Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

A lot of interesting Kindle 2 news updates -

1. Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise for $15.7 million in cash. Fictionwise also make the iPhone reading App eReader (a top 3 app in the Books category). B&N hinted at bigger plans -
   

   Barnes & Noble said it plans to use Fictionwise as part of its overall digital strategy, which includes the launch of an e-Bookstore later this year.

2. Len Edgerly at the excellent Kindle Chronicles finally gets around to interviewing himself (actually his wife does the interview).
3. Another Buy One Book, Get Another Book free from the Kindle store – “purchase the Kindle edition of Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand by Carrie Vaughn, and automatically receive Kitty Raises Hell for free”.
4. What, for me,  is quickly becoming the most exciting Kindle related blog.  
5. Indigo (one of Canada’s largest book store chains) had launched Shortcovers in Feb 2009. Now, they’re talking down the Kindle for iPhone -
   

   “If you’ve got Kindle and you’ve got some books on your account then you can read them on the iPhone, that’s complimentary for what they’ve got but pretty limited for everybody else,” said Michael Serbinis EVP of Short Covers and CIO of Indigo.

   I guess they’re missing the fact that iPhone users can and will buy books from the Kindle Store.

6. The New York Times released V2.0 of its iPhone App on March 4th and it includes offline reading support.
7. A really interesting website to try out is this Elastic Articles Site built on the NYTimes API.  
8. Frommer’s City Travel Set now available at Amazon’s Kindle Store for $39.99.
   

   If travelers were to purchase the contents of the Frommer’s CitySet in print form, the stack of books would weigh 8 ½ pounds and fill up 3,809 pages. Now all this information is available in just over 10 ounces on the Kindle or the Kindle 2 for a special price of $39.99.

9. A pretty large scale eTextbook trial is going on between McGraw Hill and Northwest Missouri State university -

One of the largest public university e-text research trials is currently being conducted by Northwest Missouri State University and McGraw-Hill. The alliance is testing the potential of replacing students’ printed textbooks with the electronic, fully interactive versions that offer promising cost savings.

The preliminary phase of this study ended this past December and involved four classes and approximately 200 students. This second phase involves 10 departments and more than 500 students. Initial results are expected by mid-April 2009.

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