For your weekend reading pleasure, here are the most popular AppNewser headlines of the week, including our blog’s expansion, an Instagram camera and the best iPad stylus.

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1. Best iPad Stylus for Writers
2. How to Convert EPub Books for use on Kindle
3. What is an App?
4. Free eBooks of the Week
5. Instagram Inspires Real Life Camera
6. Sesame Street to Release Digital Comics
7. Kit Kat App Designed To Give Users A “Break” From Social Media
8. App Toolbox for Wedding Planning
9. Siri Says: Don’t Buy an iPhone
10. Free apps of the week

A friend tweeted me a link to this app. It’s so useful that I couldn’t help but pass it along.

If you’ve spent any serious amount of time in a bookstore then you are probably familiar with the pain of having to tilt your head sideways to read the spines. This app can help with that. ShelfLook uses the camera on a late model iPhone to take a picture and then rotate the picture 90 degrees to the left. This incredibly simple trick is intended to help you avoid getting that crick in your neck.

You can find this app in iTunes for under a buck.  In my opinion that is overpriced; I’m sure there are free camera apps that can accomplish the same thing.

iTunes

U.S. trade publishers are seeing huge growth in English language eBook sales to other countries. According to a new report from the Association of American Publishers, eBook net sales revenue for 2011 was $21.5 million, which was up 332.6% from 2010. The press release explains more: “…this represents 3.4 million eBook units sold in 2011, up 303.3 %. As comparison, print formats (Hardcover, Paperback and Mass Market Paperback) increased 2.3% to $335.9 million in 2011.” In 2011, eBook sales grew 218.8% in Continental Europe, 1316.8% in the UK, 201.6% in Latin America and 636.8% in Africa.

Overall, U.S. publishers earned a net sales revenue of $357.4 million from export sales in 2011, for both print and eBook titles. This was a 7.2% increase from $333.3 million the net sales revenue earned in 2010.

As the Facebook IPO launched today, with the share price trading between $38 and $42 in the first few hours on the stock market.

While the app market is booming, some fear that we are nearing another tech bubble. Every week we will keep track of tech bubble predictions as we cover this space. Today’s feature comes from The Huffington Post business section, where they are keeping a “Tech Bubble Death Watch” over the industry.

What do you think? The post worried about the future of Facebook: “Its revenue growth is slowing. It hasn’t quite figured out how this whole “cell phone” thing works yet. Advertisers aren’t too sure they can make money buying ads on Facebook, the New York Times writes. One, General Motors, has already pulled its ads. Insiders will be dumping shares in an unusually big way at the IPO. Some 57 percent of the shares that will be available to the public will come from investors who bought the company early and are cashing in on the IPO, writes the Wall Street Journal — a high percentage for any IPO, particularly for a tech IPO.”

Read more

The Android version of the Pocket reading app got an update earlier this week and it’s definitely worth a new look. In addition to bug fixes, subtle tweaks, and improvements to a couple reading themes, the app now supports faux page turns.

I don’t care for them myself, but a lot of readers value the feature. When Instapaper added this in an update a week or so back, it got a lot of attention. It seems that readers want to recreate the experience of reading in a paper book.

The update also adds a larger font size as well as new support additional video sites, including TED, Khan Academy and Devour. You can find the app on Google Play.

The Liberty Times, a Taiwanese newspaper, added a rumor to the growing iPad Mini frenzy earlier this week. According to their sources, 2 different screen manufacturers have been tapped to provide displays for Apple’s rumored smaller iPad. Their report also says Radiant is going to supply the backlight module.

Their list of suppliers is quite extensive, more so than this reporter can verify. That gives this rumor the weight of being either true or an elaborate hoax, and I lean towards the former. The iPad Mini is also said to be scheduled to begin shipping by the end of the third quarter of this year, but no retail price has been suggested.

On a related note, there’s new speculation from some quarters that the screen on the iPad Mini will be 7″, not 7.85″. According to the more fanatical believers, that larger dimension is the size of the entire ipad Mini from corner to corner, not the screen. If true it would make the production rumors that much more plausible. It’s not clear that anyone makes a 7.85″ screen, so there’s not much of a chance that it could be used in the iPad Mini.

via

The Weather Channel has had a cool iPhone app since apps first came out, and now the media company has evolved the app to “be more local, social and relevant than ever.”

The upgraded app includes a new home screen, the ability to save your favorite locations, and the ability to add and share photos directly from the iPhone. Want to share photos of a storm? You can post them on TWC’s social network iWitness or directly to Facebook and Twitter. Here is more from TWC’s app page: “iPhone address book integration lets you share weather information via email with anyone. Stay in touch with worldwide video forecasts from The Weather Channel meteorologists.” We’ve embedded a demo video of the new features above.

According to AppData, the app has been the No. 1 app in the free weather apps genre for the past year.

Discovering great apps can be a challenge to users who have to navigate through many crappy apps to find ones that they like.

To help address this problem, Appsfire, a community site for apps, has created the Appsfire App Score, a quality score given to apps. The idea is to help users determine if an app is worth downloading.

The Appsfire blog explains how it works: “App Score is a dynamic score which processes dozens of parameters several times a day across all the apps in the iOS App Store. The App Score for a particular app goes beyond the current ratings, rankings and reviews for that app; it also analyzes the rating and ranking performance over time, incorporates additional metadata and reviews for that app across the web, identifies apps engaging in suspicious rating/review behavior in the App Store, and synthesizes the publisher’s record across all of his or her apps.”

Via GigaOm.

With Instagram you can share photos. With SoundCloud, you can share audio recordings. With StoryMark, you can share both. StoryMark is a new iPhone app that lets users record audio tracks to go with photos and then share them with their friends.

“People take photos to document a place and time but the story that goes along with the photo is usually only kept in the mind of the photo taker and those involved,” Dale McIntyre, president and co-founder of StoryMark told AppNewser. “Letting people share a story with audio not only truly adds the story to the photo but it also lends emotion with the sound of a voice that can be enjoyed for generations to come.” Read more

If you’ve ever wanted more out of the home screen on your Android tablet then I have a Kickstarter project for you. Chameleon is a 4 month old work in progress that aims to replace the bland home screen currently found on most Android tablets with a more information rich design.

Asssuming it gets funded, Chameleon is going to enable you to build multiple different home screens which will show you the info you need most right at that moment. You might have different screens for work, home, your morning news binge, and more.You can watch this video for more details: Read more