Publisher Quirk Books, the company behind the popular interactive eBook app Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, has partnered with Tapestry a digital storytelling app. This is the first time that the user generated storytelling app has partnered with a publisher.

As part of the partnership, Quirk Books is contributing 5 stories to Tapestry’s 2.0 relaunch including a William Shakespeare Star Wars mashup written by Ian Doescher.

Reading on the Tapestry app is not like reading on your run-of-the-mill eReader apps. The app lets users both create and read stories. Readers are encouraged to take the time to take it all in, as it is designed for readers to move the story forward but as the website explains, ”There’s no going back, so take your time—that’s the whole point.”

Reading on the device is designed specifically for the experience of touch screens. Here is more from the Tapestry blog: “Touch devices and Tapestry stories evoke emotions in a way other media cannot. It’s a medium that celebrates some of the most important aspects of storytelling: succinctness, pacing, and creativity.”

New York City is gearing up for any hurricanes that might come its way this year. The mayor’s office has begun installing free solar charging stations for smartphones around the city in a move to help make it easier for victims of a storm to charge up devices.

Reuters has more: “The Street Charge stations are New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest answer to flaws in infrastructure and operations exposed by the historic storm that ripped into the East Coast in October 2012 and left about 900,000 New York City dwellers and millions of others in the region without power.”

The city has installed 25 of these solar power stations paid for by AT&T. The stations will provide electricity to charge up phones and tablets even when the city’s power is out.

Should birdwatchers be able to use bird call apps? The question has caused a debate among birders.

Using apps like Chirp! Bird Songs USA, birdwatchers can instantly access an archive of countless bird sounds–getting very close to their subjects. National Geographic Daily News has more:

The trouble is, there’s a slippery slope leading toward harassment of rare and/or endangered birds and, in the worst case, genuine interference with their nesting success. And the slope got a lot steeper with the proliferation of smartphones and birdsong apps … a number of bad things could happen when a birder plays a song to attract a bird. Momentarily distracted, the bird could be snatched up by a predatory hawk (this has been witnessed a number of times by distraught birders).

OpenAirplane launched a new service for plane rentals – so get your wings ready! To borrow an airplane, you’ll have to take a flight test, but that means you’ll be able to rent from any of their locations: New York, LA, Chicago, San Jose, Kissimmee, or Detroit. Your flight credentials lets you reserve an airplane online or with the OpenAirplane app.

Co-Founder Rod Rakic told Mashable:

My co-founder and I are both pilots, we’ve both been renters. We know it kind of sucks that when you leave your home base, your pilot certificate and your credentials turn off, because when you don’t have rental privileges, it takes half a day and hundreds of dollars to turn those credentials back on.

Read more

Aetna is launching an app to help its customers stay fit and healthy. The app, Carepass, gives users access to a number of different healthy options including tips on how to reach your weight goal, data integration from fitness devices like Fitbit, or find local doctors using a quick diagnosis through Aetna-owned iTriage.

According to Mobihealthnews, the number of partner apps at launch was staggering:

MapMyFitness, LoseIt, RunKeeper, Fooducate, Jawbone, Fitbit, fatsecret, Withings, breathresearch (makers of MyBreath), Zipongo, BodyMedia, Active, Goodchime!, MoxieFit, Passage, FitSync, FitBug, BettrLife, Thryve, SparkPeople, HealthSpark, NetPulse, Earndit, FoodEssentials, Personal.com, Healthline, and GoodRx.

Read more

What’s the Riddle? joins the top free iPhone apps list this week at No. 1, according to research from AppData. The gaming app from Rainy Day games challenges players to solve riddles.

Below, we’ve listed the top free iPhone apps of the week. The list links to Inside Network’s research about the individual apps, including historical charts, developer information and download information.

To support Mediabistro’s Media App Summit, we spotlight the top free apps every week–helping our readers discover, enjoy and analyze successful content. Read more

Facebook may add video to Instagram on June 20th, according to a report on TechCrunch. Facebook is holding a press conference on Thursday and the  technology blog apparently received a tipoff that the social network will use the event to debut Instagram video.

Here is more from the blog:

We are still looking for more information because we understand that Facebook has not wanted the details of June 20 to leak out — so this could be an intentional blind alley. But if the Instagram video report is true, you could say the event invite itself — sent by snail mail, coffee cup stain charmingly in one corner — is a red herring of its own.

There are plenty of other video sharing apps already available such as Viddy, Socialcam and Twitter’s Vine.

While you may be used to reading a user review of a book or a pair of shoes, you probably haven’t read a review of a guy before.

Well, now you can. Lulu is a app that lets women write reviews of guys on Facebook that they have dated and share dating tips with their friends. Women can judge these guys on a number of attributes including their personality, their sense of humor and even how they kiss.

Mashable has more details:

Founder Alexandra Chong launched the app in February, but what she describes as “Yelp for boys” has roused some of the male population, who are irked that they can’t log on directly to see what women are saying about them. Guys who want to opt out of the service must send a letter requesting removal to privacy@onlulu.com with a screenshot of their profile, or download a separate app, Lulu Dude, to manage or deactivate their profiles.

What do you think about this app?

Marked for Vengeance (Book One: The Alyx Rayer Chronicles) by SJ Pierce  is today’s Free eBook of the Day.

The story is a paranormal romance. Check it out:

During the initial, routine stake-out of her Marked, a dream prophet named Isaac Walsh, Alyx is thrown for an emotional loop when his allure captivates her heart from two rooftops away. The event marks the very instance when her sense of what’s right and what’s wrong is brutally challenged as her contact with him is strictly forbidden.

Amazon has the free download through June 21st.

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

Struggling to convert your Microsoft Word document from .DOCX format to a digital book format?

The free eBook creation and editing tool Calibre has been updated with some helpful tools. You can download Calibre at this link. The 0.9.35 Update contains a host of fixes to help writers converting Microsoft Word documents into eBooks. Check it out:

DOCX Input: Add a markup analyzer that identifies and removes redundant markup generated by Word. This can result in much cleaner HTML and reductions in markup size of up to 50% … Bug Fixes … DOCX Input: Add support for theme fonts. DOCX Input: Fix some manual page breaks being ignored DOCX Input: Fix empty paragraphs not being rendered. DOCX Input: Fix some text being underlined incorrectly. The ‘none’ underline style was being translated incorrectly.