If you are an avid Amazon Kindle user and routinely transfer large documents wirelessly to and fro using Whispernet, you are in for a rude awakening – to the tune of a minimum 50% increase in wireless transfer charges. [Gasps] Say it ain’t so. Sorry, but it is very so. The old $0.10 flat fee that covered everything from a single byte transfer to that monstrous 400MB transfer will now be billed according to total size. What is the new cost that you find Kindle readers now get to foot? $0.15 per megabyte. And of course, it will be rounded up to the next nearest megabyte. So if you use 1.01 megabytes, guess what, you’re getting billed for 2MB. Oh the humanity. It isn’t a complete loss however as you now will have the ability to view DOCX and RTF files which I’m assuming is some reassurance to some of you eBook readers out there. Is it enough to compensate for the rate hike? Or, is the Kindle looking less attractive than it was last night before you went to bed?
Source: Gizmodo, Gear Diary, Engadget
Book worms and tree huggers rejoice as another eBook option has surfaced. This newest development is making home on RIM’s popular Blackberry line of devices. Brought to you by Fictionwise, Barnes & Noble’s online eBook reader service, the eBook app will allow you to browse B&B’s free catalog of books online as well as all of their 60,000+ titles available for sale online. See a book you like? Now you can buy it straight from your phone. Supported models include: Curve, Storm, Pearl, Bold, and several other BlackBerry models. All of this eBook goodness is still pretty fresh in our minds. If you don’t recall the legal trouble that Apple is now in due to their amazon backed Kindle app for the iPhone. It makes you wonder if MONEC Holding Ltd, the company currently suing Apple for the Kindle eBook app, will go after Barnes & Nobile, RIM, and Fictionwise. Apparently, two human beings somehow managed to both think of an electronic box that transmits words in 1′s and 0′s….Someone is just jealous because their app sucked and someone else is making a fortune…typical gold diggers. Anyway, interested Blackberry users can point their BB browser to the OTA download link to download the app and get their nature friendly, worming skills on!
Source: Mobile Burn, WSJ
