Posts Tagged ‘ebook’

Shiva Iyer at Packt Publishing kindly sent me a review copy of Instant OpenELEC Starter. It’s an ebook with a list price of £5.99, and I was able to download .pdf and .mobi versions (with an .epub option too). It’s also available from Amazon as a paperback (£12.99) and for Kindle (£6.17). The book is […]


There’s a passage on governance in Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus that I really like: ‘Groups tolerate governance, which is by definition a set of restrictions, only after enough value has accumulated to make the burden worthwhile. Since that value builds up only over time, the burden of the rules has to follow, not lead.‘ It […]


Shortly before digging into the copy of Cognitive Surplus I bought on Google ebooks the other day I read this piece comparing the relative merits of Google, Amazon and Apple’s offerings. One of the areas of the store/reading experience it didn’t touch on was gifting. Since getting my Kindle I don’t really want any more […]


One of the big tech news items today is the launch of the much anticipated Google eBooks. Sadly the service is only available in the US at the moment, so I thought I’d have a poke around and see what the hurdles were. US Browsing Browsing from my regular connection at home I could only see […]


My Kindle died two days ago :( Thankfully Amazon were pretty prompt in dealing with this. I called their Kindle helpline[1], a new one was sent out, and it arrived this morning :) It didn’t take long for me to restore all of my content, and things like bookmarks seem to be intact :) Unfortunately […]


As I’ve spent more time with my Kindle I’ve been paying more attention to eBook prices. My conclusion is that zero weight (or perhaps just the novelty of eBooks) is a feature, and one that the supply chain thinks is worth a premium. Pricing Typical pricing for eBooks seems to be the same (or just […]


Despite knowing that ‘free 3G’ is a trap I still ordered a Kindle 3G. There was nobody home when the postman came yesterday, so I had to pick it up from the depot this morning before rushing for my train (depot opens at 0800, train leaves at 0803, I just made it). This isn’t intended […]


When I registered thestateofme.com some years back it was for a project to allow synchronisation of RSS aggregator/reader state across a number of systems. I never wrote any code because things got overtaken by events. Firstly I discovered RSS Bandit, which had a mechanism to sync state via a WebDAV server (and a number of […]


The bottom line here is that $50 (or £40) for 3G won’t get the buyer unlimited global web surfing. It looks too good to be true, and therefore it is. In the words of Admiral Ackbar – ‘it’s a trap!’. That 3G is there so that Amazon can sell you books. Whilst it may be possible to use it (for the time being) to do some surfing too at no extra cost that’s a feature that can’t be (and therefore won’t be) economically sustainable.


‘Can I have an iPod Touch for my birthday?’ asked my five year old daughter yesterday (the birthday isn’t far away), ‘Susie has one, and she’s 6’. ‘No’, came my reply, ‘I gave you an iPod mini just a few weeks ago’. We’ve been going through a bit of an iPod upgrade cycle around the […]