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?

Kindle users have long complained that e-reader esoterica like “Location 4483-4591 of 10022″ are not exactly helpful when one is writing a bibliography or trying to find a passage in a real-life book, and while it has taken a while, Amazon has finally remedied this in the latest Kindle firmware update.

Wired’s Charlie Sorrel explains how it works:

Amazon seems to have solved the problem of transferring numbers from physical, fixed-sized pages to the virtual page, where changing font-sizes alter the number of “pages” a book has. The fix is clever: The Kindle only displays the page-number when you press the “menu” button, working out the equivalent paper-book position on-demand. And because the Kindle pages don’t correspond exactly to the printed page, it tells you the page number for the text at the top right of the screen i.e.. the first few words.

Kindle Software Update, which is available for download now and will soon download automatically to Kindles with Internet connections, contains a few additional upgrades, including public notes, better magazine and newspaper layout, and something called “Before You Go …” (“When you reach the end of the book, you can immediately rate the book, share a message about the book with your social network, get personalized recommendations for what to read next, and see more books by the same author”).

(via Wired)

Amazon released its quarterly report for the end of last year and says that for every 100 books sold on its site, it sells 115 Kindle ebooks. This doesn’t include the ebooks that are offered for free (seriously — free books!), and if it did, the report said the numbers would be pretty huge. Has Kindle created more readers out of people who didn’t previously read now that it’s available on iPads, phones, computers, and, of course, the Kindle?

As announced in October, Amazon.com has quietly started implementing a new feature that allows Kindle users to “lend” their e-books to other Kindle users. The only catch is that unlike Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the ability to lend e-books will depend entirely on the book’s publisher. If the publisher has allowed lending, the option will appear in the Amazon listing (as pictured above) and, when loaned, will be unavailable in the original user’s collection for 14 days, and if the feature remains the same as announced this fall, a user will only be able to loan each of their books to anyone once… for really no earthly technological reason.

(via Wired)

This morning, Amazon announced that they sold a record-breaking 158 items per second on Cyber Monday, which is the Monday after Black Friday. The 158 items per second totaled 13.7 million items ordered worldwide. Amazon also announced that the new third-generation Kindle has become the best-selling item in Amazon’s history, beating out Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Amazon has had a rocky history with censorship and apparent censorship. There was the time that they took a great number of books regarding homosexuality out of their sales ranking system, flagging them “Adult content” without regard to their actual sexual content (included were “children’s books, self-help books, non-fiction, and non-explicit fiction“). And there was the time that they caved to public pressure and stopped selling a book on pedophilia, while maintaining that despite their actions they did not condone censorship.

Now, Amazon.com appears to have pulled a number of self-published fictional erotica titles from its virtual shelves because they are incest-themed. Not only have they pulled them from sale, they have also deleted them from the Kindles of any user who purchased them. This has gone largely unnoticed, except, of course, by the authors and readers of the books.

The biggest problem with this, if it is true, is that Amazon just finished a lawsuit last year where it agreed, in legally binding terms, that deletions would only occur because of “failed credit card transactions, judicial orders, malware, or the permission of the user.”

Owners of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader have long clamored for the ability to lend each other e-books, making them more like, you know, actual books. And Amazon has been listening: In a post on Amazon’s Kindle Community forums, the Kindle team has announced that sometime later this year, Kindle book lending will become a reality. Though that reality probably will not make the anti-DRM set especially happy.

How Dangerous is Image File Metadata? (The Assurer)

Playboy’s Most Scandalous Fiction (Flavorwire)

12 Questions About the DC Move (The Comics Reporter)

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Gives 100 Mil to NJ Schools (Google News)

Scrabble on the Kindle. …Scrindle. Krabble? (Wired)

A Chemist and A 3-Year-Old (Science Creative Quarterly)

Reddit Quietly Booms (The Awl)

(pic via Reddit user Schizocat.)