Patchen Barss’ book The Erotic Engine has the subtitle “How Pornography Has Powered Mass Communication from Gutenberg to Google”. An article on it highlights ten technologies that “secretly owe debts to the pornography business” Among them, E-commerce, Streaming video, Webcams and Bandwidth; you can read the fascinating post here. But if the Pornography industry drove forward electronic communication, it was an entirely different arena that drove the print world it is replacing.

What was it? Religion.… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

I have said before that I have been reading much more since getting my Nook Touch last June, which has really been wonderful. The Nook Touch in my Oberon case is just a thing of beauty to hold and behold. It has allowed me to catch new books like Robopocalypse and recent releases like The Art of Racing in the Rain, re-read almost my entire Kurt Vonnegut collection, get ready for The Hunger Games, and grab books I always meant to read but had long forgotten – like The Accidental Tourist.

Whenever a movie is made from a book, the comparisons are made and are generally unflattering – sometimes the movie is better (Godfather) but most times the movie is significantly lacking (pretty much everything else). There are a few examples where both are excellent – the recent movie The Help is a great example of something you should both read AND see.

But recently I have fallen in love with another book/movie combo: The Accidental Tourist. Let’s take a quick look at both versions!… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

image courtesy Fundamentally Flawed

Barnes and Noble is taking an extremely strong anti-Amazon stance this week. Engadget is reporting that They’ve declared all books published through Amazon or in an exclusive deal with Amazon will not be carried in their brick and mortar stores, just online at BN.com.… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

I’m a big fan of audiobooks for long drives. Sarah and I usually head to the library a few days before a road trip and stock up on something we will both enjoy hearing, and on rare occasions we splurge for a download from Audible.com. In general, though, we tend to find it’s faster and cheaper to borrow the CDs from the library than deal with a digital audiobook. Despite the format being perfect for the digital age, costs are still high and digital library borrowing is still a complete mess. That’s where Simply Audiobooks thinks they have a plan with their new Audiobooks.com streaming service.

Their blog sums up the program pretty… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

The timing could now be better… for the first time in a few years there is a computer running Windows 7 in my house. (I’m shocked but enjoying it… details soon.) And, as luck would have it, we just got an offer to share with you of a FREE eBook. Normally
PC Maintenance Guide is $9.95 but until January 31 you can get it for free. Free as in “$0″.

The PC Maintenance Guide is…

…a concise eBook in which the most essential articles and links are collected into one, easy to use reference.

The editors of the Windows Secrets Newsletter pored through several years of published information and compiled the

In my review of the ebook version of Fahrenheit 451 I was sharply critical of the massive amount of typos and mistakes in the text. It was suggested that I take my complaint to Amazon, which I did … but honestly never expected anything. It wasn’t the first time I had complained, but I had never heard anything back in the past.

But last night I got a happy surprise – an email from Amazon’s Kindle Store that an update had been made to Fahrenheit 451, and I could download it from my account. So I headed to the link, and wound up wading through the sea of too many unread books… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

After Apple’s big iBooks 2 announcement, I went hunting for more info on prior digital textbooks; it occurred to me that most of the pilot programs and digital textbook stuff are aimed at college level students and up, with the most famous/infamous being Amazon’s Kindle DX experiment with several universities. This makes sense, since college kids foot their own bill for hardware.

So why is Apple targeting high schools? Did no one point out that schools are so poor they are firing teachers left and right? A class of 500 freshman starting high school would cost a district $250,000 before textbook costs just to get each kid an iPad, plus ongoing book costs each year. For college this is brilliant because… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

I was scratching my head this morning after the announcement of iBooks 2 and Apple’s major play into the textbook arena. It struck me that they were already going in this direction and, as a result, this was an expected evolutionary step forward, not something worthy of an announcement. Having thought about it a bit more, however, I think there is actually a bigger story here. I’ll leave it to Carly to address the actual textbook aspect of this and instead, look at what is really the bigger picture that is key to today’s Apple announcement. You see, this isn’t about textbooks. It is not about Apple in the educational arena. This is about strategy and… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

(image courtesy nikdaum)

eBooknewser reported today that Amazon quietly shut down Mobipocket, an ebook store that those of us with PDA roots probably remember fondly. Amazon purchased Mobipocket and still uses their format as the basis for Kindle books. After reading the post, I headed over to Mobipocket and found what appears to be the internet equivalent of a broken, abandoned storefront. There’s no announcement that Mobipocket is gone, but the files appear to have all disappeared. Bestsellers, fiction, non-fiction, everything is just gone, with the exception of a handful of classics that appear on the main page.

Meanwhile, things aren’t exactly hopping over at eReader/Fictionwise. They haven’t carried a new bestseller or mainstream… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

There’s an interesting (and honestly, inevitable) trend in the book world lately: no one’s talking hardware anymore. Yes, there’s new devices, and sales are touted when they’re impressive. But the big announcements that come up again and again are “ebook sales are increasing by these triple digits/these authors are making this much money through ebooks/we have this many free ebooks, etc”. Plus, all those lovely ebooks are available on tablets, computers, smartphones and dedicated ebook readers…so does it pay for a company to offer the hardware without the ebooks anymore?

In my view, the answer is no, and I think 2012 is the year we see many of the unaffiliated hardware drop by the wayside. Sony, Ectaco… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

The Kindle Lending Library and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program debuted this past fall, and so far they’re off to a great start whether you’re a consumer or an author. As a refresher, the Lending Library is available to anyone with a Kindle and an Amazon Prime account, and you can download one book per month free of charge through the service. The KDP program offers perks to authors willing to sign up exclusively with Amazon, including a share of a $500,000 pool per book borrowed through the program. Needless to say, the exclusivity clause has been a subject of debate among ebook fans, since it tightens Amazon’s hold on the digital book market immensely, and… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

It’s official, Kobo is now a division of Rakuten, meaning that Kobo now has some deep parental pockets and an even stronger international reach. While they may still be number 3, they have an opportunity to grab more share in 2012, as B&N struggles to expand internationally. Plus from the sound of Kobo’s press release they had an excellent holiday season!

According to Kobo:

• December 25th was Kobo’s best day ever for eBook downloads, with several ebooks downloaded every second by readers in over 150 countries
• ·         Kobo saw a 10-fold increase in new customers compared to the company’s pre-holiday period
• ·         Compared to last year’s holiday season, eGifting increased by 500%, eReader sales and eBook sales

Remember Blio? It’s ok if you don’t. Blio debuted at CES two years ago, and promptly disappeared off the radar as a serious threat. Don’t forget, CES 2010 was the ebook gold rush, and history has shown that anything not labelled “Kindle” or “NOOK” turned out to be fool’s gold. But the folks behind Blio are convinced they still have a fighting chance, and they’ve set their new sights on Ultrabooks.

From the press release:

Baker & Taylor, Inc., the world’s largest distributor of digital and physical books today announced an agreement with Intel, the world leader in computing innovation, to provide a comprehensive ebook solution for Ultrabook devices through Intel® AppUp(SM) center. “We are thrilled to

Big news from B&N today! They’re looking to push down the price of the NOOK and drive more subscription services, so they’ve combined the two! You can get a free NOOK Simple Touch or a $99 NOOKcolor with a subscription to the New York Times through B&N ($19.99/month). Alternately, if you are more of the entertainment news type, there’s always a $199 NOOK Tablet with a subscription to People!

This is potentially huge for the ebook industry. It turns the reader hardware into a commodity, not the main show. It also pushes prices down while also lining up ongoing cash flow for B&N and the periodical providers (who I assume are splitting the subsidy costs). Finally, this is a… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Most internet users trust Google implicitly for several things: for myself, I use them exclusively for Search, my phone is Android, I rely on Google Maps, do tons with YouTube, edit documents in Docs, browse RSS feeds in Reader, have my daily News fix, have Picasa on my PC for images, and so on. Yet anyone reading my Android editorials knows that I am fully aware that Google is monetizing my actions … big time.

For me, a for-profit company that never asks me for money is MUCH scarier than one that does, since I know it is still getting money from me, or from my habits or… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...