For your weekend reading pleasure, here are the most popular AppNewser headlines of the week, including our blog’s expansion, a new Moleskine partnership and a fake iPhone 5 commercial (video embedded above).

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1. How to convert ePub Books for use on Kindle

2. iPhone 5 Coming September 21st?

3. Moleskine & Evernote Create a Smart Notebook

4. Free eBooks of the Week

5. iPads & Kindles May Soon Be Allowed During Take Off

6. New Kindle Fire Photos Leaked Online

7. How To Sync iBooks Between Your iPhone And Your iPad

8. Tools to Combat eBook Piracy

9. How to Make a Homemade Stylus

10. This iPhone 5 Commercial Will Have You Drooling

Shopping in big box stores can give you a headache if you just want to run in and pick up a couple of things without spending the day navigating those long corridors looking for items.

To help shoppers make their way through the store, retailers like Home Depot, Walgreens and Wal-Mart have added a new function to their apps that let you search for an item in the store and locate the aisle number for the item.

USA Today has more: “In a store, ‘I can talk to an associate, but I can’t search for a two-sided tape,’ says Gibu Thomas, Walmart head of mobile and digital. ‘Mobile brings the (online store) to the store.’ Within two weeks of Walmart’s May launch of the ‘In-Store’ mode in its app, about 15% of page views were from shoppers in stores.”

The rumored launch of the new Kindle Fire is only 6 days away, and in spite of the leaked images we don’t really know much about it yet. But according to Reuters the new Kindle Fire is going to have location capabilities, so it will be able offer directions and ads based on your current location.

But most importantly, Amazon didn’t go with either Open Street Maps or Google Maps. Instead the retail giant teamed with Nokia, and according to sources the KF’s mapping ability will be provided in partnership with Nokia.

The exact details of the deal haven’t been explained, and that tends to make me doubt this rumor. While Nokia makes smartphones of all sorts, they don’t strike me as the company who would provide this single service for the Kindle Fire. To me it feels like there’s either more or less to the story than we are being told, and until the new Kindle Fire is launched we won’t know which option is the real one.

In any case, I’m looking forward to Thursday. All will be revealed then.

via Reuters

Kali: The Ghosting of Sepulcher Bay by Eric Griffith is today’s Free eBook of the Day. The book is a haunting urban fantasy set in modern times.

Check out the book’s description: “Kaliope ‘Kali’ Stergakos is dealing with divorced parents, a crush on a boy her best friend also adores, and spirits of the dead talking to her all the time. Even worse, they take over Kali’s body when she sleeps. Despite growing up in a suburban necropolis where the dead outnumber the living, this possession stuff never happens to anyone else.”

Amazon has the eBook available for free until Saturday September 1st.

For more free eBooks, check out our Free eBook of the Day archive.

For something that has not yet been seen in public, the iPad Mini is probably the single most talked about device ever. And now even the legitimate business news sites are getting into the act.

Bloomberg now has multiple sources telling them that the new ipad Mini is going to debut next month.

Apple will use screens from AU Optronics and LG Display for a smaller version of the iPad to be released in October, according to four people familiar with the plans.

That’s about all Bloomberg can tell us today, but just for the sake of being told no they also asked the rps for the various rumored parts suppliers for comment, and none were willing to say anything.

While I’m pretty certain that this is a solid rumor, I’m almost looking forward to the possibility it might not be true. Many, many, many bloggers and analysts are focused on the certainty that this device exists and is coming next month.

If it doesn’t then the size and magnitude of the collective error will be the greatest since the housing bubble, when far too many people invested far too much money in over-priced real estate.

Amazon put out a press release today announcing that “customers have downloaded hundreds of millions of apps and games from the Amazon Appstore.” Earlier this week Amazon opened up its App Store in Europe. This news comes as Amazon is expected to announce new Kindle Fire devices at a press conference on September 6th.

Yesterday, the online giant reported that they sold out of Kindle Fires, without any mention of restocking. Yesterday, The Verge leaked images of what the devices will supposedly look like.

Rumors have been circulating all summer that Amazon is coming out with a number of new Kindle Fire devices in different sizes.

Novelist Alan Goldsher has a new virtual talk show dedicated to books, thanks to technology from Shindig.com. Shindig.com is a NYC-based start-up that offers video chat tools that let users create large events online designed to function like physical events.

Goldsher’s interactive virtual event is called Book It. Essentially a talk show about books and publishing, the show will let virtual listeners participate as a live audience by asking questions to the author during a Q&A session. Like a physical event, seating is limited to the first 1,000 guests who register online. Viewers must register for each individual show. Follow this link to register. The shows will be archived after they have aired.

The show launches on Thursday September 6th and will run on the occasional Thursday through January 2013. Guests who are scheduled to appear on the show include actor/comedian Kevin Pollak, Time magazine’s Joel Stein, and authors Adam Mansbach and Jonathan Maberry.

Apple’s free app this week is Extreme Skater HD.

This is one of those games where the developers eschewed usual button style controls in favor of using the iPad’s accelerometer. You control the player by tilting the iPad left and right, and for some moves you’ll also need to swipe the screen. Read more

IBM engineers spent 4 years and countless millions of dollars building Watson, a supercomputer which could win Jeopardy!, and now those same engineers are working on shoehorning Watson into a smartphone.

SFGate is reporting that IBM is working on a new version of Watson. Watson 2.0 is part of IBM’s plan to tap new markets and boost revenue in business analytics.  The new Watson is going to have sufficiently low CPU and power requirements that it will be able to run on tablets and smartphones. Read more

As much as you might like Apple’s well-designed products, trust me you aren’t as infatuated as David Wu.

This software developer has spent the last 3 months turning his home office into the next best thing to an Apple store. He’s even gone so far as to have a table custom made in the pattern of the iconic Fetzer Maple Wood Desk which Apple uses to show off its wares. He also has a black custom Apple pillar with a light up Apple logo and a built-in LCD screen as well as a a bookshelf to show off all the Apple products he purchased over the years.

There’s a number of photos over on David’s website, and this one doesn’t do justice to all his hard work.

via David Wu