For how humongous and detailed the worlds in Elder Scrolls games tend to be, it is continually impressive that the huge, detailed worlds are filled with many long, detailed books. Elder Scrolls players tend to become obsessed with the books, collecting them and arranging them on the bookshelves in their in-game housing, to the point where users have madd mods for past iterations of the franchise installments that make the book-arranging an easier process. The problem, though, with the long, detailed in-game books are that they’re long and detailed, and we have a world to explore and quests to complete.

Now, however, capane.us has compiled all of the in-game Skyrim books and made them available for you to read on the go, in both Kindle and Nook formats.

Several Kindle users have reported that after going through security at an airport, their Kindles have stopped functioning. As you might be able to expect, the culprit is none other than the x-ray scanners in security. “After my Kindle went through the X-ray scanner at Madrid airport, it no longer worked. I had been reading an e-book on the way to the airport so I knew there could be no other reason,” said affected user Michael Hart, from London. Now, many Kindles have made it through security unscathed, so this isn’t a rampant problem, but there is evidence to suggest that the security x-ray’s might be to blame.

It appears that the Kindle Touch 3G, despite having 3G right in its name, will only be able to surf the web with Wi-Fi. The 3G capacity can be used to sync books and browse Wikipedia, but anything aside from those two activities will require a Wi-Fi signal. The weirdest part of that limitation, however, is that a previous Kindle model, the Kindle Keyboard 3G had, and appears to retain that very feature.

The limitation came to light after a clarification was posted on the Amazon forums. While the Kindle Touch 3G’s website touts “free 3G wireless” which is technically true, it doesn’t say anything about the restriction. The post on the forums, however, makes it perfectly clear: The 3G is expressly for syncing books and looking at Wikipedia. The “experimental” web browsing present on the Kindle Keyboard is going to stay were it is.

The Internet has been buzzing about the possibility (the inevitability, really) of a new Kindle-branded Amazon tablet for a while. Now it’s finally here. Announced officially at an Amazon press conference this morning, the Kindle Fire is the newest addition to the Kindle family and brings some remarkably new functionality to the Kindle we’re familiar with, all for a competitive, come-at-me-iPad price of $199.

So, let’s break it down, the Kindle Fire is a touchpad. Although it only has two-finger touch support, it has touch support, which sort of elevates it to the big boy tablet arena. As for physical specs, the Kindle Fire operates on Android, weighs about 14.6 ounces and has a 7-inch touchscreen which clocks in at around 3 inches smaller than competitor iPad. Whether you see that last bit as an advantage or a flaw is matter of preference.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler is reporting that not only does Amazon have a tablet in the works, but that he’s held it in his hands. The new tablet is reported to be a full-color, 7-inch device with a capacative multi-touch screen that will be branded as a Kindle but will not have an e-ink display. Apparently, the device will have the shocking low price of $250 when it hits the shelves, and will be sold alongside existing black-and-white Kindles.

According to the article, though the device uses the Android operating system as a foundation, it has a custom-made Kindle OS built on top of that. Interestingly, impressions of the device seem to indicate that instead of competing with the iPad as a all-in-one device, the Kindle tablet will be deeply integrated into the services offered by Amazon. The Kindle Store will power book reading, the Amazon Cloud Player will play your music, and Amazon’s streaming video service will push your videos. The idea, it seems, is that the device be based primarily on the cloud and serve as a hand-held bridge to Amazon’s media services.

TechCrunch says that the device is slated for a November release. If true, this could have the potential to shake up the iPad hegemony in the tablet market.

(TechCrunch via Techmeme)

Apple, along with book publishers HarperCollins, Hachette, Mcmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster are now involved in a class-action lawsuit that accuses them of colluding to fix prices in order to hurt Amazon’s Kindle success. The lawsuit, being brought by a Seattle law firm, suggests that all the parties involved had reason to be afraid of Amazon’s pro-consumer pricing scheme for both its hardware and for eBooks.

The logic of the case goes something like this: Publishers were concerned about lost profits from the sale of Amazon’s eBooks, Apple was concerned that the Kindle could seriously damage the iPad’s viability as an eBook reader, and therefore, the two teamed up to fix prices to try and thwart Amazon’s eBook endeavors.

Amazon, the maker of the Kindle e-reader, has launched a textbook rental service for the device and its associated apps. According to Amazon, thousands of textbooks will be available for the 2011 school year from major  names in textbook publishing like John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier, and Taylor & Francis.

The Kindle textbook rentals can be customized for however long a student feels they’ll need the book, between 30-360 days. The price of the rental will increase the longer the book is rented. Rental time can also be extended if a student realizes they need the book longer than they thought. According to Amazon, renting e-textbooks instead of paying for paper copies could save students up to 80% off the list price of their books. However, the 80% figure is based on only a 30-day rental, and really, who uses a textbook for only one month out of a semester?

Project Gutenberg is essentially an archive of over 33,000 free eBooks that users can load onto most eBook readers. Magic Catalog, from Project Gutenberg, is a free program that acts as a middleman between eBooks and eBook readers, specifically Kindle and iBooks. The app contains links to the free eBooks offered by Project Gutenberg, which when selected, will load said free eBook into one’s Kindle or iBooks.

There is also a more roundabout way available to load eBooks into one’s reader using the program. From the Unofficial Apple Weblog:

If, for some reason, you’d prefer to download the books to your computer and transfer them to your iOS device (or if you already have .epub, .mobi, or other e-books on your computer), you can do so using iTunes. If you have the Kindle app installed, it will appear under the “File Sharing” section in the “apps” tab, and you can add books there.

You may notice that iBooks does not appear in the “File Sharing” section. To transfer books to iBooks, simply drag to the “Library” section of your iTunes library (see this page at Apple.com for more details).

Kindle and iBooks: When you are on the web page to download the book, you will not see the name of the book; you’ll see something like “pg23.mobi” followed by the size and a button to open the book in the Kindle app (or iBooks if you have the EPUB version). Once you open the book in the appropriate application, it will show the correct name.

Though Magic Catalog seems like a quick and convenient way to load free eBooks onto one’s reader, a few users claim that browsing through the many free eBooks is tedious, as Magic Catalog doesn’t quite have an organizational system in place as of yet.

(via The Unofficial Apple Weblog)

Amanda Hocking is already a millionaire author by the age of 26. No, she probably hasn’t written something you’ve seen on the bestseller shelf at Barnes & Noble. She’s made her millions by self-publishing Kindle eBooks, which she claims have sold over 900,000 copies since April 15 of last year. Due to Amazon’s seemingly generous policies, she gets to keep 70% of the profit. She also says that she has never be traditionally published, though a few of her books have foreign deals in place. Novelr explains:

Perhaps more importantly: a publisher on the private Reading2.0 mailing list has said, to effect: there is no traditional publisher in the world right now that can offer Amanda Hocking terms that are better than what she’s currently getting, right now on the Kindle store, all on her own.

Part of her strategy is that her eBooks cost anywhere from $0.99 to $2.99, prices so low that many people probably wouldn’t be too discriminating with their literary choices. It’s estimated that Hocking rakes in about two million dollars per year selling–you guessed it–paranormal romance novels, which includes a vampire series. From her Kindle page’s biography:

Amanda Hocking is a lifelong Minnesotan obsessed with John Hughes and Jim Henson. In between making collages and drinking too much Red Bull, she writes young adult urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

Her books may be young adult paranormal vampire romance, but do they include two hunky dudes who have sides on which we can choose to be? That’s obviously where it’s at.

(via My Blood Approves and Novelr via Business Insider via Gizmodo)

If you are honest, gentle reader, you probably have a rough list of books that you’ve been meaning to read for a long time. The kind of classic you pick up in a bookshop, the kind that makes you mull over how it would change your life until you remember that the latest Twilight/Dan Brown crossover novel has come out and skitter off to buy that instead.

But thanks to so many books passing into the public domain and the pioneering work of organizations like Project Gutenberg, more foundational works are available for free than ever before. And what’s more, the widespread use of e-readers like the iPhone, iPad, and Kindle mean that you can now read and store these books with ease and comfort.

Unfortunately, good, free books for e-readers are often tough to come by. The top free book list on Apple’s iBooks can be hit-and-miss; finding free books using the Kindle’s navigation is a laborious process, and again frequently includes more self-promoting teaser tomes from marketing gurus than it does books that you really want to read. Even if you have a specific classic in mind, the first search results are often ‘critical editions’ of the books which, while providing context and generally not costing as much as new releases, aren’t free. You clicked this link because it had ‘free’ in the title, right?