LIST: America's Most Well-Read Cities

Via Business Wire:

Amazon.com today announced its fifth annual list of the Most Well-Read Cities in America – just in time for summer reading season. The ranking was determined by compiling sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format from April 2014 to April 2015, on a per capita basis in cities with more than 500,000 residents. Seattle, Wash., the home of Amazon headquarters, not only purchased the most books overall but also purchased the most Kindle books, magazines, and newspapers. Washington, D.C. residents, ranked #5 overall on the list, prefer the print book, outranking Seattle as the city with the most purchases of print books. California is for readers with three cities making the top 20 list this year: San Francisco, San Diego, and San Jose.

The most-purchased book in seven of the above cities was Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

New JMG Mobile Interface Launches

We launched a new mobile interface for JMG today. Don't freak out if you don't like it - just hit the "desktop" button at the top and you'll be returned to the regular version. The new interface supports the following devices at this stage:

• iPad (Mobile Safari on iOS 5+, Chrome on iOS 5+)
• iPhone (Mobile Safari on iOS 5+, Chrome on iOS 5+)
• Nexus 7 (Google Chrome)
• Kindle Fire (Amazon Silk)

Other Android devices will be supported in the next couple of months. Just click on a photo or title to read each post. You can then swipe back and forth between the posts as you do with any mobile photo gallery. Hit the JMG logo to return to the home page and tap "add to home screen" to create a dedicated JMG button on your device. Everybody hates change, including me, but since you've got the option to stick with the old interface, I'm hoping there won't be too much screaming. But just in case, I'm putting my mandrake earmuffs on.

UPDATE:  Some important features have proven to be buggy or not working from the start. The provider is working to install some fixes and the interface will likely be up and down as they make changes. You'll continue to be able to access JMG on mobile devices the regular way while they do this. Sigh. I guess I was kidding myself that it would work like a dream right out of the gate, huh?

Open Thread Thursday

E-reader or "real" book?

One Million Moms Vs Amazon

What took them so long?

Dear Joe, Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite commercial promotes gay marriage. Instead of Amazon remaining neutral in the culture war while showcasing how their product has no glare even at the beach, they chose to promote sin. The commercial starts off with a guy and a girl sitting on the beach with their Kindles. At the end, the girl mentions her husband is getting her a drink, and the guy says, "So is mine." They both turn around to see their 'husbands' waiting for their drinks. Both men at the bar wave to their spouse. Homosexuality is wrong just like other sexual sins of heterosexual sex before marriage, adultery, and pornography, but Amazon has chosen to promote gay marriage in their advertisement. This ad has been airing during programs such as "American Idol" when children are likely watching. These commercials are airing nationwide and are damaging to the minds of young children and adolescents.

Their attached form letter demands that Amazon "pull this commercial immediately" or "at least" edit out the ending that reveals that the man is gay.

New Kindle Ad Is Gay-Inclusive

You know who ain't gonna like this!

(Tipped by JMG reader Bstewart23)

Amazon Readies New Kindles

Gizmodo notes that Amazon says it's all out of the Kindle Fire. For the moment.

Staples' U.S. retail chief Demos Parneros recently said Amazon was prepping "five or six" new tablets. What that likely means—if there's any basis to it at all—is several storage options in two different sizes. So theoretically, a 7-inch Kindle Fire with 8GB, another with 16GB, and another with 32GB, as well as a 10-inch Fire with those same configurations. In that same vein, there have also been murmurings of a 4G Kindle Fire. However, that intel comes by way of an analyst and well, analysts say a lot of crap that you'd think they dreamed and said out loud but they wish they hadn't. And while 4G has become table stakes for premium tablets in the last year, it's equally possible that Amazon will forego it to keep the price down.

I'd consider an e-reader but it's all I can do to lug my giant phone around.

Turn Off All Electronic Devices

But not because you'll crash the plane.

“The power coming off a Kindle is completely minuscule and can’t do anything to interfere with a plane,” said Jay Gandhi, chief executive of EMT Labs, after going over the results of the test. “It’s so low that it just isn’t sending out any real interference.” But one Kindle isn’t sending out a lot of electrical emissions. But surely a plane’s cabin with dozens or even hundreds will? That’s what both the F.A.A. and American Airlines asserted when I asked why pilots in the cockpit could use iPads, but the people back in coach could not. Yet that’s not right either. “Electromagnetic energy doesn’t add up like that. Five Kindles will not put off five times the energy that one Kindle would,” explained Kevin Bothmann, EMT Labs testing manager. “If it added up like that, people wouldn’t be able to go into offices, where there are dozens of computers, without wearing protective gear.”

Amazon Launches iPad-ish Kindle

Via Atlantic:

Tomorrow Amazon will unveil its answer to the iPad, reports TechCrunch's MG Seigler. "On Wednesday morning in New York City, Amazon will unveil the Kindle Fire. Yes, this is the name Amazon has settled on, to help differentiate the product from the e-ink Kindles, which will still be very much alive and for sale." With Amazon's online retail foothold, its tablet could present a threat to Apple's dominance--at least we think so.

Slightly smaller than the iPad, should retail for around $300.

Open Thread Thursday

Tell us how technology has changed your reading habits. Kindle? iPad? Internet-only? Dead trees? What are you reading right now and how are you reading it?

e-Books Outselling Print

For the first time, e-books outsold printed books at Amazon over the holidays.

eBooks, some of them free eBooks, outsold print books this Christmas. On December 26, Amazon announced that, for the first time ever, they had sold more eBooks than physical books on Christmas day. In an interview Jeff Bezos was also quoted as saying that he believes that the print book will eventually disappear. And how much money is Amazon making? How much money are authors and publishers making? When GalleyCat examined the Kindle Store bestsellers, they found that 64 of the 100 bestselling eBooks, the majority, were, in fact, free, including the number one bestseller, "Midnight in Madrid", by Noel Hynd.

I've never been one to save books to put them on display as proof of having read them, but I think I'll always prefer a physical book. How do you share a favorite e-book?

Kindle 2 Unveiled

Amazon is unveiling the second generation of its Kindle ebook device today. Details are sketchy at the moment, but CNET predicts a few changes.

What the final product will look like is unknown, but if a new Kindle is launched Monday it's easy to imagine it will be lighter, slimmer, and have an updated look. The original design was largely panned for being too bulky and having too many sharp edges, as well as an interface that wasn't as user-friendly as some had hoped. Even beyond that, there are a whole host of tweaks to the device consumers want to see in the next Kindle: wider support of file formats like PDF; a color screen; touch-screen capabilities like swiping to turn a page (as with Sony's Reader); and, more particularly, redesign of the "next page" button, which is located near the spot where many hold the device while reading.

Yahoo Finance is reporting that Amazon is also making its ebook titles available for mobile phones, as is Google.

Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said Friday that the Seattle-based online retailer is working on making Kindle books available "on a range of mobile phones." The company is not yet saying when the books will be available, or on which phones. Another e-book provider, Mobipocket, which is owned by Amazon, already sells titles that can be read on numerous smart phones. And on Thursday, Google Inc. announced that titles available from its Book Search service can now be read on Apple Inc.'s iPhone or a phone running its Android operating system. For now that would just be the G1, which is sold by T-Mobile.

The Kindle is currently selling for $359, but the device is frequently out of stock.

Kindle's Killer App?

Could textbooks be Kindle's killer app? I sure would have loved not to have to lug around a giant pile of over-sized textbooks. To say nothing of the their outrageous prices and the bother of selling them at the end of the term. On the other hand, I'm not so sure I'd be able to get a handle on flipping to the place in the book where I needed to be. Another downside: black and white photos and graphs.

Kindle Ignites

Hey, remember last year when we all laughed at the Kindle? Said e-books would never take off? Especially with such a fugly e-reader? Via CNET:

Calling it the iPod of the book business, CitiGroup analyst Mark Mahaney says the Kindle e-book reader will generate three-quarters of a billion dollars for Amazon.com in less than two years.

CNET thinks the analyst is being "more than a little optimistic", but still. Amazon is already selling around 200,000 of the $400 units a year and sales are apparently on track to hit 1 million units a year.

(Photo via Gizmodo)

Kindle Fails To Spark

Yesterday Amazon's Jeff Bezos launched Kindle, their new $400 e-reader that he claims will become the iPod of books. Previous e-readers have failed to catch on, but the Kindle, which can hold 200 books, does have some nifty features, including the ability to wirelessly download books, blogs, magazines (Time Magazine: $1.99/mo), and newspapers (New York Times: $13.99/mo.) New content is pushed onto the Kindle via a free network called "Whispernet". Once you've subscribed to a source, it automatically appears in your device.

Some have noted the product's name in reference to Ray Bradbury's famous novel about book burning, Fahrenheit 451, but Bezos claims the name is a reference to "rekindling" an interest in reading. Yeah, whatever. While reviews have been generally unkind, citing the device's lousy web browser among other issues, I can sorta see myself using a Kindle, as I am not a book saver - once I read something, I usually give it away shortly after. But with the Kindle's cost and limitations, I'm not that blown away. I wanted an MP3 player the minute they came out. For the Kindle, not so much.