what to do in a video, or that dictate recipes out loud to you.  You don't even have to touch the iPad in the process.

  Still, no one knows whether this is something people really want and if they are prepared to pay a premium for it.

He also responds to questions about Amazon's own entry into publishing and its exclusives with authors who have been with the larger publishing houses and explains why he believes the authors will tend to stay with the publishing houses for the advantages they offer.

Here's the rest of the interview conducted by Markus Brauck and Isabell Hülsen.

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Check often:  Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!

30,000 free books for iPad are for Kindle too - UPDATE

(Special note:  The March 26 blog entry has not been released by Amazon blogs dept - some kind of glitch.  I hope it comes through along with this post.  Apologies to Kindle Edition subscribers.  The gap is not what it would appear.)

Columns about the Apple iPad are highlighting the 30,000 free Project Gutenberg titles that come with it.
    As many regulars know, that's also available to Kindle owners.
  But for the benefit of those who have become Kindle users in the last 6 months and those who are Kindle Edition subscribers, I'm reposting the information on that as it will have fallen off the current pages.

The below is from a popular Kindleworld blog-article which is being highlighted for newcomers and Kindle-blog edition subscribers (who can reference it on the Kindle for another 25 days or so).

ALL Kindle-compatible books with file extensions ".mobi" or ".prc" that you download to your computers (rather than to your Kindle, which is possible from many places) can be read on the computer by the free Kindle for PC or Kindle for Mac software by just clicking on the book file that is on your computer (wherever it is downloaded and kept).

The 30,000 free Project Gutenberg books are laid out well and proof-read.
This tip allows you to directly download a Project Gutenberg book to the Kindle, although that will work only where whispernet web-browsing is enabled already - U.S., Japan, Hong Kong, Mexico.

International Kindle users who live outside the U.S. and do not have web-browsing enabled in their countries can download these free books to their computers instead (choosing "Kindle" or "mobi" or "prc" format) and then move them to their Kindles with the USB cable that is part of their Kindle power cord.

Originally posted April 2, 2009
TIP OF THE DAY: James Adcock tells us how to download chosen Project Gutenbook books direct to our Kindles.  First, you need to get the catalog on to your Kindle, and you can download it by webbing via your Kindle to http://www.freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html
(mucho typing on that Kindle keyboard but I did it).
OH, for the Kindle, try this instead: http://tinyurl.com/gutmagic

After downloading "The Magic Catalog of the Project Gutenberg E-Books (MOBI Edition) to your Kindle (or transferring it from your computer to the Kindle if you don't want to type in the long URL on the Kindle), follow James's instructions which are:

"Use your Kindle's Search Feature to find your favorite Author and/or Title.  Click to go to that page.  Click again on the Author: Title listing and your chosen E-Book will automagically download directly from the Project Gutenberg website to your Kindle..."

Thanks, James!

Added tip from James - How to use mobipocket.com's mobigen.exe, to easily convert EPUB books (at the DOS prompt) to MOBI versions.  Downside, any illustrations in a book are not included at this point.

  UPDATE - 3/30/10 This blog entry was first posted 3/27/10.
- It's better now to convert these using Calibre instead.  For detailed info on how to do that, see the Kindleworld article on converting ePub files to Kindle-readable 'prc' files.

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See the ongoing Guide to finding Free or Low-Cost Kindle books and Sources
There's also a page of links that confine searches to mid-range priced e-books. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
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Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!

Amazon announces Free Book Collections page

At the Amazon Community Discussions area, there is an official Announcement tonight from the Amazon Kindle Customer Service account about the new Free Book Collections page:

' With over 420,000 titles, the Kindle Store contains the largest selection of the books people want to read including New York Times® Best Sellers and most new releases at $9.99, unless otherwise marked.  And Amazon provides thousands of the most popular classic books for free including titles like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, and Treasure Island with more coming.

But of course, the Internet is huge and there are lots of older, pre-1923 books online.  We wanted to make it easier to find these collections which today represent nearly 2 million titles [emphases mine].

Visit amazon.com/freebookcollections for sites with free book collections and download instructions. '

  This has an advantage for Amazon as now they can say that the Kindle can access all those books, which is, of course true, which the Amazon Community Forums have discussed for a long time and which you've seen on blogger sites such as this one's regular reminders and links.

  But this makes the free books available to the Amazon Kindle a bit easier for most people to find, and Amazon has been working on improving the formatting of free books that had been uploaded to Amazon in the past.

  The set of almost 20,000 or so free Kindle classics at Amazon now has its own page.

  At the new Free Book Collections page  (free classics and out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books available for Kindle), Amazon tells us:

' But of course, the Internet is huge and there are lots of older, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books online.  We wanted to make it easier to find these collections, which today represent nearly 2 million titles. See the sites and instructions below to download free classic and other out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books and transfer via USB to your Kindle device or read on Kindle for PC.

Note that these large collections of older free books are typically created from scanned copies of physical books and can have variable quality. '

  In fact, the 30,000 Project Gutenberg books are very well formatted and Amazon now links us to that website, but with that particular link they encourage you to browse the site on your computer (rather than the catalog on your Kindle) and you then need to download the books to your computer and transfer them to your Kindle -- instead of directly downloading a book to your Kindle via the catalog on the Kindle (see next paragraph).

  There are ways (one of them promoted on this site) to get the catalog of Project Gutenberg onto your Kindle and browse or search it on your Kindle and when you want to download a Kindle-compatible e-book ('Mobi' format), you just click to get it, direct onto your Kindle.  The problem for Amazon is that Whispernet is used for such a download but it's direct from the Project Gutenberg area and is not chargeable as it doesn't come from Amazon servers.

  So, give that a thought.  Amazon wants to keep use of the webbrowser free (as it is now a defining, unique feature of this e-reader), and I imagine too much use of it could threaten Amazon's ability to keep that feature free.  Downloading time is extremely brief though, for a text-based book, and can't compare with time and bandwidth spent actually browsing the web, something they still encourage with their built-in web bookmarks on new Kindles.

The new Amazon page also makes it easy for people to know about and find The Internet Archives, which I wrote about here in January and which has about 1.8 million free books.

  Amazon has been paying attention, it seems, to customer interests as expressed for a couple of years now on its own Kindle Community forums in that humongous thread about free books elsewhere and on many blog pages.

  It always interested me that Amazon did allow the extremely-busy message discussions about how to find free books outside Amazon (while the world of news reporters and even e-reader analysts were -- and still are -- constantly writing that Amazon customers could buy e-books for their Kindles only from Amazon, which was never true).  In the last 3 months, I've noticed many Kindle customers now correct those news stories in the comment areas.

Amazon closes its new free-book collections page with
    "Have you seen another great collection of free Kindle books on the web?
     Drop us a line"
  So, they are really into this now.  

  It was needed since Barnes & Noble, and Sony, were advertising over a million books for their e-readers after getting the half-million free, pre-1923 Google books that are readable directly on their devices, and counting the ability to read ePub formatted ebooks.  As regular readers of this blog know, while the Kindle doesn't read the Google books direct, Kindle users can easily convert an ePub file to a Kindle-readable one in about 3 minutes using Calibre.

  The Amazon Kindle reads free MOBI files (offered on many book sites) -- in addition to WORD doc files through free Amazon conversion, and also reads pure text-files (*.txt) direct, the latter two not supported by the Nook) but has not counted the free MOBI files elsewhere.  Now it can count non-rights-protected MOBI files on other sites as directly accessible, a good thing to point out, finally, even if that takes customers away from busily buying at the Amazon store itself.  It's probably more beneficial to let people know what the Kindle can read.

Again, Amazon's own set of almost 20,000 free classics, directly downloadable by the Kindle from Amazon for some time, now has an Amazon page of its own.

You can read the Amazon forum discussions for customer reaction to this new welcome feature.

UPDATE - March 3, 2010
I've updated the ongoing Free and Lowcost books page.  Amazon's free book collections don't include feedback.com or manybooks.net, which have good formatting on them.  That continues to be covered by the free-books page here.

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LINKS FOR SEARCHING FOR FREE OR LOW-COST E-BOOKS
  As ever, here is the ongoing set of links for various Searches for free or low-cost Kindle-compatible books. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!

A bad-apple decision and other news

The Net is abuzz with Apple's strange iPhone App Censorship of a reader app (Eucalyptus) because people can search the Project Gutenberg and find (gasp) the Kama Sutra and even download and read it.  The Wired article by Brian Chen includes Apple's explanation in its rejection letter, and a later email from Apple requested that access to the Kama Sutra be removed, despite its actually being a part of the Project Gutenberg and not the app.  So the beleaguered author, Jamie Montgomerie, has installed a filter to block that particular search.  Will Apple approve it?  Why not?  And Montgomerie couldn't have bought that kind of advertising.

  In the meantime, Technologizer's Harry McCracken writes, "Judging from its Web site, it’s more or less comparable to Amazon’s Kindle application–except all the content is free, and the interface looks to be prettier. The asking price is $9.99–steep for an iPhone program, but I’m tempted."

Well, actually, the Project Gutenberg books are available to all Kindle owners, free, direct to their Kindle, since the catalog can be placed on the Kindle, and the Kindle search feature within that book/catalog for the author or title plus a click on the found title will download the book to the device, though that might cost 15c with Amazon's new Whispernet charge for "personal documents" (meaning documents that don't come from Amazon).  These primarily-text books are usually less than one megabyte each, but if a stray one is 2 megabytes then it's 30c for the wireless delivery.
  There is always the option to instead download it to your computer from the Project Gutenberg site and transfer it to the Kindle with the included usb cable if 15c is a problem.

See the earlier entry on this blog for instructions on how to get that catalog onto the Kindle, thanks to James Adcock.

OTHER NEWS:
. Those awaiting an Apple announcement in June '09 about a Kindle-challenging Apple Tablet will have to wait until the "first half of 2010" for whatever it is that'll use a 10" screen and cost between $500 to $700.  If the product includes wireless access it'll certainly also cost at least another $30/month for that, judging from Apple's history.
  Thoughtful article at ITworld.

. Kindle owners who have iPhones and like to sync their reading between the two will be happy to see that Amazon has put the Stanza team to work already, improving Amazon's Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod so that the Kindle books can be read in landscape mode; you can tap on either side of the device to NextPage or PrevPage; and change the colors of the background and text.  The latter's especially useful for dimmer light.  A look at the black against white example made me realize it looks very nice but I was surprised to have to squint my eyes after a bit because of the energy of the white while the gray is easier for a longer period of time.  It's been documented that a gray background is easier on the eyes, but that of course is dependent on how dark the foreground text is.

. Will Kindle sales crash Nielsen Bookscan?.  In an earlier entry here, it was noted that Jeff Bezos claimed that when Kindle titles are available, they now represent 35% of those books' sales.  Bookscan can't include those sales, for reasons given in the article, and this would have a rather large impact on their reports.

. And if Amazon hasn't given publishers enough to worry about lately, they now have Amazon Encore:

'AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers.'

. Is the Kindle hurting Barnes and Noble sales?

UPDATE - 5/27/09: Apple relents and allows sales of Eucalyptus app. (Surprise) Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!