Amazon's Kindle might have some competition on its hands. Google has just announced a new e-book store called Google Editions, that will deliver books to any device with a web browser. Although Google isn't launching an e-reader device like the Kindle, it will support e-books that customers buy from stores like Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. Google Editions is slated to launch in the first half of 2010.

This obviously won't hurt Amazon's e-book sales too much, but it might cut into sales of the Kindle. Why buy a really expensive device when you can read the same books on the devices you already have? From what we've seen in the past, though, Amazon is much more concerned with book sales than device sale. They did create the Kindle app for iPhone, after all. Also worth noting: Google's history with electronic versions of books isn't entirely a successful one. They're still resolving legal issues over Google Books, a project which has already scanned over 10 million books and made them searchable.

[via Mashable]

Oh those times they are a changin'! According to the statistics at the time of writing in the Amazon US best-selling books list, 'The Lost Symbol' by Dan Brown for Kindle is outselling the equivalent hardback!

Kindle Nation notes that the situation may well change as time goes on and particularly as the holiday season approaches (when the book will certainly sell extremely well as a gift), however I think that what we are seeing is almost a 'coming of age' of the eBook - consumers realising that they can get their books more conveniently, cheaper and of course instantly - a huge plus when you're rushing to get the newest best-seller from a huge author like Dan Brown.

Bear in mind that as you can see in the above screenshot, not only is the Kindle version of the book outselling the hardback edition, but it is outselling every other book in any form in Amazon's store. Impressive!

Unfortunately we don't have any numbers that detail what percentage of the copies sold are delivered to iPhones and iPods rather than the Kindle devices themselves, but I suspect that if we did, a large percentage would be going to the non-Amazon devices.

Who knows how huge the book sales would be if more platforms have a Kindle reader...?

A while back, we told you how Amazon revealed its ability to delete a book from all Kindle devices, even after customers had purchased it. In a somewhat poetic twist, the deleted book that brought this to everyone's attention was George Orwell's 1984, and bloggers were quick to liken Amazon's activities to those of 1984's Big Brother. Now, to smooth things over with customers, Amazon is offering anyone who bought 1984 a redelivery of the book or $30.

If you're one of the affected customers, you can take your payoff as Amazon store credit, or in the form of a check. For those who choose to get their books back, all notations made on the books will also be restored. This is noteworthy in light of the recent lawsuit Amazon was facing from a high school student who lost his class notes on 1984 as a result of the incident. Amazon can't really unring the bell of letting users know it can delete their purchases, so promising not to do it again and offering compensation is as close as they'll get to regaining trust.

[via slashgear]

It's been 25 years since 1984 came and went. But if you ever needed proof that we're living in a world where Big Brother is watching, all you need to do is look at Amazon's recent actions regarding the book, 1984. Basically, the company was offering a digital version of the title in its online Kindle store, but at the book publisher's request, Amazon pulled the title. And not just from the store, but from the Kindle eBook readers of customers who had purchased copies.

Sure, Amazon did offer full refunds to those customers. But imagine walking into a book store, buying a volume, taking it home, and then going to read it the next day only to find someone has broken into your home and removed it. That's kind of what Amazon did here, although we probably shouldn't be surprised, because the company never made any claims that it's eBooks weren't wrapped up with DRM (digital rights management) software that gives Amazon more control over the titles than you have.

Now, it sounds like Amazon's actions aren't quite as nefarious as first reported. The book wasn't pulled simply because the publisher decided not to offer it anymore, but because the party that was selling the eBook through the Kindle store actually didn't have the rights to the book. It was a pirated copy that shouldn't have been there in the first place. But that's kind of Amazon's problem, not the eBook readers, no?

Amazon has issued a statement saying that the next time a title is removed from its store in this fashion, the company will take care to remove it only from the digital store shelf, and not from actual Kindle devices. But this incident can't be leaving current and prospective Kindle owners with a warm and fuzzy feeling, can it?

Update: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has posted an apology that is one of the most heartening I've seen from a corporate CEO in a long time.

When Amazon created an iPhone app based on its popular e-reader device, the Kindle, it became clear that $10 books were as big or bigger than $400 readers in Amazon's business model. By allowing reading on other devices, Amazon has been able to make sales to customers who would never have bought a Kindle, and that's worked so well on the iPhone that other devices and book formats are now on the agenda.

According to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the company looks at the ebook business and the gadget business as separate. Expanding to new devices isn't going to keep gadget-hungry consumers from buying a Kindle if they were planning to do it anyway, and plenty of customers who would never buy a Kindle might still buy a few books for their own devices. As for file formats, the Kindle already reads PDFs, but Bezos said other formats could be supported in the future. This may be one of the results we're seeing from Amazon's acquistion of Stanza, which supported formats that the Kindle doesn't yet.

Updated: At first, I thought that recent release of the Kindle Source Code might have something to do with developing for other platforms, but it was actually only done to comply with the Gnu Public License. Because the Kindle was built on some open-source GPL-licensed components, Amazon had to release the parts of the code that were modifications of those components. It unfortunately has nothing to do with enabling developers on other platforms to build apps that work with Kindle books.

I haven't been shy about expressing how much I love Amazon's Kindle iPhone app, and I love it just a little bit more now that it's update to Version 1.1. The addition of an iPhone-optimized Kindle Store made the iPhone experience a bit more like a real Kindle, but the updates in version 1.1 make the app feel more iPhone native. You can now rotate to landscape mode, like you'd expect in an iPhone reader, and there's also a new color scheme available.

The rotation feature is definitely handy, especially since you can turn it off when it would be inconvenient -- when reading in bed, for example. As far as appearance, the old black-on-white layout is still available, but a less bright option has been added in the form of a dark brown-on-sepia theme. It's a bit easier on the eyes in low light. No revolutionary changes here, just small fixes that make an already-usable app that much more pleasing.

[via Daring Fireball]

Do you have a blog? Does it have a working RSS feed? Congratulations! You can now publish your blog on Amazon's Kindle platform, allowing users of the Kindle device (or the Kindle iPhone app) to subscribe to your blog for a small fee. You take a 30% cut, and Amazon takes the rest. It might be small potatoes, but more blogger-generated content could attract more users to the Kindle platform, which means more blog subscribers.

You don't have to do anything special to make your blog readable on the Kindle. Just put your RSS feed in over at Kindle Publishing for Blogs, and you should be good to go. As M.G. Siegler points out at TechCrunch, it would be really nice to give your blog away for free, but that doesn't seem feasible for Amazon. Right now, they decide what to charge your readers, and it's generally around $1.99/month.

Amazon's Kindle app for iPhone is a great alternative to purchasing a pricey Kindle device when you've already invested in an iPhone, but it's still not quite as streamlined and easy-to-use.

Amazon seems to be changing that as quickly as it can, though, with the launch of an iPhone-optimized Kindle store. The new store still isn't part of Kindle itself, but it can be launched with the app's "get books" icon.

This seems like a small thing, but it's a big win for iPhone Kindle users, and possibly for Kindle book sales. As nice as it is to have your purchases delivered by WhisperNet to your iPod or iPhone, sometimes you're not at a computer, and trying to buy books from an iPhone in Safari was an aggravating experience until now.

Business Insider points out that Apple is planning new eCommerce features that iPhone developers will eventually have access to. Amazon might be able to use that to handle sales from within the app, making it even closer to the real Kindle experience.

First of all, I've read the Times nearly my whole life. I grew up in a NY-suburban Times household. I have fond memories of my father spreading out the Sunday edition on the floor, sitting on the carpet in his pajamas. He read that paper every day until he died. (No evidence that the Times hastened his death.)

But that's not reason enough to fork over $15 bucks a month for the latest digital format.

The NYTimes web site is persistently in my "most visited" lineup on my computers. I have multiple Times RSS feeds neatly sorted in Google Reader. I subscribe to the Times on my Kindle. Oops ... as of five minutes ago, not so much with the Kindle. I ditched that subscription, and replaced it with TimesReader 2.0.

In doing so, I violated my own dictum (and we all know how much that hurts) that convenience always trumps quality. The Kindle subscription takes the convenience prize, especially when traveling. But oh my -- the quality of that interface would leave Samuel Pepys aghast. Fun fact about Pepys: he had 10 brothers and sisters. He had to fight for his share of the family Kindle.

Dictum death occurs when quality zooms upward, but convenience gets nudged down just a little. That's what happened here. Bad news for Amazon. I'm suddenly willing to dig out my laptop on a plane for a vastly improved reading experience plus updates from just before the machine exited WiFi range. I used to keep the Kindle on my bedside table so I could start reading the OpEd page in the morning before my eyes were fully open. Now I'll haul over a laptop. We'll see how that goes, but at the moment, the tradeoff seems more than worth it for the full-color, wide-angle experience.

Is any of this reason enough to subscribe in any fashion, when I spend all day and half the night in front of computer screens and can get Times content free of charge? I just hope my wife doesn't start asking that question. In the meantime, I am loving this thing. The NYTimes might and might not survive the newspaper crash, but some of the digital solutions it comes up with definitely rock.

Rumors have been floating around this week about a new, large-screen version of Amazon's Kindle eBook reader. The New York Times seemingly confirmed that the device is for real, and it could be released "as early as this week," according to their industry sources. The Times pieces focuses, not surprisingly, on the larger Kindle as a platform for newspapers and magazines, whose pages didn't quite translate to the current Kindle's smaller screen.

As much as a newspaper-friendly Kindle might matter to the future of print journalism there is some speculation about other important uses, like textbooks. Some websites are reporting that the new device will be tested at a handful of universities in the fall. It would be phenomenal not to carry around several pounds of reading material for classes, especially if the Kindle versions of the books cost less than the paper editions.

Just a couple of months after launching its Kindle app for iPhone, Amazon.com has acquired LexCycle, the company behind a popular free eBook reader called Stanza. Besides removing some competition, Amazon now has the potential to use Stanza's features to improve its own software. For its part, LexCycle doesn't plan on changing Stanza just yet, and its content partnerships are still in place.

While Amazon pushed its proprietary Kindle book format, Stanza has supported open eBook formats like EPUB. Stanza has a library of over 100,000 titles, coming from Barnes and Noble's eBook store, O'Reilly and Project Gutenberg, among others. It's really not obvious what Amazon gets out of this deal if it decides to discontinue Stanza. Readers who were using it only for free books are unlikely to switch over to the paid-download scheme of Kindle unless it incorporates a lot of Stanza's most appealing features.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

If you're starting to amass a large collection of eBooks, formatted for all kinds of different readers, Calibre might be just what you need to help organize them. It's a cross-platform app that can read and tag eBooks from Kindle 1 and 2, iPhone, and readers from Sony and Cybook. It can also convert text from all kinds of sources into eBook format, and function as its own server of sorts, so you can access your library online.

Calibre also looks great, with a display mode similar to the Cover Flow in iTunes -- can someone explain what's up with Cover Flow being so hot right now? -- and a more practical list mode that just shows cover images on the side. You can also edit or fill in information about your books from Calibre, to make sure your library is accurate and organized. Oh, and if you're a fan of the Stanza reader on the iPhone, Calibre's hosting feature makes your books accessible through that, too.

There's a lot of news in the eBook space these days. First Amazon launches the new Kindle 2 eBook reader. Then the company follows it up with the launch of an eBook app for the iPhone. But Amazon ain't the only game in town.

Yesterday Barnes & Noble announced that it was acquiring eBook seller Fictionwise for $15.7 million. B&N plans to launch its own eBook store later this year, and will likely use Fictionwise's technology to help build that site. The company will not be shutting down Fictionwise.com or eReader.com.

Electronic books have been available in one form or another for years. But they've really started to take off in the last few years. Not so long ago, most of the text-based books that were available for download from the internet were either public domain works or illegally scanned books. But we're increasingly seeing new releases available for downloading and viewing on cellphones, PDAs, eBook readers, and computers for fairly reasonable prices.

Technologically, it's surprising that digital books didn't take off before digital music. After all, you can fit most books in just a few hundred kilobytes, which makes them easy to store and distribute. Developers had to come up with heavy compression algorithms to shrink audio and video files for distribution over the internet, and even then it took huge advances in hard drive capacity and broadband access for digital music and video to take off.

But over the last few years we've seen companies like Sony and Amazon put a lot of effort into developing hardware that makes reading eBooks more like reading a paper book and that's probably made a big difference. Some people just never liked the idea of reading books on a computer or cellphone screen. And then there are concerns over copyright issues.

Amazon is going to be selling a heck of a lot more Kindle books very, very soon. With the launch of the Kindle app for iPhone, the online bookseller just opened up their entire Kindle library to folks who already own one expensive mobile device -- the iPhone -- and aren't willing to shell out for another -- Amazon's own Kindle.

The kicker is that Kindle for iPhone works like a charm. I tested out buying some books from MobileSafari and then from my Mac, and it was a seamless experience. With a single click, your book is sent via Amazon's WhisperSync to your iPhone or iPod Touch, ready to be opened the next time you use the Kindle app.

So, how's the reading experience on the iPhone screen? It's obviously much smaller than the Kindle's display, but reading is easy. Turning pages on the touchscreen interface is a breeze, and you can resize the text to suit your needs. Navigating between books and within books is intuitive, too. Tap on a page to bring up menu items and navigation, including the ability to bookmark your current page. Kindle will also pick up where you left off if you accidentally close the app while you're reading.

Overall, Kindle for iPhone is everything it needs to be to satisfy picky iPhone users who were reluctant to buy the Kindle device because of its steep pricetag and notorious form-factor. This way, everyone wins: iPhone and iPod Touch users get books on the go, Apple gets another selling point for its already-hot mobile device, and Amazon gets the profits.

So you're in love with your Kindle, but you wish you had a way to view PDF or HTML files on it? A quick run through Auto Kindle, and they're painlessly converted to the reader's native .mobi format.

I haven't posted a screenshot of the app, because there's really not a lot to see. When you launch Auto Kindle, you'll be immediately asked to browse for a source file. Once you've done that, a prompt asks you to specify the location to save your newly converted file. A progress indicator appears, fills, then disappears, and your conversion is done.

Create a shortcut to the program on your desktop, and you can convert by dragging-and-dropping files onto it. Auto Kindle does a very good job of converting files, though you may notice a quirk or two.

Sure, there are online services that do this as well, and Amazon provides email conversions, but maybe you'd rather take care of things from the privacy of your own desktop.

Auto Kindle is a free download for Windows only.