Posts tagged amazon

Kindle for iPhone — Amazon

Just recently Amazon released a major software update to its hugely popular, all-time number one bestelling product, the Kindle e-ink e-book e-reader. The update brought several new, much publicized features. With the new software version installed on your Kindle, you can now enjoy a new and easier layout for your magazine and newspaper subscriptions, you can immediately leave a rating and get recommendations based on a book you just finished, and you can enable your notes and highlights for public viewing.

But the most prominent among the new features is arguably the inclusion of real page numbers. Previously, the contents of Kindle books were marked only by location numbers, which remained the same however you resize or reformat the text. Apparently a lot of Kindle users, especially those who are members of book clubs or are academic researchers given to citing their sources, demanded real page numbers, which match those in their print counterparts. This in-demand feature is now also included in the Kindle app for iPhone and other supported Apple devices.

Read more »

Dr. Oulipo or: How I Learned to Stop Writing with E and Love the Vowel or: Look, Ma, No E’s!

I am again submitting to my longstanding and usually costly bibliophilia. Not at all unhappy about it, I am allowing my intoxicating compulsion to buy almost any book that attracts my fancy to triumph again. I am again laying down my arms in favor of my craving, but paradoxically coinciding with this act of submission is my cocking of an imaginary gun, locking its crosshairs on a book that’s on display in an Amazon.com tab in my Safari application window.

Known in its country of origin as La Disparition, my mark, popularly known as A Void, is an atypical work of fiction by a famous postwar author who will stay anonymous throughout this post so that I may sustain this post’s actual foundation and carry on with its fairly unobvious quirk.

As soon as I found out about this intriguing composition by our so far unknown author, I sort of took an oath that I would own a copy of it, by hook or by crook. Now an opportunity is knocking on my door and trying to add a transaction to my Visa card account. Its Amazon listing is no bargain, but I’m just dying to lay my hands on such a curious and hard-to-find book. Naturally I am glad to succumb. I click on “Buy.”

Now, in wound-up anticipation of its arrival, I am simply bound to adopt a lipogrammatic tactic that mimics that of La Disparition a.k.a. A Void. You may look at this as nothing but pomposity or boastful vanity, but truth is, in composing this consciously lacking and slightly awkward post, I am honoring a book that is without doubt a work of virtuosity.