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.

So where do you go to find new books? First of all, naturally, you read this article. But after that you should head to www.amazon.co.uk and click on the Kindle Books link. To the right of the page you’ll see a Bestsellers box; click on the “Kindle Store : Books” link and you’ll see a straightforward listing on the right, plus a useful list of categories on the left. Click on the category you’re interested in – let’s say Science Fiction – and you’ll see the bestsellers, both paid for and free.

If using the Kindle itself then Amazon makes it a little trickier to find the free books, but it’s still possible to access the top 100. Select “Shop in Kindle Store”, then “Kindle Best Sellers” under Featured. You’ll find the link “Kindle Top 100 Free” on the top right hand of the screen.

Here’s our pick of the free books we’ve found – feel free to add your own suggestions in comments:

The Penal Colony

A gripping read from start to finish, this novel depicts an all-too-conceivable situation where Britain despatches its most dangerous prisoners to remote islands. Think of it as Lord of the Flies for adults. The Penal Colony is based on Sert, where The Village is the pinnacle of island culture: hot water, limited electricity and a direct link with the prison authorities make it the best place to live. But, as our arrogant protagonist Routledge discovers, you have to earn your place: when he arrives, insisting himself innocent of the murder of a young woman he met on a train, he’s told he can only be allowed in if he survives six days on the outside. But it doesn’t take him long to be captured by the biggest psychopath on the island…

Jane Eyre

The setting may be old fashioned and all too reminiscent of stuffy English Literature lessons, but the story is so strong – and your compassion with Jane Eyre so compelling – that you’ll likely rush through it if you haven’t done so before. As with A Christmas Carol (and for that matter all the Bronte sisters’ works), this book has been lovingly transcribed from the original and formatted for the Kindle by a community of literary do-gooders. If you haven’t read a classic for donkey’s years, let this one guide you back into the fold.

A Little Book of Christmas

Yes it’s twee and sentimental, but if A Christmas Carol wasn’t enough to get you into a festive mood then this book definitely will. It’s a collection of short stories tied together not only by the C word but also sheer niceness. Whether it’s the story of George W Hetherington, a Scrooge-like figure whose anti-Christmas sentiment is swept away when he becomes involved with a poverty-stricken family, or the way a New York Santa helps Little Billee find his way home, if you don’t have a tear in your eye at some point while reading this book your heart is made of flint.

A Little Bit of Everything for Dummies

There’s no getting away from the fact this is basically an advert for the For Dummies series, but it’s still packed with information. There’s a nostalgic chapter lifted from the first ever Dummies book – DOS for Dummies – plus another about networking in Windows 7, both written in a style you’ll either find chatty or enormously irritating. But it’s impressive by the sheer range of other topics covered: how to keep a relationship happy, enjoying an evening out in French, meditation tips, learning to play rock music on the guitar… and much more.

A Christmas Carol

Everyone knows the story of Scrooge, if only through the various movie tellings – prepare yourself to be shocked, but The Muppet’s Christmas Carol wasn’t the original. Like so many classic novels, it’s been converted to Kindle form by “the community”, and aside from the odd formatting error it has a very professional finish. Certainly you won’t be distracted from Dickens’ most accessible plot, with straightforward storytelling making this just as suitable a read for young children as it is for adults who may, just like Scrooge, have fallen under the magic spell of money.

What is HTML5?

We’re not massive fans of most of O’Reilly’s free books on the Kindle – as we mentioned above, they have a tendency to feel like extended web articles – but this one serves as an excellent introduction to HTML5. The opening pages focus on what it means for the end user, and it’s helped along by a friendly tone, but the target reader is always the aspiring web programmer and so there’s plenty of more meaty information to get your teeth into.

White Fang

There are plenty of children’s books available for free on the Kindle, and Jack London’s tale of survival is among the best. You follow the story of White Fang, half dog, half wolf, as he moves from one perilous situation to another. Most children will love the idea of being this close to the wild – he isn’t a gentle dog, to put it mildly, but most of the violence is hinted at rather than explicitly described – and unlike many such books it does its best to steer away too much from humanising wild animals. A deserved classic.

The Crew

Dougie Brimson was already considered an “expert” in football hooliganism before The Crew, his first novel, was published in the late 1990s, and he brings all that knowledge to bear in the plot. We follow two main characters: an under-pressure cop and a claustrophobic hooligan who’ll do anything to avoid being locked up in a cell. The police use this knowledge to persuade him to work with an undercover officer as they infiltrate an operation being run by the UK’s most notorious hooligan mastermind, with dramatic and unexpected consequences.

South: The Story of Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Expedition

If you’re hoping for a book with stylistic prose and beautiful descriptions of landscapes then look away now. Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton is a man who calls the killing of a seal a killing of a seal, and this journal features plenty of that. But while the prose is straightforward it’s also compelling, dragging you through the long months his ship spent locked in ice while they waited for summer to reappear. It’s a superb record, not only of that trip, but also a historical record to reflect the state of the world at the beginning of the First World War.

The brilliant book of calm

This is just one of the many self-help books that litter the Amazon freebie list, but it’s certainly one of the better ones. You’ll need to be in the mood for it – the one person we know who would benefit from The brilliant book of calm, PC Pro editor Barry Collins, probably wouldn’t make it through two pages before slamming it into the proverbial bin – but if you ignore the awkward humorous asides then it becomes a little more bearable. And actually, on occasion, thought-provoking. Please note this book is no longer free; since this article was written, its price has gone up to around £7.

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.

Apple: Today is one of the few times the Apple Store has a sale, so if you’re a fan now’s the time to shop. The iPad 2 is £31 off the full price for the 16GB Wi-Fi model, dropping it to £368, while the  32GB has a discount of £41 and the 63GB is £51 off. If you’ve had an eye on the MacBook Air, it has an £81 discount today. iTunes gift cards are also £5 cheaper than the stated amount, if you’re looking for stocking stuffers.

PC World/Currys: The retailers are running a “100-hour Price Crash” — don’t blame me, that’s what they’re calling it — until Monday. The deals are constantly updated, but at the time of writing an HTC Flyer is £50 cheaper, PCs are available at 20% off, and there are monitors with 40% discounts.

Amazon: The online shop has been running a series of “Lightning Deals” since Monday, offering short-term, limited availability discounts. The discounts disappear extremely quickly, so you’ll need to be on the ball. You can follow Amazon on Twitter, or check out what deals are coming up on the main Black Friday page.

Comet: The struggling retailer is wrapping up five days of sales today, with discounts from £20 off speakers to £300 off an all-in-one HP.

Other retailers aren’t opting for Black Friday sales, but some including Dabs have set up Christmas discount stores, while gaming site Steam has slashed prices for its Autumn Sale, which continues for a few more hours.

For those who don’t know what the heck Black Friday is, it’s the kick-off to the US holiday shopping season. The Friday after American Thanksgiving is shopping carnage — injuries have been reported and one Wal-Mart employee was actually killed in 2008 (not because of online shopping, so you’re probably safe).

Personally, as a Canadian, I prefer the online sales practiced by the homeland (I have no idea if anyone else does this) that start at 6pm on Christmas Eve or first thing Christmas Day — so you know how much money from your gift budget you’ve got left to spend on yourself, and if you didn’t get what you wanted under the tree, you can just buy it yourself from the comfort of your home. Much more civilised.

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.

Amazon plays constant reruns of Bambi’s mum dying in their call centres, and selects its staff by throwing rocks at kittens to see who breaks down first

After a few rings Rose picked up the phone and walked me through a hard reset of the Kindle, just to make sure that I wasn’t being thick, or holding it back-to-front or anything. Once she’d determined that I had an IQ over 12 (mistakenly in my case), she passed me onto Simon, who apologised for my Kindle being broken while managing to sound like he actually meant it. I swear there was a catch in his throat, like he’d just watched a puppy getting washed down the river. I can only assume that Amazon plays constant reruns of Bambi’s mum dying in their call centres, and selects its staff by throwing rocks at kittens to see who breaks down first.

Anyway, after wiping away his tears, Simon swiftly offered to replace my Kindle – just like that. No problems, no fuss, no drama. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to ship a new one to my home in Dubai, though he extended the return period to 60 days on the broken one, so I have plenty of time to get it back to them. He even sent out a free return postage label.

After filling me in on the West Ham vs Liverpool score – at which point we had another little cry together – he wished me the best and hung up. It seems odd to celebrate somebody doing their job, but I doubt there’s anybody reading this blog who doesn’t have a tech support horror to share. As a customer and a journalist, it’s occasionally nice to write a blog that’s not whinging about something being rubbish, or demanding a company stop being awful. This is that blog.

The Kindle is great, and Amazon customer service is excellent. That really shouldn’t be such a rare thing to hear, and I only wish I could say it more often.

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.

Lots of big banks have an obsession with a thing called a Monte Carlo simulation, and it’s a CPU hog. Nimbula allows banks to devote racks of kit to the sisyphean task of Monte Carlo overnight, and then flip them over to less intense workloads during the day. That’s a nice simple example of a resource-sharing situation which previously would have tested the patience of a wide variety of Banking IT skills.

You have to draw together so many threads, said Reza, that a private cloud deployment is something you don’t project manage: you orchestrate it

That’s the Nimbula promise – the EC2 -alike platform offers a curiously familiar place to work on defining and then pushing around a load of VMs, while the underlying platform has had the odd bit of large-scale testing. (Two technosnippets: did you know that EC2, internally, doesn’t use TCP/IP to talk between hosts? Or that the lamentably widespread Facebook addon, FarmVille, consumes 12,000 EC2 VM guests?).

But that’s not what I want to talk about. Neither is the fact that Diane Greene, who left VMware a couple of years ago, has popped up on the board of Numbula (Reza is ex-VMware, too). What I want to get you thinking about was the word Reza dropped in once I realised he had a cold and put him mercilessly under pressure.

He wanted to convey the job of being a private cloud deployment manager: how that demands all kinds of skills, with a footprint inside the typical private cloud customer which is pretty much guaranteed to raise empire-builder hackles in every meeting. You have to draw together so many threads, said Reza, that a private cloud deployment is something you don’t project manage: you orchestrate it.

A lovely word, that. It means “(to) arrange or direct the elements of (a situation) to produce a desired effect, esp. surreptitiously” according to Dictionary.com, and just how far is that from the normal definition of a business process?

I know what a lot of my readers in small businesses will be saying: that there’s just no time to be all surreptitious, and if cloud enablement is that difficult why on earth should anyone be bothering with it? Those who sit in bigger companies, however, will get Reza’s point immediately. Moving one bit of work up to Amazon EC2 can be as simple as abusing your company credit card (assuming you have a complete virtual machine rolled up and ready to go), but altering an entire organisation’s way of thinking about server counts running into the hundreds, crossing budgetary boundaries (always the most jealously guarded, those) and demonstrating that you’ve saved money or speeded up response – that won’t fit into one episode of The Apprentice.

It’s not even arranging things  (small jazz bands play “arrangements” – half a dozen people who can all see and hear each other. Easy stuff). We are certainly here dealing with products that trip off major outbreaks of organised, directed change – and that requires a new role. I’m not sure “conductor” is quite the right term, but I could be persuaded by “orchestrator”.

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.

I’ve surveyed my book purchases in the months before my Kindle acquisition, and compared it to the titles I’ve picked up since. To make the stats easier to follow, I’ve rendered the results in handy chart form (with sincere apologies to the much funnier 27BSlash6).

Before my Kindle, I mostly borrowed books from friends (and the library, before I forgot to bring one back for six months) and bought used copies from second-hand shops. The only time I picked up new copies was in the airport before a flight. Still, all were made of paper:

And after I picked up my Kindle, this is what my purchasing looks like:

I haven’t bought a single paper book (aside from gifts) since November. While it makes for a nice clean pie chart, I don’t think the trend will continue quite so perfectly; Tim Danton just handed me a beautiful book — the paper kind — of infographics, and the full colour, incredibly detailed pages wouldn’t work so well on a Kindle.

That covers amazing Amazon stat number one. What about the double-digit billions in sales? I’ve another chart for that:

In the year before I bought my Kindle, I bought a spent a whopping £5.48 on new books from Amazon. Since November, I’ve spent £92.87. It’s easy to see where the sales jump comes from — and to see why I’m so desperate for the eBook lending system to actually work…

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.

With all this in mind, Amazon has offered up the ability to lend copies of eBooks to other Kindle owners. While it’s a step in the right direction, the system is still extremely limited: it’s only open to US users (although books can be loaned to the UK), and only on selected books, which can only be borrowed once for 14 days.

Still, it’s worth a look. Here’s how to do it for UK Kindle owners.

The first step is to flip your device to the US store. So far, I’ve done this several times with little trouble, but Amazon is bound to catch on and ban such abuse of the practice eventually.

To do this, go to Manage Your Kindle on the Amazon website and enter a new address with a US post code. Then, head over to the same management page on the Amazon.com website to start lending.

On that account page, scroll down to your list of books. Click the “+” next to titles you’ve bought, and it will let you know if your books are available to lend.

Some publishers aren’t allowing the feature, while UK versions of books also don’t seem to be available — so you might not have a wide selection to offer your friends anyway. Just one of the US books I’ve bought is available for loan, and it’s not one many people will want to borrow…

Click ‘Loan this Book’, drop in your friend’s email address, and a link will be sent to them. They’ll have seven days to start the loan, and 14 days to finish up reading. Meanwhile, you won’t be able to read the book, and it will show up as “on loan” on your device.

Is this enough to make up for high eBook prices? And does anyone have anything good they want to lend me?

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.

If that weren’t enough, I can give you an even better reason, because out of curiosity I shelled out to have the collection delivered to my Kindle.

Despite the book, Wikileaks documents expose US foreign policy conspiracies. All cables with tags from 1-5000, clearly promising the first 5,000 cables, it contains nothing of the sort. Instead, Duthel has merely listed all the cables — the dates, random (well, random to me) identifying numbers, and locations, but not the actual cables. It makes for exceptionally dull reading.

To be fair, Duthel has also included some photos of world leaders (which hopefully he has copyright for), screenshots of websites that are unintelligible on the Kindle’s screen, and articles presumably copied and pasted from newspapers.

While this will likely anger (or amuse) anyone silly enough to download the eBook, it’ll probably be a relief for Amazon to find out it’s not enabling the spread of illegally obtained documents.

On the other hand, the apparent copyright violations littered through the introduction to the book could cause trouble, as that was one of the reasons Amazon Web Services gave when it stopped hosting the whistle-blowing site: “It’s clear that Wikileaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content.”

Either way, if you want to read the leaked diplomatic cables, save your money and head to Wikileaks to get the documents for free.

And if you can’t think of a better way to spend £7.37, you could donate it to Wikileaks, purchase another one of Duthel’s tomes (maybe try out Discovering Asian Women) or just send it to me, as I don’t think I’m getting my money back from Amazon…

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.

Amazon, for example, made its first concession on lending this week, when it said users (provided the publishers had agreed) could lend books to a friend. It seemed like a great idea, and it was, but only up to a point.

There’s a 14-day limit on the loan, and each book can only be loaned to one friend. It’s a far cry from what happens to a good paperback that does the rounds like a cold sore before ending up on a shelf in a second hand book shop.

Then there’s price. There are some bargains to be had – Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kept Having Bloody Books Written About Her series are just £2.68 a pop on Amazon. But there are also mind-blowing anomalies that make no sense.

Writing this in France, Amazon.co.uk won’t show me Kindle prices from UK shops, referring me instead to the US site for European sales – which is bonkers. However, I can buy Bernard Cornwall’s bloody account of Azincourt for $11.13 (£7) as a Kindle book.

That same title is on sale as a hard copy – with all the material, print and distribution costs involved – for £4.63 for the 542-page paperback. No thanks.

It was widely reportedly recently that eBook sales had overtaken traditional book sales, but the hoopla largely neglected to mention that the figures were for hardbacks, which no-one under the age of 100 buys.

In reality, according to figures from the Publishers Association, consumer digital sales have reached a mere £5 million a year.

Library success

Still, eBooks should come into their own with libraries, as public lenders look to fight dwindling visitor numbers. Although device manufacturers and local authorities have set up schemes that allow you to load up an eReader with books that expire after a set period, the book industry is not so sure it likes the idea, despite the potential revenue.

Approximately a third of UK libraries have embraced the new technology, but that progress could soon be reversed.

According to a report in today’s Guardian, the Publishers Association has launched a clampdown on library services, citing the fact that “untrammelled” remote lending of digital books could pose a “serious threat” to publishers’ commercial activities.

The Publishers Association has launched a clampdown on library services, citing the fact that “untrammelled” remote lending of digital books could pose a “serious threat” to publishers’ commercial activities

The publishers want readers to actually go to the library to update their devices, which rather misses the point, and old school ideologies prevail across much of the industry. Although Apple’s iBook store has hundreds of thousands of titles, it’s missing big names like John Grisham and all the titles from Random House after failing to agree to pricing with the publisher.

It’s like stepping back to a time when MP3 players were a brave new world of technology. The music publishers buried their heads in the sand, stuck their fingers in their ears and shouted “la-la-la-la-la” as if the whole digital conundrum would go away. It didn’t.

For a micro-generation, music was a free ride with the record companies almost encouraging piracy through their petty and greedy tactics and refusal to accept that publishing had changed.

Spotify

It wasn’t until iTunes and – more importantly – Spotify came along and offered what the public had wanted after all: a fair price for a fair deal. OK, that’s free for a lot of Spotify consumers, but at least the artists are being paid something via their share of advertising revenue.

As yet, however, apart from the free books listed by the excellent Project Guttenburg, among others, authors and publishers of the world are largely offering an arguably weaker product at a sometimes higher price, which is no way to create a new industry or reduce pirating.

The scenario is best captured by the stance of wizard peddlar JK Rowling, who has famously vetoed eBooks on account of piracy fears. As a result you can’t buy a single official Harry Potter book for the Kindle, or through the Apple iBook store.

Head to pirate torrent site isoHunt, however, and they are available in a variety of file formats. It’s as if they’ve learned nothing.

I and many others would happily pay, say, £1 for a book that expired in a month, or sign up for a £10 a month service that gave me unlimited books, with the book expiring after a reasonable period. Anyone listening over at Spotify?

As it is, I’ll keep buying the odd paperback and swapping ad infinitum with book-loving friends.

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.

Take, for instance, last week’s news that Amazon is planning to join American service provider Verizon in setting up its own app store. While the firm is one of the biggest retail brands in the world, I’m struggling to see how multiple app stores is a good thing.

That’s especially true when Amazon’s terms and conditions are practically Apple-like in their restrictiveness. For starters, there’s an annual $99 fee to join Amazon’s developer program and the promise of parity when it comes to application updates – so a developer will have to update its app in Amazon’s store at the same time as it does elsewhere.

That’s not all. Apps sold through Amazon’s store will be locked with DRM to ensure that they only work on Amazon-approved devices – there’s currently no word on how devices will become approved and the firm can also pull apps for any reason. At the moment, Amazon’s store is only slated for the US, although there’s no reason why it would stay on the other side of the Atlantic if it became a success.

Verizon’s app store is less restrictive, with free entry to the program available, but the firm is planning to vet every app before it’s unleashed into the wild to ensure a base level of quality and, of course, it’ll only be available on phones using Verizon’s network. At the moment, though, no-one knows what restrictions Verizon will impose and how these will relate to the firm’s own interests. That goes for Amazon’s plans, too: would anyone be too surprised if a Kindle app rocketed to the top of the charts while competing eBook-reading apps mysteriously fell by the wayside?

Android enthusiasts, such as those who root their phones, already know that there are several places to use when downloading apps. The average consumer, though, won’t be so sure about what might look like sponsored links on their phone’s desktop. Introducing Amazon or Verizon-branded stores alongside the central Android Market will, at the very least, cause confusion. At its worst, it could look like crapware and remind consumers of Vodafone’s aborted app experiment earlier this year.

And what about developers? Previously, it’s been far easier to get your app onto Android than on iOS. While some will say that results in the Android market being flooded with crapware, no platform is exempt – and a few immature, largely pointless apps are a small price to pay for Android’s open and versatile nature, in comparison with Apple’s walled garden.

Let’s say, for arguments’ sake, that either or both of these new app stores gains a significant foothold in the market. Both could prove to be far more restrictive than the Android market, and could result in audience, revenue streams and developers divided between at least two stores on the same platform. In an area where few profit without selling hundreds of thousands of apps – and in a world where your major competitors are resolutely committed to their single, centralised app stores – that’s madness.

Android suffers from fragmentation in other areas, too. For all of HTC and Samsung’s efforts to overlay the vanilla interface with their own efforts, they’re not always successful – for every handset running HTC Sense there’s a Sony Ericsson Xperia x10, which came with its own unique frustrations. Even if they work well, these skins rarely bring anything new to the table, instead serving to promote and differentiate the company’s latest phone at the expense of Google’s software.

When both Apple and RIM both keep a tight grip on hardware and software, Android’s open-source origins seem like both a blessing and a curse: good hardware variety is countered by the increasing dilution of software by the growing number of app stores and skins introduced by companies looking to capitalise on Android’s success and claim it for their own.

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

The choice isn’t fantastic: my two favourite newspapers, The Times and The Guardian, aren’t available, but I could happily compromise on the Financial Times or The Independent.

The pricing doesn’t seem too outrageous, either.  £14 a month for The Independent and £18 for the Financial Times represents a healthy discount on the £1 and £2 per day cover price. Admittedly, you only get the plain text – no pictures, graphics or any of the fluff such as the crosswords, but I could live with that.

But just as I was preparing to unleash the credit card, I started reading the newspaper description pages. The Independent’s page says: “For your convenience, issues are automatically delivered wirelessly to your Kindle starting at 7:15am London local time.”  Ditto The Daily Telegraph. The Daily Mail, meanwhile, won’t start arriving until 8:30am (although it’s best not to read that before the pubs open, anyway). Only the FT gets out of bed at a reasonable hour, with its deliveries starting at 5am.

Why are the Kindle editions of the newspapers so tardy? I’m starting my commute by 7am most mornings. If The Independent and The Daily Mail can manage to write, sub, produce, print and distribute the physical newspapers to my local newsagent by 7am every morning, why on Earth can’t they strip out the text and send it to the Kindle by that hour?