Megatheriums for Breakfast

Just as I’d finished my survey of nine different e-reader apps for the iPad, here comes Amazon with another e-reader – the Kindle Cloud Reader.

Apple has recently been cracking down on iPhone and iPad apps selling content.  Basically, Apple wants a 30% cut of any revenue made through in-app purchases, a figure so high as to wipe out all of the profits of companies who are retailing such content, such as e-book retailers.  If they refuse to pay Apple that cut, Apple forces those retailers to remove, not only any mechanism for in-app purchases, not only any link to a web site where such purchases could be made, but even any mention of such a web site.  Personally, I think this is totally unreasonable. Read more…

Summary and Conclusions

It’s been quite exhausting looking at and writing about these nine e-reader applications, but now I’m ready to draw my thoughts together. I think my major conclusion is that there is no one perfect e-reader app, and further, that the best e-reader to use depends on what you are reading.

Read more…

Kindle App

It’s worth saying right from the start that I think it admirable that Amazon have made it possible to read books from their Kindle Store on so many different platforms, ranging from desktop PCs through to a wide range of mobile devices, including, of course, the iPad, which could be said to directly compete with their own Kindle device. I imagine that the reason is that Amazon make far more money from selling Kindle books than they do selling Kindle devices, so this just makes good business sense. Whatever the thinking, they have done a really good job with the Kindle iPad app. Read more…

Just a cross-reference here to say that I’ve launched a new blog dealing with digital publishing with particular emphasis on assisting Australian authors who are self-publishing their books through the Amazon Kindle Store, Smashwords and other outlets.

It’s called Digital Authors Australia, and you can find it here.