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POPSAmazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said. Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned. Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish. An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.” People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. “Of all the books to recall,” said Charles Slat
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POPSCache and Carry : A review of the Kindle I’m not your classic “early adopter” when it comes to new electronic gizardry (a word I just made up that means a combination of gizmo and wizardry, with a secondary definition of bird digestion). I’m not even what one ersatz electronics guru referred to as an “early adapter,” although I do sometimes wonder if my purpose in life has been reduced to making sure my various devices are all plugged in correctly
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POPSLibrary~The Beta Version Okay, I know I'm not the only one saving up for a Kindle, but a totally bookless library? I don't think I could do it.
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POPSAmazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues. Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”
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POPSSome E-Books Are More Equal Than Others As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table. You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony? The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”
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POPSRemember when .... star Trek seemed like science fiction? Well remember those notebook/computer/books? Guess what !
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POPSThe iPod of e-Readers? Hmm. Not sure about this one. Form factor not very inventive and I've heard Kindle's iPhone app is quite adequate for filling in the gaps when you have short chunks of time to read for a few minutes. I give them credit for going after a fast growing niche, but they've got their work cut out for them IMO.
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POPSAre e-books the new newspapers? Trend Monitor was writing about newspapers being circulated using what was then called "data broadcasting". We brought out our own 'ebook' at the time designed to work with floppy disk. With wireless distribution, this could finally become the next big technology given the enormous financial and environmental cost of paper newspapers, journals, magazines and books. The way a subscription model would work is that publishers would (jojntly or singly) lease ebooks to customers as part of the subscription, so they would not have to pay upfront costs.
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POPSScience Fun If you're not already familiar with TED click on over to the site and roam around. There are a multitude of smart people talking about really interesting stuff. Something is bound to kindle a flame in you.
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POPSAmazon Cheats Book Authors First it was Google, which proposed a few years ago to scan every book in existence without compensating the copyright holders. (A proposal that was amended after an outcry from publishers and authors.) Now Amazon has found a new way to rip off authors, who sell audio rights to their books to supplement generally meager incomes. The Kindle II now delivers books via voice - without compensating authors. Here the head of the Author's Guild explains his position. Time for me to find another online book purveyor.
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POPSApple building a Kindle clone? I hope if this is true Amazon and Apple find some way to co-exist -- it would be terrible to have some publishers work with Apple and some with Amazon. Both stores should have the same books, in the same format -- let the companies compete on the hardware front.
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POPS Why Obama's Spreading Panic And Fear 
Only by keeping us in a state of panic can he induce us to vote for trillion-dollar deficits and spending packages that send our national debt soaring. And then there is the matter of blame. The deeper the mess goes — and the further down his rhetoric drives it — the more imperative it becomes to lay off the blame on Bush. But the jig will be up soon. The crash of the stock market in the days since he took power (indeed, from the moment he won the election) can increasingly be attributed to his own failure to lead us in the right direction, his failed policies in addressing the recession and his own spreading of panic and fear. The market collapse makes it evident that it is Obama who is the problem, where he should, instead, be the solution. Instead of being a firewall, reassuring Main Street even as Wall Street crashed, he has become a conduit of panic, spreading the mood of desperation from the stock exchange floor to kitchen tables across the world.
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POPSApple killing Micro-USB standard? Apple makes lots of money selling charger cords, converters and docks, so they're resistant to adopting Micro-USB. But this could come back to bite them; come 2012, if the iPhone is the only device with a proprietary charger, don't you think that's going to turn off consumers?
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POPSKindle 2.0 Out Feb 9 This is a hotly anticipated gadget -- but launching an expensive book reader right in the middle of a major recession isn't the best timing.
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