BilmBlog500

Somebody with a cold weather Kindle casualty clearly doing the Google thing, as this comment was just added to my post from two years ago... I can sympathize with you on this topic. I left my 12 day old Kindle in the pocket of my car door for a few hours while the temperatures here were between 5 and 23. I thought about it at the end of the day and brought it inside. The next day when I turned it on, I had a screen similar to what you describe - top 2/3rds is wallpaper and the bottom 3rd is barcode-like. Amazon is being kind to replace it, but considering that I haven't even had this one 2 weeks, it shouldn't be having this problem. By LDZPLN1 on Death of a Kindle on 12/7/10 ...which makes me wonder again on whether or not to look into a class action suit that might force Amazon and other marketers of eInk devices to be more upfront about their limitations. In a day and age when everything we buy comes buried with warnings on things that are so very obvious, why don't th...

The Kindle will soon be available in Best Buy. The Wall Street Journal is said to be starting up a book section for its Saturday weekend edition. The NY Times had actual science fiction novel reviews in the paper a Friday back and may do this on a regular basis. The column is from actual sf writer Jeff VanderMeer, and this is the seriousestish coverage of the field from the Times in years. The Kobo reader is rolling out a desktop computer app. Not doing the usual linkage because I am still on the road and these filtered in from different places.

Borders announced it's earnings, or more exactly the size of its loss for the most recent quarter. Same store sales dropped 7%, not good, but not as steep as other recent reports, but would have been worse if not for an uptick in cafe sales.  Web site sales increased by big percentage but from small base.  They are closing a store in San Francisco near the Giants' ballpark, and are happy to have around a half dozen other leases for underperforming stores like this, DC store I blogged about a couple weeks ago etc. I haven't visited this SF store, may try on my layover heading back from WorldCon. And good or bad, Borders will open Build a Bear workshops in some of their stores. There is now also a two-tier Borders Rewards program, a paid program like the Barnes & Noble program which will offer more discounts, free shipping etc.  while also continuing the current free program. In other store closing news, Barnes & Noble is closing its large flagship store opposite Linc...

As I type this I'm a few hours away from boarding a plane to Melbourne, Australia for WorldCon with some travel Down Under following.  I may not be able to do all the cross-linking and such I try and do usually because the Blogger site I post in is a little more cumbersome to use on an iPad. This post an example of that.  But I will try and do some posting.   A few business things to mention before I go... Borders is going live with their AreaE sites this week, and we've been watching them go from big red tables to more fitted out but I'll be away for the official launch. Not impressed. At some stores these big red tables are replacing and thus doubling as the information desk, so customers trying to test a Sony or Kobo will compete for attention. Can't wait to see how that works on 21 December. And even where the table is dedicated AreaE most of the table space is taken up with computer stations, not eReader display space. The center of the table will have room for a f...

You can go here to find a guest post I've done for the Clarion blog, wherein I discuss the quickening pace of the e-book revolution and the roles of publishers and agents in the current age. Lots of other interesting stuff to be found on the Clarion blog, so if you go and visit, stay a while!

Weight: With its case the iPad weighs 1.5ish pounds. I am youngish if not youthful and do modest lifting but mostly the weight doesn't bother me. A bit when I was reading a novel on it while walking around the DC area for a good chunk of a day. A big hardcover fantasy can weigh more than an iPad. So it is true that the dedicated eReaders weigh more like a modest paperback while the iPad is compared to an epic fantasy in hardcover, but the weight issue can be put into perspective. Typing: I have survived typing on an iPod Touch, this keyboard is bigger! My biggest problem is that my finger will hit a bottom letter key instead of the space bar resultingminmsomethingblikenthis. And the autocorrect doesn't do a good job of recognizing run-on words that result from this unfortunate habit of mine. Maybe with time I will train myself to hit the space bar. Less often I hit the space bar instead of an m or n. I did also mate the Bluetooth keyboard that came with the new home Mac to...

I got meself an iPad three weeks ago this evening. I am quite happy with it so far. First and most important for me is its utility as a tool for reading, and it's quite winning for that. With reading, as with many other things, one of the things I like about the iPad is that it gives you a lot of different ways to do something. So for reading, option #1 might be to just open up an e-mail with a manucript and read the manuscript within Mail. Option #2 might be to open the file in Pages, Apple's word processing app for the iPad. Option #3 might be to put the manuscript on using shared wireless network with Stanza , which is what I'd been using on my iPod Touch, and which is owned by Amazon. Option #4 might be Apple's own iBook store. And then you've got the Kindle app for the iPad and the Nook app and the Borders app. Or you've got other word proccessing apps like Documents 2 Go. I've read one novel and reviewed a contract which I had opened in Pages, ...

My client Tim Akers took some time away from his work on Dead of Veridon to give us his thoughts on the Nook he got for Christmas. Click here and enjoy. And then you should enjoy Akers' debut novel The Heart of Veridon, which Library Journal has rightly hailed as a key title in the modern steampunk movement, and then reserve his forthcoming The Horns of Ruin . We've heard of sword and sorcery, or s&s, and now we add the third s of steampunk to create a fully-realized s&s&s fantasy which people are giong to be talking about come November. He mentions an article in the NY Times today by Randall Stross, an author on hi tech topics. I, like Stross, don't see the dedicated ebook reader as a lasting technology, that being said a lot of people are betting a lot of money that Randall and I are wrong. And Randall gives a lot of attention in his article to Amazon's notorious tendency to say lots without saying anything. The only problem here is that Amazon has ac...

So let's see what's happening this week in the world of e-books and retailing. Borders officially launched its e -book store today and has new low prices on the Sony Reader in their e-reader department , which is also charging forward and looking toward the opening of in-store AreaE sections in stores next month where people can play with the Sony, Kobo and Alutek devices, promises of more to come. Their goal, expressed in this news release , is to gain a 17% market share in e-books. And now here's an article from Publishers Weekly, reporting on a Barnes & Noble investor conference presentation. An article in the print edition of PW this week further elaborates, saying B&N claims a 20% share of the e-book market currently compared to a 17% share of print books, that they now sell 80% of their Nooks in retail stores vs. internet, and that currently print retail accounts for 90% of book sales but will drop to under 70% by 2014. Even though they see brick and mort...

& today's eReader news, Amazon and Target have announced that Target will become the first brick-and-mortar retail outlet to be selling the Kindle. So Best Buy can get your Nookie and your Sony going, Target will have the Kindle, Borders will have a huge selection of the eReaders nobody else has heard of. And I'll be very eager to hear what SciFi Fan Letter thinks of her new Kobo ...

Borders announced that it will be offering something called the Libre eBook Reader Pro as part of its "Area E" section come August. This comes from Aluratek , a company not heretofore known to me. So if Borders continues to sell the Sony, along with their major partnership with Kobo, and now the Libre, that's three eBook readers, and Borders is promising in their press release to be offering up to ten devices by the end of the year. And the Libre has the cheapest offering price yet of $119. I'm beginning to like this approach. If you're too late, and Borders is too late by far to offer its own branded device, just like they were way too late with their own e-commerce site and way too late updating their IT and supply chain, this is probably the best way to go. While everyone else offers their own device, Borders is the place where you actually get to choose your poison. The best thing might be if Borders would come to an agreement with Apple to sell the iPa...