Tag: READING

Lendle, an e-book sharing site that launched this week, allows Amazon users to borrow and lend select Kindle e-books, of which 821 are currently available, for two-week periods. All you need is at least one of the free Kindle apps for Mac, PC, iOS or Android (or a Kindle, itself). Besides that, you'll need an Amazon account and a willingness to share with others. Just make sure you return the ...

E-book reading platforms are a dime a dozen these days. (Don't believe us? Just do a search in the Android Market or iTunes App Store for "e-reader" or "books.") But Copia -- a new e-reading app/store/community -- stood out when it was announced at CES almost a year ago, thanks to the deeply social reading experience it provides. In addition to syncing your spot in a book, taking notes and ...

Share As frivolous as new gadgets can often seem, the iPad has served a higher purpose in the Cain-Goldstein household of Brooklyn, where 7-year-old Owen, whose body has been long debilitated by a motor-neuron disease, is now reading books on his own. Watching as her son flipped through the pages of 'Alice in Wonderland' for the first time, Ellen Goldstein cried, "That is completely wonderful." ...

In the age of 140-character tweets and bite-sized blog posts, Mark Armstrong found it increasingly difficult to locate lengthy articles to read during extended periods of downtime. So, he created the Longreads Twitter feed, where similarly inclined followers could submit and share meatier online pieces among themselves. Armstrong clearly wasn't the only one looking for long-form pieces, either. ...

If you give a kid a Kindle, she's going to ask for more fun books. A study commissioned by Scholastic -- the publisher of the 'Goosebumps' and 'Harry Potter' series -- found that 57-percent of kids aged 9 to 17 were interested in reading on electronic devices. Their parents, however, believe that using electronic devices of any kind limits the amount of time they would actually read, do ...

Wired's Jonah Lehrer recently spoke to neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, who explained that our brain uses two processes to interpret the written word: the "ventral route" for fast reads, and the "dorsal stream" for difficult verbiage. Cohort Tim Carmody then weighed in, wondering about Lehrer's analysis and why ventral-oriented e-readers won't be mediums for avant garde texts. What will the ...

When Stephen Fry was putting together an e-reader version of his new autobiography, 'The Fry Chronicles,' he could've gone the traditional route, slapped his text onto an iPad app, added a few graphics, and/or garnished his book with a Hugh Laurie voice-over narration. Instead, he decided to reinvent the narrative wheel. Literally. Available for iPod touch, iPhone and iPad, Fry's new 'myFry' ...

The book business is changing, or better yet, it has changed. Kindles are outselling hardcover books for crying out loud! The next step, sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson hopes, could be using an online platform to sell digital books with material contributed by a team of writers and readers. According to Venture Beat, Stephenson launched the first installment of a serialized digital story called, ...

As print journalism continues to die a slow death, consumers are flocking to the Internet to get their news. According to a recent study, though, people are still having a hard time trusting what they read online. A report from the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California finds that more than 75-percent of users rank the Internet as the most important source of ...

The Kindle may be facing stiff e-reader competition from Apple's iPad, but, when it comes to printed books, at least, Amazon's reader seems to be dominating the market pretty handily. The company says it sold approximately 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books sold over the past three months, and that gap is continuing to widen. Last month alone, for example, Amazon sold 180 Kindle books ...

Do people read e-books more slowly than printed ones? A small survey by Nielsen Norman Group alleges that we may process digital words at a lazier pace than we do those on the page, but, when further analyzed, the results of the survey raise questions about the participants themselves. A group of 24 volunteers "who like reading and frequently read books" were asked to read Hemingway short ...

As companies wage the e-reader war, there's a segment of the population that's being left out: kids. But learning company VTech is reaching out to youngsters with an e-reader specifically designed for little eyes and grubby hands. According to The New York Times, the V.Reader is a touchscreen tablet/e-reader targeted to kids aged 3- to 7-years-old. So, while Mommy or Daddy read the latest ...

The iPad could be causing restless nights for many who use it to read e-books before lights out. According to the Los Angeles Times, the light that's emitted from the iPad's screen inhibits the release of melatonin, a chemical that tells your body to wind down for the evening. This holds true for any device that emits unnatural light -- be it a TV or a cell phone. But Frisca Yan-Go, director of ...

The Kindle is rapidly changing how we read. However, as Paul Lamere points out on his blog, book publishers and even Amazon aren't taking a close enough look at how e-readers are changing the industry. Ironically, the data is right in front of their faces, too, thanks to the Kindle software's Whispersync feature. For the reader, Whispersync is an electronic bookmark. It keeps track of where ...

Hey, Google Books, get a load of this! Masatoshi Ishikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo, has developed a system that can scan books simply by flipping pages under its camera eye. Professor Ishikawa claims that a 200-page book could be rendered by the machine in under a minute. Details are a bit scarce (and the dear professor's accent rather thick), so you'll just have to watch the ...