The best free books to read on an Amazon Kindle

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

There are so many free books available for the Kindle that you never need spend anything more once you’ve bought the device. You have the entire canons of out-of-copyright writers such as Oscar Wilde, all the Sherlock Holmes adventures you’ll ever want to read, plus a myriad of other freebies. And in a way, those other freebies are the more interesting.

Some of the books are honeypots from professional authors, hoping to lure you into their 23-part series that tells the life story of an amazing spy/explorer/dancer/footballer. There’s nothing wrong with this, just go into it with your eyes open.

Some are only briefly reduced to free as a promotion, before being shoved up to full price. You can keep an eye out for such promotions by entering your email address at www.ereaderiq.co.uk (this site also provides a slightly clumsy search mechanism for finding free books).

Then there are some that barely qualify for the terms “books” at all. O’Reilly, for instance, produces a number of very short publications about technology that feel more like extended articles. (more…)

Black Friday tech deals in the UK

Friday, November 25th, 2011

Like Halloween and the NFL, Black Friday is the latest American import that the British love to moan about, but secretly actually quite like. And with good reason — tech retailers are offering some fantastic deals, whether you’re shopping for Christmas gifts or yourself.

Here’ are a few of the best deals. Drop a line in the comments if you’ve seen any other discounts worth sharing.

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Textbook service from Kindle tech support

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

Customer service really is rubbish, isn’t it? I mean how often have you rang a support line, or stared into the glassy eyed bubble of human-shaped ignorance that is 98% of this nation’s support staff and seen nothing but the next ten minutes of your life being rolled up and thrown out of the window.

That was my attitude until last night, when I took out my Kindle to discover the top two thirds of the screen had frozen, while the lower third of the screen worked perfectly. It was the Dolly Parton of eBook readers, and I rang Amazon fully expecting to be ushered onto the usual treadmill of pointless questions and obfuscation.

Instead I got Rose and Simon. Not together. They weren’t dueting support queries or anything – though that would be awesome.

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Wanted: IT orchestrator for private cloud deployment

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Reza Malekzadeh is a trooper. I don’t mean he’s in the military or anything: I mean, he fought his way through a rotten cold in the depths of winter, to talk to me a few weeks ago about Nimbula.

Take a look at the site if you want to but I’m about to gloss fairly rapidly over what it does in pursuit of a couple of points that dropped out of the conversation. Here’s that rapid gloss: this is the dev team who built Amazon EC2, and it wants you to have your own EC2-alike (a whole lot alike, even though it is not Amazon) cloud, inside your organisation.

That’s a short sentence that tends to leave Cloud sceptics and fanatics alike a bit like a goldfish. It takes time to sink in, during which you can see the cogs moving: I ‘m sure Reza could see mine doing that because when I asked him for a case in point, he dived back into the example-giver’s favourite territory of banking.

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Why Kindle eBooks are outselling paper on Amazon

Saturday, January 29th, 2011

Amazon has very excitedly shared a couple of stunning stats with the world. First, sales of eBooks overtook new paperbacks for the first time, after doing the same for hardcover books last year. Second, it rang up a whopping $13 billion in sales.

I find this fascinating, as my own book buying has mirrored this very trend, with eBooks overtaking paper titles of any kind since I bought a Kindle in November.

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How to lend eBooks with your Kindle

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

One of the major downsides of eBook readers is the price of books — they feel like they should be cheaper than they are. The Kindle’s portability means I take it everywhere, and am therefore tearing through twice as many words as I used to, but the costs are adding up as eBooks aren’t actually cheaper than the average paperback.

With standard paper books, that’s easy enough to get around: just borrow your friend’s copy. However, as with any DRM content, digital books can’t be easily shared — unless you’re happy handing over your Kindle to your friends, possibly not a smart move given the tendency for loaned books to never find their way back home.

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Why you shouldn’t buy the Wikileaks cables from Amazon

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

The discovery that Amazon.co.uk has listed for sale an eBook containing Wikileaks’ controversial collection of diplomatic cables, after dumping the site from its hosting services for publishing those very documents, has angered a few supporters of the whistle-blowing site.

In case you were planning to do so, there are a few good reasons not to buy the now infamous eBook.

While many wouldn’t want to support such hypocrisy either way, the material is widely available online — that’s sort of the point — so there’s little reason to pay the £7.37 price being asked by “author” Heinz Duthel.

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Where is Spotify for eBooks?

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

The eBook market should be booming. Prices for readers have never been lower and there are plenty of services available. Yet somehow the model just doesn’t seem to work – and the reasons seem horribly familiar.

The publishing industry’s current attitude is like a flashback to the music industry as it was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the digital age.

We’d all love access to hundreds of books and travel guides in a lightweight, easy-to-read device with a long battery life, but I also want a decent selection of books at a fair price, with the same level of freedoms offered with a paperback. That’s where the services from everyone from Amazon, to Apple and Barnes & Noble fall over.

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Android, Amazon and the case against third-party app stores

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

Allow me, if you will, the use of a metaphor. If Apple’s iOS is like a cruise liner moving through the smartphone sea – albeit one that’s expensive, where half the facilities are closed and the captain’s a bit of a nutter – then Android is like a disparate flotilla of smaller, but no less capable, vessels.

The good ship(s) Android do come with advantages. For starters, the multitude of different designs allows you to pick the one that most appeals to you, or comes with a range of features that best suits your needs without ignoring stuff that should seem obvious.

It goes without saying, too, that the Android harbour is packed with both expensive and cheap ships, so you’re able to choose a vessel to suit your budget.

If you haven’t yet guessed, this dubious extended metaphor represents the increasing fragmentation of Android, Google’s open-source mobile operating system. While it has undoubted hardware advantages, the increasing disparity of the platform’s software is starting to look like a bit of a disaster – and it’s an issue that Steve Jobs is well aware of, as anyone who’s listened to his ranting on Apple’s latest earnings call will testify. (more…)

Kindle newspapers: slower than print

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

I’m not a great eBook advocate, but the one thing that might tempt me to splash out on the new UK-friendly Kindle is newspapers. If I could download the latest issue before I jumped on my train every morning, saving me the dirty look from my newsagent when I try and pay for The Times with a £20 note (why do I never have change in the mornings?) then all power to Amazon’s elbow.

So when Amazon opened the doors on its UK Kindle Store earlier today, the first section I headed for was the newspapers.

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