Library Stuff

More Intelligent Life – “The printed word has always had an Achilles heel: factual mistakes. Can the electronic reader help?” (via)

The New Yorker – “Can the Kindle really improve on the book?’

Farhad Manjoo – “Why newsprint still beats the Kindle.”

Wired Campus – "Brigham Young University’s library will no longer let professors check out books on Kindles — at least, not until it receives written permission from Amazon, the company that makes the e-book readers. To meet the high demand for popular new books, the library had purchased Kindles and used them to lend out digital copies. Campus officials said the university had received verbal consent from Amazon, but Brigham Young decided to put the program on hold until it received written consent."

See also: Legal ambiguities be damned! Kindles lent out by public libraries

Amazon – “Amazon is pleased to make available to you for download an archive file of the machine readable source code (“Source Code”) corresponding to modified software packages used in the Kindle device.”

NYTimes.com – “In the future, Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader will display more book formats beyond its own. And you should also expect to see Kindle books on a lot more devices. That was the clear implication of comments that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, made at a conference in New York Monday on disruptive business models”

NYTimes.com – “A recent reading in Manhattan at the Strand bookstore by David Sedaris, whose most recent book is “When You Are Engulfed in Flames,” may have offered a glimpse of the future. A man named Marty who had waited in the book-signing line presented his Kindle, on the back of which Mr. Sedaris, in mock horror, wrote, “This bespells doom.” (The signed Kindle was photographed, but its owner’s full name is unknown.)”

Wired.com – “Nobody is likely to confuse a Kindle with a cellphone, but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Monday he considered the cellphone business model: undercharge for the device and make it up on content and service fees. But, Bezos told Wired’s Steven Levy at Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference in New York, it’s cheaper in the long run for customers to pay something akin to the actual cost for hardware. And fees and minimum purchase requirements create friction.”

CNET News – “The Kindle DX is too expensive. For what we're getting, which basically amounts to a larger Kindle 2 with more storage, I'm not impressed. But that doesn't mean it can't eventually be worth that price. With a few additions, I think the DX could eventually provide enough value to justify spending $489 on it.”

NYTimes – “The publishing world is all caught up in weighty questions about the Kindle and other such devices: Will they help or hurt book sales and authors’ advances? Cannibalize the industry? Galvanize it? Please, they’re overlooking the really important concern: How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism?”