04:58 PM by pdurrant in E-Book General | News

The UK Kindle ebook store is now open for business. Amazon are also offering to transfer UK customer's Kindle store accounts from Amazon.com to Amazon.co.uk.

I've just done clicked the button to start this process. Hopefully it will be painless. The UK store has prices in £, not $.

Most prices seem to be a simple conversion from $ to £, with an exchange rate of about $1.55:£1. The current rate shown at xe.com is $1.58:£1, so it's not too bad at all.

It will be interesting to see how frequently Amazon update the UK price as the exchange rate changes.

Some UK prices are cheaper — as sometimes a cheaper paper version is available in the UK which isn't available in the US.

e.g. The Penguin Classics version of Kidnapped is $6.06 is the US Kindle store (including the 17.5% VAT for UK customers) but is only £1.89 in the UK Kindle store.

And no doubt some UK prices are higher.

04:52 PM by M_Agnum in E-Book General | News

Amazon is now offering two word puzzle games for Kindle--Every Word and Shuffled Row. They are free, so we encourage you to check them out.

"If you like word scrambles then Every Word is the game for you. Test your vocabulary as you try to find as many words from the scrambled letters in this fun and fast-paced word game."

"In Shuffled Row see how many words you can make from 60 lettered tiles. The tiles are added to your row one at a time so you'll constantly be working with a new set of letters. After you submit a word, the letters you used will be removed and new ones will be added. Increase your score by using less common letters. Create longer words and increase your score even more."

via http://www.kindlepost.com/2010/08/fr...on-kindle.html

I just downloaded them and am going to give them a test run.

04:46 PM by mbovenka in E-Book General | News

Irex gets a new lease on life as 'IRX Innovations', leaves the consumer market to others (Dutch): Webwereld

12:40 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

The NookStudy website was updated sometime this morning. All sections (including the FAQ and help) are now live. You can also download NookStudy here.

I've already tried it, and I am impressed. It still has a few rough edges, but it is one of the best desktop reading apps on the market. I think it's already better than Kindle4PC.

I posted an early review over on The Digital Reader blog.

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

It's time again for our roundup on all the stuff we posted on our frontpage this past week.

E-Book General - News

• New Kindle with WiFi announced

11:19 PM by DianaB in E-Book General | News

The new Kindle features a screen with increased gray-scale contrast, a battery that lasts for a month, and a slightly smaller size. It will come in two flavors: one with Wi-Fi and 3G Internet connections selling for $189, the other with Wi-Fi only for $139.

Amazon will begin taking orders Thursday and the new models will begin shipping Aug. 27 to customers in 140 countries.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...036454208.html

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Is it really Sunday again? Hoorah! Time to dig in to another digest of MobileRead delectables

E-Book General - News

• Kindle Books Outsell Hardcovers
• Sharp looking to push oddball XMDF format on new LCD readers
• Barnes & Noble launches Nook for Android

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• August 2010 Book Club Nominations
• August 2010 Mobile Read Book Club Vote

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• Winner of the Win an iPad Survey
• Mobileread hits 1 million posts. Thank you!

04:29 PM by pilotbob in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help up choose a book as the August 2010 eBook for the Mobile Read Book Club. The poll will be open for 5 days. We will start the discussion thread for this book on August 20th. Select from the following books.

Sh*t My Dad Says by Halpern, Justin
More than a million people now follow Mr. Halpern's philosophical musings on Twitter, and in this book, his son weaves a brilliantly funny, touching coming-of-age memoir around the best of his quotes. An all-American story that unfolds on the Little League field, in Denny's, during excruciating family road trips, and, most frequently, in the Halperns' kitchen over bowls of Grape-Nuts, Sh*t My Dad Says is a chaotic, hilarious, true portrait of a father-son relationship from a major new comic voice.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.
Here are a few quotes from the Amazon page:
"Every time I finish reading one of Chandler's Marlowe novels, I end up feeling depressed, because it's one less Chandler novel that I can read for the first time. In my mind, he's that good -- he is one of the only writers that I am consistenly incapable of setting down to go to sleep... I finished the last half of "The Long Goodbye" at about 5:00 am -- I was so wrapped up in it, that I failed to notice the time."

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett
It is 1944 and weeks before D-Day. The Allies are disguising their invasion plans with a phoney armada of ships and planes. Their plan would be scuppered if an enemy agent found out... and then, Hitler's prize agent, “The Needle”, does just that. Hunted by MI5, he leads a murderous trail across Britain to a waiting U-Boat. But he hasn't planned for a storm-battered island, and the remarkable young woman who lives there.

Don't Sleep There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett
The Pirahã Indians of the Amazon are a very peculiar people. They number fewer than 400 and have no myths, rituals or history. Their language is unrelated to any other living tongue. It can be whistled, sung, hummed or spoken. It has no words for numbers, colours, left or right, brother or sister.

The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
"More dramtatic than fiction...THE GUNS OF AUGUST is a magnificent narrative—beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained....The product of painstaking and sophisticated research."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to World War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and why it could have been stopped but wasn't. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, THE GUNS OF AUGUST will not be forgotten.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel written by Yann Martel. In the story, the protagonist Piscine "Pi" Molitor Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck, while stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean. Martel brought the idea of rituals many times throughout the novel as well as storytelling. Rituals give structure to abstract ideas and emotions—in other words, ritual is an alternate form of storytelling. It was rituals and storytelling that kept Pi Patel sane.

Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster
A delightful, witty, easily accessible set of talks on the topic of the novel. Relatively short, too.
Forster's book is not really a book at all; rather, it's a collection of lectures delivered at Cambridge University on subjects as parboiled as "People," "The Plot," and "The Story." It has an unpretentious verbal immediacy thanks to its spoken origin and is written in the key of Aplogetic Mumble: "Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad." Such gentle provocations litter these pages. How can you not read on? Forster's critical writing is so ridiculously plainspoken, so happily commonsensical, that we often forget to be intimidated by the rhetorical landscapes he so ably leads us through. As he himself points out in the introductory note, "Since the novel is itself often colloquial it may possibly withhold some of its secrets from the graver and grander streams of criticism, and may reveal them to backwaters and shallows."

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family outside Munich. Liesel's father was taken away on the breath of a single, unfamiliar word - Kommunist - and Liesel sees the fear of a similar fate in her mother's eyes. On the journey, Death visits the young boy, and notices Liesel. It will be the first of many near encounters. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery.So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.The Book Thief is a story about the power of words to make worlds. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
From Booklist:
Gladwell, a New Yorker staff writer, offers an incisive and piquant theory of social dynamics that is bound to provoke a paradigm shift in our understanding of mass behavioral change. Defining such dramatic turnarounds as the abrupt drop in crime on New York's subways, or the unexpected popularity of a novel, as epidemics, Gladwell searches for catalysts that precipitate the "tipping point," or critical mass, that generates those events. What he finds, after analyzing a number of fascinating psychological studies, is that tipping points are attributable to minor alterations in the environment, such as the eradication of graffiti, and the actions of a surprisingly small number of people, who fit the profiles of personality types that he terms connectors, mavens, and salesmen. As he applies his strikingly counterintuitive hypotheses to everything from the "stickiness," or popularity, of certain children's television shows to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, Gladwell reveals that our cherished belief in the autonomy of the self is based in great part on wishful thinking. Donna Seaman

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland
.....Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (popularly known as Fanny Hill) is an erotic novel by John Cleland first published in England in 1748. Written while the author was in debtor's prison in London, it is considered "the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form of the novel." One of the most prosecuted and banned books in history, it has become a synonym for obscenity.