eBooks

Chicago-based automotive journalist Jim Gorzelany has taken his expertise and packaged it up into what he says is the first new car reference guide created specifically for Amazon's Kindle device and iPhones with the free Kindle Reader software installed.

The Automotive Intelligentsia 2009-2010 Sports Car Guide covers more than 50 sports cars with sticker prices ranging from $20,000 for us everyday folk to $2 million for that rare breed of consumer with a whole lotta extra pocket cash.

Gorzelany pulled together profiles that detail each model's "heart-pounding performance," advanced technology, heritage, photos and specifications.

Future entries in the Automotive Intelligentsia series will include guides to economy cars, family cars and luxury cars as well as the first e-book new car pricing guide for the 2010 model year designed for the Kindle.

The sports car guide is available for $5.59 from the Amazon Kindle store.

Amazon.com's new Kindle reader application for the iPhone is certainly the most publicized e-reader for the device, but it's not even close to being the first.

For e-book fans looking for reading material not available in the Kindle format - or just wondering what other options there are for turning the iPhone into a reading device, Macworld has put together a list of what it considers the "most relevant reading apps" currently available for the iPhone.

The list: Stanza (free); Instapaper (free; $10 pro version); Classics $3); eReader (free); iFlow-based books (various), BookShelf ($6) and Amazon's Kindle for iPhone (free).

You can read the good, the bad and the ugly about all the contenders here.

Hot on the heels of the Kindle 2, Amazon.com has released a Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Amazon says that the free app is so Kindle owners can start reading a book on their iPhone and pick up where they left off on their Kindle or Kindle 2 or read a page or two while waiting for a meeting to start, while standing in line at the grocery store or other places where it would be inconvenient to use the Kindle.

The app uses Amazon's new Whispersync technology to save and sync your bookmark across the Kindle, Kindle 2, iPhone and iPod touch so you never lose your place regardless of device.

With Kindle for iPhone, you can shop for books on a Kindle or online at Amazon and wirelessly transfer them to the Apple device, access your full library of previously purchased Kindle books, adjust the text size and add bookmarks.

Amazon has more than 240,000 books, newspapers and magazine available for the Kindle.

OnPoint Digital, an e-learning and mobile solutions provider, has gone live with its CellCast Mobile Library. The company partnered with several publishers of business-oriented e-books and launched the mobile library with more than 500 titles.

The CellCast Mobile Library offers its content in a variety of formats, including streaming video, podcasts, animated slide presentations and in-phone audio. The library is organized into topics such as sales and marketing, management and leadership, computing and communications, change and innovation, personal effectiveness, human resources and some industry-specific categories.

Users can browse, preview and purchase content online, create playlists and sync with a supported smartphone. Subscribers can also download and buy content over the air directly on their phone. All "books" include a 30-second preview, sort of like a try-before-you-buy.

Safari Books Online, an on-demand digital library of books for techies, creative professionals and business folks, has gone mobile. The new service, at m.safaribooksonline.com, lets Safari subscribers take their books with them on their iPhone, Nokia, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device.

The decision to optimize the library for mobile was almost a necessity for Safari, which says that 81% of its customers use their mobile devices to read reference books and other professional content.

Mobile users can search, bookmark and set favorites and also use preset access keys to launch a variety of functions, similar to "hot keys" on a computer keyboard.

Safari Books Online's library includes books from dozens of publishers including Prentice Hall Professional, O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley Professional, Microsoft Press, Sams, Que, Peachpit Press, Adobe Press, Cisco Press and Wharton School Publishing.

Don't want to buy an Amazon Kindle but like the idea of e-books? New moves by both Google and Amazon can help.

Google, which already has 1.5 million public domain books available for free viewing on PCs, on Thursday made them all available for reading on cell phones, specifically the iPhone and, of course, the G1.

The same day, Amazon said it's working to offer cell phone versions of some titles already available for its Kindle e-reader, reports the New York Times.

Amazon, which has some 230,000 titles formatted for the Kindle, hasn't said when any will be ready for mobile phones, just that it has plans.

Although Google has a lot more titles to offer for cell phones, they are public domain, which means older titles no longer covered by copyrights. The Kindle titles, however, include books on Amazon's various best-seller lists.

According to the Times, Google hopes to add out-of-print and more current books if it can forge deals with publishing companies.

Just days after the Amazon Kindle had its first birthday, the company's popular eBook reader disappeared from shelves and will not be available until February of next year, Macworld reports.

"The Kindle has been out for a year, and has been enormously popular, so its vanishing makes a degree of sense," the article said. "But one would figure Amazon understood the demand for its product and would stockpile appropriately."

It's also possible that Amazon is clearing its stock of the first-generation device ahead of a rumored revamp due early in 2009. But missing out on all holiday season sales, plus at least an entire month afterward, doesn't seem like the smartest business strategy to us.

After more than 250,000 units sold, it seems that at the very least, the Amazon Kindle has found a loyal audience. CNN reports that on the device's first birthday, its texts account for 10 percent of Amazon's book sales despite the fact that only 200,000 titles are available in digital form, representing just a fraction of what's out there in print.

The device remains sold out on the company's Web site. Some analysts think that Jeff Bezos' pedigree is helping. "You can't discount the prominence of having Amazon behind this," says Paul Reynolds, technology editor at Consumer Reports, in the article. "Jeff Bezos is respected for what he's done with Amazon, and if he feels this is a future product in media, people are willing to trust him."

There was also that whole Oprah thing, and the fact that it's the only eBook reader that lets you make wireless purchases. Want a new book or newspaper subscription? Pay for it and download it right onto the device, without having to mess with computer synchronization. Analysts expect an upgraded Kindle, possibly with sleeker lines and more memory, to come in early 2009.

Nintendo has announced its 100 Classic Book Collection cartridge for the company's Nintendo DS portable game system, 1UP reports. The cartridge comes with 100 plays and novels from Dickens, Shakespeare, Bronte, and other authors and playwrights, along with a built-in eBook reader.

The report said that Nintendo is also promising downloadable additions to Book Collection's library, although they haven't offered details as to how frequently new downloadable titles will be made available and how much they will cost. The cartridge will hit the market in Europe on December 26th.

Remember the rumor about how we'd see a new version of the Amazon Kindle before the end of the year? The one where, even though Amazon publicly denied it, people believed it anyway?

It turns out that it was in fact scheduled for release in October, but Jeff Bezos pulled the plug at the last minute because he wanted changes to the software. That's the word from TechCrunch, which also said that the Kindle 2 is now scheduled for release early in 2009, according to sources close to the product's development.

Interestingly, the images that had surfaced of the new Kindle in October "are real—it's a longer device but not as thick as the original Kindle, and fixes some of the button issues that plague users (like accidental page turns)."