Posts Tagged "App Store"

Kindle for iPhone – Gives Books and The Real Kindle a Run For Their Money

Posted by Editor on Jan 21, 2010 in Amazon Kindle, Apple, apps, iPhone, Reviews, Tablets

As we move into the Apple Tablet era I wanted to test drive what the experience might be like so I downloaded the Amazon Kindle for iPhone Reader [FREE AppStore] from the iTunes Store. Kindle for iPhone is meant as a standalone or companion to an Amazon Kindle eBook reader. You can shop for books online using your Amazon.com account, purchase, download and read all in this clever little application.

Kindle for iPhone is a very light download so you’ll be up and running in no time, you just need to enter your Amazon.com account details. Then you are taken into a Safari browser session to pick out books. Couple of nice features, you can download decent sized free samples of any book you’re interested in and if you have a Kindle it will automatically sync up so you have one copy on the Kindle and one for the iPhone. I chose a cookbook about making Japanese food.

WSJ Makes Apple Tablet Official

Posted by Editor on Jan 21, 2010 in Amazon Kindle, Apple, Tablets

Apparently the Wall Street Journal still has journalistic integrity, i.e. they don’t pass on every last unsourced rumor the web is happy to. So when they write up a deeply detailed description of Apple’s tablet plans to be unveiled on January 27th, we’re supposed to take this as gospel. Right? In a nutshell, what’s in store is massive changes to the ways we interact with textbooks, newspapers, magazines and cable TV. Here’s some highlights:

Amazon Hedges Ahead of Pending Apple Event

Posted by Editor on Jan 20, 2010 in Amazon Kindle, Tablets

In a sign that the party is coming to an end for Jeff Bezos, it was announced today that Amazon would be changing their royalty sharing model from the truly paltry 25-30% they were offering before to up to 70%. This comes with some strings as explained by Mashable:

To be able to get the 70 percent royalty deal, the list price for your title must be both between $2.99 to $9.99 and be 20 percent below the lowest physical book price; title also must be “offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices”. The title also needs to be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, e.g. text-to-speech. Finally, the title must be made available for sale “in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights”

It’s the Value Added Content – Stupid

Posted by Editor on Jan 15, 2010 in Apple, Tablets

The AP via MacNewsWorld ponders the viability of the Apple tablet. They point out a lot of the previous attempts to bring a tablet to market have failed, most notably:

Bill Gates, cofounder of Apple nemesis Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), predicted repeatedly during the 2000s that tablets were about to take off. He was wrong because those tablets required people to use a pen-shaped stylus to tap buttons or write on the screen, which was attractive in workplaces where employees needed to check boxes or fill out forms. For most people, though, using a stylus for regular computer tasks such as editing a spreadsheet was more cumbersome than using a mouse and keyboard.