Is Amazon compromising your right to privacy?

It always used to baffle me when people would vehemently oppose the government’s ability to look up records of books you’d taken out at the local library. What could they possibly glean from such mundane information, I worried, and how could reading anything you find at your local library be used to implicate you? It’s not as though they have diagrams on how to build pipe bombs sitting right... [Read more]

Amazon Earnings Report- State of the Kindle Address

What better time of year to address the state of the Kindle than in the wake of the President’s State of the Union address? Amazon recently announced their earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2009, and the results were overwhelmingly positive. Is that success sustainable? According to their statements, fourth-quarter profits were up 71 percent over this period last year. While much of that... [Read more]

A Student’s Guide to Kindle Notes & Marks

One of the most underrated features of Amazon’s Kindle is the ability to highlight passages of text to save for later. If you’ve never done it before, just use the five-way joystick up or down when on a given page of a book and click it in at the beginning of your passage, scroll to the end of the text you want, and click it again. You can even type out your own notes and commentary by just tapping... [Read more]

Amazon Enlists Developers for Kindle Games

With the January 27th debut of Apple’s long-rumored tablet PC right around the corner, I think some people are starting to look back at Amazon’s Kindle and wonder… What’s so special about that? It’s just an e-Reader! Of course, for those of us who purchased our Kindles just for the pleasure of reading books, that seems like a nonsensical statement, but it’s a question that’s asked nonetheless. We’ve... [Read more]

Bible Reading on the Kindle Revisited

One of our most popular posts here at KindleChat is an old one we did over two years ago on the state of the Bible on Amazon’s e-Reader. As it turns out, there are loads of people out there who see their Kindle as a way to keep in close contact with scripture on top of their favorite classics and best-sellers. Things have changed for the better since then, so we thought we’d give you a long-overdue... [Read more]

The Sorry State of Kindle Text-to-Speech

The Amazon Kindle was once again in headlines this week, and this time, it wasn’t in an especially flattering light. No, instead of any mentions of the latest developments at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Kindle was guilty by association in a lawsuit filed by the National Federation of the Blind and American Council of the Blind against Arizona State University for discrimination... [Read more]

CES e-Reader Roundup 2010

We knew we could feel the winds of change coming, but I don’t know if anybody was really prepared for the sheer deluge of new e-Readers that are poised to flood the market in 2010. We’ve already touched on the rumored Apple iSlate, and Heart’s Skiff caught our attention just the other day. With the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas kicking into gear Thursday, I suppose it was inevitable... [Read more]

Hearst’s Skiff to Pioneer e-Reader Advertising

In anticipation of the Consumer Electronics Show, which runs from January 7-10, the magazine publisher Hearst has taken the wraps of their own new entrant into the e-Reader club. Called the Skiff, it has a similar form factor to Amazon’s Kindle DX, presumably to offer the most possible screen room to display Heart’s content as it might appear in an actual magazine. And of course sports the now-obligatory... [Read more]

Temptation, Thy Name is Apple iSlate

It didn’t take very long, but the word on the internet grapevine is that the long-awaited Apple e-Reader is practically at our doorstep, promising early fulfillment of one of our Top 5 predictions for 2010. The consensus name for the device is iSlate, a conjecture based on Apple’s registration of the domain name islate.com as far back as 2007. The iSlate reportedly sizes up to about 10 inches across,... [Read more]

Amazon Defends Against Kindle DRM Hacks

For better or worse, the books you buy for your Kindle via Amazon exist only in places that receive Amazon’s express consent. They utilize digital rights management (DRM) technology to make sure that your Kindle books stay on your Kindle, or at least in the Kindle App on your iPhone or Blackberry. Sites like Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks, by contrast, offer a plethora of public domain titles that... [Read more]