For your weekend reading pleasure, here are the most popular AppNewser headlines of the week.

They include changes to airline device rules, the best iPhone apps for writers and a way to digitize everything you write (video embedded above).

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1. What Are the Best iPhone Apps for Writers?

2. EPad Femme Tablet Made Exclusively for Women Now Selling in Middle East

3. How to convert ePub Books for use on Kindle

4. Save Handwritten Notes on Your iPad Wirelessly & Instantly

5.  Tools To Use When Google Reader Dies

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

7. Websites Where You Can Download Free eBooks

8. How To Make a Homemade Stylus

9. Free eBooks of the Week

10. ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ to Publish F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Collection

Amazon announced plans to acquire Goodreads, the social network for readers, yesterday afternoon. Many people expressed disappointment about the news on Twitter. While Goodreads, assured fans that the team behind the community is not going away, for those of you looking for an alternative to the soon-to-be Amazon company, we’ve made a list of five other social networks for readers. We’ve included links and the site’s description to help give you an idea of what these various social networks for authors have to offer.

5 Alternatives to Goodreads

1. weRead: “weRead is your own online virtual bookshelf and a great community for book lovers. Whether you love classics or popular fiction; whether you love Dickens or Dan Brown; weRead is a place where you can find others who share your reading tastes and through them discover new books that you will absolutely love.” Read more

A recent survey by AT&T reveals that adults are the biggest violators of texting and driving. Nearly 49% of adults surveyed admitted to driving and texting compared to 43% of teenagers. Ironically, 98% of adults thinks that this behavior is unsafe.

John Ulczycki of the National Safety Council  states that, “Texting while driving is not just a teen problem. Teens text. But you’re looking at around 10 million teen drivers, but about 180 million other adult drivers.”

The bad news is, these numbers have been increasing. Of those that do text and drive, 60% said they never did it three years ago. Texting and using your smart devices can distract you for an average of 4.6 seconds – long enough to increase your crash risk by 23 times. Read more

Sapphire is the material used in bulletproof windows for military vehicles and Rolex watches, so why not mobile screens? If you have an iPhone 5, you are already seeing the genesis of the new technology in its camera lens.

Sapphire is only second to diamond in strength, and a screen made with sapphire can withstand scratches and dropping, making it a much more durable investment at a price. However, producers of man made sapphire project that the technology will become cheap enough to be used on high end smartphones in the next few years.

Currently, Gorilla glass costs much cheaper to use at $3 per phone compared to sapphire screens which costs $30 per phone. Sapphire optimists are projecting a $10 decrease in cost over the next few years which would make the material a lot more competitive, especially for phone users who want more resilient screens.

Amazon has released Version 8.3.0 of its Kindle Fire HD 8.9 software, adding support to Kindle Editions eBooks that feature audio and video.

Matt Cavnar, VP of business development, at Vook is excited about the update. “The move to support video and audio enhanced eBooks on the part of the marketplace leader demonstrates that enhanced ebooks are here to stay, that there is significant reader demand for video and audio enhanced ebooks (as we’ve learned first hand at Vook), and that the growing catalog of enhanced content has enough scale that it merits access to the Kindle family of devices,” he said via email.  Read more

Apple is no longer alone in the tablet business. Faced with competition, the company is tapping into iPad-love for its new marketing effort which aims to attract new customers.

iPad owners are passionate about their devices and Apple wants to get that message across to potential owners. To do so, the company has introduced a new page on its website titled, “Why you’ll love an iPad.”

Apple boasts on the page: “When iPad was introduced, there was nothing quite like it. And there still isn’t. Today millions of people are using iPad and iPad mini to do just about anything you can imagine. Here are a few reasons why they’re loving every minute of it.”

The page highlights all of the features of the device and points to a study by J.D. Power and Associates, in which Apple ranked “Highest in Customer Satisfaction Among Tablets.” (Via Apple Insider).

TabTimes and the Application Developers Alliance are accepting submissions for The Tabby Awards for consumer-focused tablet apps from now until April 15. The early bird discount ends today (March 29).

The contest will celebrate the top consumer apps in the world of tablets, exploring some of the best mobile content. Here’s more from the company:

The TABBY AWARDS competition is open to consumer applications written for the iOS, Android, and Windows 8 operating systems. The competition covers 27 categories including Entertainment, Games, Health & Fitness, Lifestyle, Music, News, Shopping, Social, Sports, and Video. A panel of experienced app developers, designers and publishers, as well as tech bloggers and journalists are being assembled to judge the competition.

Digital newsstand Zinio has plans for a new Windows 8 app. The company has formed a partnership with Nokia to launch its app exclusively on Nokia Lumia smartphones. The partnership will include special magazine promotions for Nokia Lumia customers.

The app has been optimized for the Windows Phone 8 platform on Lumia devices. One new feature in this app is that content from multiple sources will be in one place, so you don’t have to launch into a new magazine to read articles from different sources. It also includes a new preference picker so that users can curate their reading list by area of interest.

Michelle Bottomley, president of Zinio, stated, “Nokia Lumia smartphones with Windows Phone 8 were the perfect platform for Zinio to bring the future of digital magazine reading for discerning digital readers. We’ve rethought every portion of our smartphone reading experience to be as intuitive as possible, allowing digital readers to fully immerse themselves in the magazine content that connects them with their diverse interests.”

Goya: Masterpieces in Color by Francois Crastre is today’s Free eBook of the Day.

The book is a work about the great Spanish painter. Here is an excerpt:

Francisco José Goya y Lucientes, the poor son of farming folk of Saragossa, fulfilled the promises of his patron. He had talent; better yet, he had genius; he fraternized with princes and with kings, and the renown of his glory restored its lost dignity to the art of Spain and did honour to painting throughout the world.

Project Gutenberg has the free download.

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

Google has redesigned the compose and reply experience in Gmail making the overall experience a little bit faster and more sophisticated. To begin with, the compose redesign allows you to create an email in a box in the corner of your inbox and still see the messages that are coming in. The writing pane grows as your message grows and you can increase the size of your window if you want.

The recipients field has gotten more sophisticated. As before you can begin to type a name and email addresses from your contact list will begin to appear. Now you can drag and drop email addresses between the to, cc and bcc lines. You can also hover over the recipient’s email to see details about them, as well as double-click on them to edit their address. Read more