by Terrence O'Brien on September 29, 2009 at 04:25 PM

Is Disney trying to put the nail in the coffin of story time? It's not enough that adults have replaced actual paper books with e-readers like the Kindle, now Disney is trying to replace children's books (and parents) with laptops. A new service, called Disney Digital Books, lets kids read what are essentially advertisements for Disney films on a computer screen. There are 500 books from which ...
by Caleb Johnson on August 14, 2009 at 06:10 AM

Throw away those old, heavy textbooks, kids. But don't get too excited. There will still be plenty of studying, just in a less back-breaking way. With many school systems crunched for money, there's a move toward digital learning in the classroom. According to The New York Times, classrooms may be devoid of traditional textbooks within the next five years. As previously reported, California is ...
by Chad Mumm on May 5, 2009 at 10:48 AM

Amazon is hosting a press event in New York City on Wednesday, which means there's a new Kindle on the way. Our colleagues over at Engadget dug up some spy photos and basic specs of the new device, which is being called the Kindle DX. Improvements over the current Kindle 2 include a larger, 9.7-inch display, a built-in PDF reader, and the ability to add annotations (as well as notes, as before). ...
by Joseph L. Flatley on April 14, 2009 at 07:11 AM

You know how it is: Amazon refreshes the Kindle, makes some upgrades, and everybody's happy. Almost. It seems that a small but vocal minority is really, really not into the way that fonts are rendered on the new device. For real. Y'see, the newest iteration of the e-reader sports font smoothing algorithms and sixteen levels of gray (as opposed to four levels on the original). For sure, these ...
by Chris Ziegler on March 4, 2009 at 10:04 AM

Sure, Amazon could pit the Kindle squarely against phone- and PDA-based e-book apps, but why not play both sides? The company had previously mentioned its desire to embrace non-Kindle devices in its digital delivery ecosystem, and the first fruits of that labor have now hit the iPhone App Store. The uncreatively-named Kindle for iPhone allows you access to all of your Kindle content right from ...
by Darren Murph on January 17, 2009 at 11:37 AM

We're not exactly sure what this says about the officially unofficial App Store policy on explicit content, but David Carnoy's 'Knife Music' has just been approved for distribution in said marketplace after the so-called "objectionable content" was removed. Essentially, the author decided to submit a copy of the novel sans a few foul words, with him noting that it was "more important to have ...
by Laura June on December 10, 2008 at 01:23 PM

Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel has a long tradition of nurturing the literary-minded -- Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, even Harpo Marx hung out there in its heyday. Keeping up with the times, the folks running the Algonquin today apparently still have literature on their minds, and are offering Amazon's Kindle pre-loaded with a book of their choice for guests of the hotel during their stay. If ...
by Chris Ziegler on October 6, 2008 at 10:51 AM

So much for Amazon's attempts to quell Kindle 2 rumors, eh? Talk of a replacement (or a pair of replacements) for Amazon's popular -- but very oddly-styled -- e-reader has been in the mix seemingly since the first model started shipping, and Boy Genius Report has scored shots of something that certainly looks like it could be in the legitimate pipeline. The revised device appears to address ...
by Thomas Ricker on September 9, 2008 at 04:01 PM

var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Plastic_Logic_finally_ready_to_launch_flexible_e_newspaper'; Earlier this week, Plastic Logic showed off its new e-newspaper reader (name, undecided) for the first time. The black and white, E Ink device features a wireless link to download content, room enough to store "hundreds of pages of newspapers, books, and documents," and a display more than ...
by Nilay Patel on August 30, 2008 at 10:08 AM

Well, so much for those rumors of a thinner, cheaper, less 80s-hot Kindle coming soon -- Amazon spokesman Craig Berman told the New York Times today that there's nothing in store for this year, and that a new version won't happen before "sometime next year at the earliest." So much for that, unless there's some huge surprise in store -- looks like all you college kids are going to end up killing ...
by Terrence O'Brien on February 1, 2008 at 05:21 PM

For the few of you out there lucky (crazy) enough to have gotten your hands on the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, one feature may have perplexed you -- the headphone jack. Headphones would be pretty useless on a device that can't play back audio. But we expect an update soon to unlock that feature as Amazon has just snatched up the web's biggest audio-book retailer, Audible.
Amazon sells ...