Round up #110: hardware rumors, free audiobook today

Round up #110: hardware rumors, free audiobook today

The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later.

Free audiobook today: Eat That Frog

Thanks to a reader who alerted me in a private comment to this Audible.com deal! Do check to make sure it is free before you click that buy button. It is probably only free today and it may have geographic restrictions. I checked it when I wasn’t logged into my Audible.com account (I believe you’ll need one to use it, but you don’t have to commit to anything) and it was still free.

This is not one of those where you only get it free when you sign up.

I’m not a big fan of audiobooks (I prefer text-to-speech), but I do listen to them sometimes in the car.

Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time

As a vegetarian, I’m not crazy about the title, and I’ll tell you what I think about the concept of a book on stopping procrastinating when I get around to it. I do have a shirt I wear sometimes that says, “Procrastinate Later”.

Will it have fins?

I know, the next Kindle hardware won’t be a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado, but it may have some interesting design features.

We are likely to find out at least some of this September 6 (Thursday), when Amazon holds a presser in Santa Monica, but that hasn’t stopped people from speculating.

One of the interesting ones involves an RSK (Reflective Screen Kindle), rather than a backlit tablet. We’ve accepted, since the first Kindle, that RSKs have a palette similar to an Etch-A-Sketch…dark images on a gray background.

In this exclusive from The Verge

article with images

they show what may be a “Paperwhite” version of the Kindle Touch. It’s stark…black text on a white background. I’m actually not sure I would like that.  Mass market paperbacks not have a white page…that’s what you put in your computer. I’m used to the more muted colors, but I don’t have normal color vision, so you might feel differently.

Yes, it would likely have a frontlighting feature.

This is not official, though.

The Verge also boldly published a post saying,

This is the new Amazon Kindle Fire

You can see an image they say came from Amazon, although it doesn’t show much. Despite the headliner, they also included an update where they say this may not be it, since they’ve received a message from someone saying it isn’t.

Another big rumor, reported in this

Wall Street Journal article

is that at least one of the tablets will be ad-supported. Gosh, I sure hope so! I’m going to buy one (maybe one of each), and I’m more than happy to let advertisers pay for part of it.

We’ll just have to wait and see, of course. I’ll get you the information on Thursday.

Agency Model negotiations continue in the EU

According to this

Reuters article

Apple and four publishers under investigation for the Agency Model, have offered future discounts from retailers as a way to settle the concerns about anticompetitive activity.

Interestingly, that’s different from one settlement recently reportedly reached in the USA, where consumers will get (probably small) amounts of cash or possibly coupons. In the USA, if you were hurt, you’d get something. In the EU (European Union), they wouldn’t compensate those people, but change the situation going forward.

Estimate: 5 million Kindle Fires were sold

Amazon doesn’t give us sales figures, but said that the Kindle Fire was 22% of the US tablet market. Based on that, Horace Dediu of Asymco does some nice work calculating that it would mean that about five million were sold.

The

article

has some other very interesting concepts: I recommend it.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

About these ads