As you may have noticed, there have been a lack of updates recently, however that doesn’t mean we have take our eyes off the ball. Amazon updated their website today and it shows that the Amazon Kindle is now now available to order.

WOHOO!

I know a lot of you had grown inpatient with Amazon and been waiting for this news for quite a while, so now is your chance to grab a Kindle device before (inevitably, I think) the stocks run out yet again.

Go to the Kindle Store and get you Kindle!

Photo by Rob Bushway.

If you have an image that you would like to submit for Kindle Photo of the Day, then please get in touch! you can send the image via email to - please make sure you include your name and a link to your site.

Photo by mydumbpics.

If you have an image that you would like to submit for Kindle Photo of the Day, then please get in touch! you can send the image via email to - please make sure you include your name and a link to your site.

Photo by normstew.

If you have an image that you would like to submit for Kindle Photo of the Day then please get in touch! you can send the image via email to - please make sure you include your name and a link to your site.

The Invisible Man is an 1897 science fiction novella by H.G. Wells. Wells’ novel was originally serialised in Pearson’s Magazine in 1897, and published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who theorises that if a person’s refractive index is changed to exactly that of air and his body does not absorb or reflect light, then he will be invisible. He successfully carries out this procedure on himself, but cannot become visible again, becoming mentally unstable as a result.

Excerpt

THE TIME TRAVELLER (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way — marking the points with a lean forefinger — as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it:) and his fecundity.

“You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.”

“Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?” said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.

“I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.”

“That is all right,” said the Psychologist.

“Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real existence.”

“There I object,” said Filby. “Of course a solid body may exist. All real things –”

“So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?”

“Don’t follow you,” said Filby.

“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?”

Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and — Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.”

“That,” said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his cigar over the lamp; “that … very clear indeed.”

“Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,” continued the Time Traveller, with a slight accession of cheerfulness. “Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it. But some foolish people have got hold of the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to say about this Fourth Dimension?”

“I have not,” said the Provincial Mayor.

“It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly — why not another direction at right angles to the other three? — and have even tried to construct a \\Four-Dimension geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four — if they could master the perspective of the thing. See?”

“I think so,” murmured the Provincial Mayor; and, knitting his brows, he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who repeats mystic words. “Yes, I think I see it now,” he said after some time, brightening in a quite transitory manner.

“Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.

“Scientific people,” proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, “know very well that Time is only a kind of Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer. Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then this morning it rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally recognized? But certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must conclude was along the Time-Dimension.”

“But,” said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, “if Time is really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it, and why has it always been, regarded as something different? And why cannot we move in Time as we move about in the other dimensions of Space?”

The Time Traveller smiled. “Are you sure we can move freely in Space? Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how about up and down? Gravitation limits us there.”

“Not exactly,” said the Medical Man. “There are balloons.”

“But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement.” “Still they could move a little up and down,” said the Medical Man.

“Easier, far easier down than up.”

“And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment.”

“My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present movement. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles above the earth’s surface.”

“But the great difficulty is this,” interrupted the Psychologist. “You can move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time.”

“That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?” “Oh, this,” began Filby, “is all –”

“Why not?” said the Time Traveller.

“It’s against reason,” said Filby.

“What reason?” said the Time Traveller.

“You can show black is white by argument,” said Filby, “but you will never convince me.”

“Possibly not,” said the Time Traveller. “But now you begin to see the object of my investigations into the geometry of Four Dimensions. Long ago I had a vague inkling of a machine –”

“To travel through Time!” exclaimed the Very Young Man.

“That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time as the driver determines.”

Filby contented himself with laughter.

“But I have experimental verification,” said the Time Traveller.

“It would be remarkably convenient for the historian,” the Psychologist suggested. “One might travel back and verify the accepted account of the Battle of Hastings, for instance!”

“Don’t you think you would attract attention?” said the Medical Man. “Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms.”

“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato,” the Very Young Man thought.

“In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German Scholars have improved Greek so much.

“Then there is the future,” said the Very Young Man. “Just think! One might invest all one’s money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry on ahead!”

“To discover a society,” said I, “erected on a strictly communistic basis.”

“Of all the wild extravagant theories!” began the Psychologist.

“Yes, so it seemed to me, and so I never talked of it until –”

“Experimental verification!” cried I. “You are going to verify that?”

“The experiment!” cried Filby, who was getting brain-weary.

“Let’s see your experiment anyhow,” said the Psychologist, “though it’s all humbug, you know.” The Time Traveller smiled round at us. Then, still smiling faintly, and with his hands deep in his trousers pockets, he walked slowly out of the room, and we heard his slippers shuffling down the long passage to his laboratory.

The Psychologist looked at us. “I wonder what he’s got?”

“Some sleight-of-hand trick or other,” said the Medical Man, and Filby tried to tell us about a conjurer he had seen at Burslem; but before he had finished his preface the Time Traveller came back, and Filby’s anecdote collapsed.

The thing the Time Traveller held in his hand was a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. And now I must be explicit, for this that follows — unless his explanation is to be accepted — is an absolutely unaccountable thing. He took one of the small octagonal tables that were scattered about the room, and set it in front of the ire, with two legs on the hearthrug. On this table he placed the mechanism. Then he drew up a chair, and sat down. The only other object on the table was a small shaded lamp, the bright light of which fell upon the model. There were also perhaps a dozen candles about, two in brass candlesticks upon the mantel and several in sconces, so that the room was brilliantly illuminated. I sat in a low arm-chair nearest the fire, and I drew this forward so as to be almost between the Time Traveller and the fire-place. Filby sat behind him, looking over his shoulder. The Medical Man and the Provincial Mayor watched him in profile from the right, the Psychologist from the left. The Very Young Man stood behind the Psychologist. We were all on the alert. It appears incredible to me that any kind of trick, however subtly conceived and however adroitly done, could have been played upon us under these conditions.

The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism. “Well?” said the Psychologist.

“This little affair,” said the Time Traveller, resting his elbows uponthe table and pressing his hands together above the apparatus, “is only a model. It is my plan for a machine to travel through time. You will notice that it looks singularly askew, and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about this bar, as though it was in some way unreal.” He pointed to the part with his finger. “Also, here is one little white lever, and here is another.”

The Medical Man got up out of his chair and peered into the thing. “It’s beautifully made,” he said.

“It took two years to make,” retorted the Time Traveller. Then, when we had all imitated the action of the Medical Man, he said: “Now I want you clearly to understand that this lever, being pressed over, sends the machine gliding into the future, and this other reverses the motion. This saddle represents the seat of a time traveller. Presently I am going to press the lever, and off the machine will go. It will vanish, pass into future Time, and disappear. Have a good look at the thing. Look at the table too, and satisfy yourselves there is no trickery. I don’t want to waste this model, and then be told I’m a quack.”

There was a minute’s pause perhaps. The Psychologist seemed about to speak to me, but changed his mind. Then the Time Traveller put forth his finger toward the lever. “No,” he said suddenly. “Lend me your hand.” And turning to the Psychologist, he took that individual’s hand in his own and told him to put out his forefinger. So that it was the Psychologist himself who sent forth the model Time Machine on its interminable voyage. We all saw the lever turn. I am absolutely certain there was no trickery. There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame jumped. One of the candles on the mantel was blown out, and the little machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory; and it was gone — vanished! Save for the lamp the table was bare.

Everyone was silent for a minute. Then Filby said he was damned.

The Psychologist recovered from his stupor, and suddenly looked under the table. At that the Time Traveller laughed cheerfully. “Well?” he said, with a reminiscence of the Psychologist. Then, getting up, he went to the tobacco jar on the mantel, and with his back to us began to fill his pipe.

We stared at each other. “Look here,” said the Medical Man, “are you in earnest about this? Do you seriously believe that that machine has travelled into time?”

“Certainly,” said the Time Traveller, stooping to light a spill at the fire. Then he turned, lighting his pipe, to look at the Psychologist’s face. (The Psychologist, to show that he was not unhinged, helped himself to a cigar and tried to light it uncut.) “What is more, I have a big machine nearly finished in there” — he indicated the laboratory –”and when that is put together I mean to have a journey on my own account.” “You mean to say that that machine has travelled into the future?” said Filby.

“Into the future or the past — I don’t, for certain, know which.”

After an interval the Psychologist had an inspiration. “It must have gone into the past if it has gone anywhere,” he said.

“Why?” said the Time Traveller.

“Because I presume that it has not moved in space, and if it travelled into the future it would still be here all this time, since it must have travelled through this time.”

“But,” I said, “if it travelled into the past it would have been visible when we came first into this room; and last Thursday when we were here; and the Thursday before that; and so forth!”

“Serious objections,” remarked the Provincial Mayor, with an air of impartiality, turning towards the Time Traveller.

“Not a bit,” said the Time Traveller, and, to the Psychologist: “You think. You can explain that. It’s presentation below the threshold, you know, diluted presentation.”

“Of course,” said the Psychologist, and reassured us. “That’s a simple point of psychology. I should have thought of it. It’s plain enough, and helps the paradox delightfully. We cannot see it, nor can we appreciate this machine, any more than we can the spoke of a wheel spinning, or a bullet flying through the air. If it is travelling through time fifty times or a hundred times faster than we are, if it gets through a minute while we get through a second, the impression it creates will of course be only one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of what it would make if it were not travelling in time. That’s plain enough.” He passed his hand through the space in which the machine had been. “You see?” he said, laughing.

We sat and stared at the vacant table for a minute or so. Then the Time Traveller asked us what we thought of it all.

“It sounds plausible enough to-night,” said the Medical Man; “but wait until to-morrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”

“Would you like to see the Time Machine itself?” asked the TimeTraveller. And therewith, taking the lamp in his hand, he led the way down the long, draughty corridor to his laboratory. I remember vividly the flickering light, his queer, broad head in silhouette, the dance of the shadows, how we all followed him, puzzled but incredulous, and how there in the laboratory we beheld a larger edition of the little mechanism which we had seen vanish from before our eyes. Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the twisted crystalline bars lay unfinished upon the bench beside some sheets of drawings, and I took one up for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to be.

“Look here,” said the Medical Man, “are you perfectly serious? Or is this a trick — like that ghost you showed us last Christmas?” “Upon that machine,” said the Time Traveller, holding the lamp aloft, “I intend to explore time. Is that plain? I was never more serious in my life.”

None of us quite knew how to take it.

I caught Filby’s eye over the shoulder of the Medical Man, and he winked at me solemnly.

Download The Invisible Man for your Kindle: The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

Every Sunday night we will bring you our selection of Kindle and Amazon links from around the web. Compiled from blogs, magazines, main stream media and other sources, we hope these links will give you a definitive overview of what’s happening regarding the Kindle and what the Kindle community is talking about.

Short Kindle supply is keeping e-book fans waiting - USA Today

5 Reasons Why Amazon Is Calling Audible - The Motley Fool

About those Kindle numbers - Teleread

Windows CE-based e-reader has 9.7-inch display - Windows for Devices

4 Case studies for Amazon Kindle - zdnet

Kindle Irony - Fotomancie

Photo by louv.

If you have an image that you would like to submit for Kindle Photo of the Day then please get in touch! you can send the image via email to - please make sure you include your name and a link to your site.

Every Sunday night we will bring you our selection of Kindle and Amazon links from around the web. Compiled from blogs, magazines, main stream media and other sources, we hope these links will give you a definitive overview of what’s happening regarding the Kindle and what the Kindle community is talking about.

Publishers Phase Out Piracy Protection on Audio Books - New York Times

Put Not Your Faith In Ebook Readers - Locus Online

Electronic Book Reader: Amazon Kindle - Illinois Institute of Technology

eBook, But Done Right - Dead Ink Vinyl

New York Times Speculates on Apple’s “Safari Pad” - Kindleville

The Apple iReader - Reading Ahead

In-depth review: can Amazon’s Kindle light a fire under eBooks? - Apple Insider

Reading Steve Jobs - Bits Blog, New York Times

Amazon Kindle - Scott Hanselman’s ComputerZen.com

Amazon Appears Reasonably Priced, Amazon Re-evaluates its Unbox Movie Service - Seeking Alpha

He loves his Kindle, she loves her Sony: Will this marriage last? - TeleRead

Apple working on OS X-based multi-touch Kindle killer? - Mac Daily News

New York Times Speculates Apple eBook Reader on the Horizon (Kindle Killer) - Schwankenstein’s Monster

The War of the Worlds (1898), by H. G. Wells, is an early science fiction novel which describes an invasion of England by aliens from Mars. It is one of the earliest and best-known depictions of an alien invasion of Earth, and has influenced many others, as well as spawning several films, a radio drama and a television series based on the story. The 1938 radio broadcast caused public outcry against the episode, as many listeners believed that an actual Martian invasion was in progress. Approx. 60,425 words.

Excerpt

1 - The Eve of the War

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.

The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety - their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours - and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet - it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war - but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.

During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2. I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.

The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight of the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, “as flaming gases rushed out of a gun.”

A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the Daily Telegraph, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a scrutiny of the red planet.

In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof - an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so silvery warm - a pin’s-head of light! It was as if it quivered, but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.

As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty millions of miles it was from us - more than forty millions of miles of void. Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light, three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that blackness looks on a frosty starlight night. In a telescope it seems far profounder. And invisible to me because it was so remote and small, flying swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible distance, drawing nearer every minute by so many thousands of miles, came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was to bring so much struggle and calamity and death to the earth. I never dreamed of it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that unerring missile.

That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from the distant planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at the edge, the slightest projection of the outline just as the chronometer struck midnight; and at that I told Ogilvy and he took my place. The night was warm and I was thirsty, and I went stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way in the darkness, to the little table where the siphon stood, while Ogilvy exclaimed at the streamer of gas that came out towards us.

That night another invisible missile started on its way to the earth from Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four hours after the first one. I remember how I sat on the table there in the blackness, with patches of green and crimson swimming before my eyes. I wished I had a light to smoke by, little suspecting the meaning of the minute gleam I had seen and all that it would presently bring me. Ogilvy watched till one, and then gave it up; and we lit the lantern and walked over to his house. Down below in the darkness were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of people, sleeping in peace.

He was full of speculation that night about the condition of Mars, and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants who were signalling us. His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was in progress. He pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets.

“The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one,” he said.

Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a flame each night. Why the shots ceased after the tenth no one on earth has attempted to explain. It may be the gases of the firing caused the Martians inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through a powerful telescope on earth as little grey, fluctuating patches, spread through the clearness of the planet’s atmosphere and obscured its more familiar features.

Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at last, and popular notes appeared here, there, and everywhere concerning the volcanoes upon Mars. The seriocomic periodical Punch, I remember, made a happy use of it in the political cartoon. And, all unsuspected, those missiles the Martians had fired at us drew earthward, rushing now at a pace of many miles a second through the empty gulf of space, hour by hour and day by day, nearer and nearer. It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their petty concerns as they did. I remember how jubilant Markham was at securing a new photograph of the planet for the illustrated paper he edited in those days. People in these latter times scarcely realise the abundance and enterprise of our nineteenth-century papers. For my own part, I was much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas as civilisation progressed.

One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been 10,000,000 miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping zenithward, towards which so many telescopes were pointed. It was a warm night. Coming home, a party of excursionists from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us singing and playing music. There were lights in the upper windows of the houses as the people went to bed. From the railway station in the distance came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance. My wife pointed out to me the brightness of the red, green, and yellow signal lights hanging in a framework against the sky. It seemed so safe and tranquil.

Download War of the Worlds for your Kindle: War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

Last month Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos said “the Kindle, in terms of demand, is outpacing our expectations.” Now with that kind of success it is probably reasonable to assume that Amazon is already hard at work on Kindle v2 and that competitors are also hard at work on their own Kindle-like devices. One aspect of the Kindle that many have criticized is that it lacks a stylish design, and I mostly agree.

Now enter student Designer Nedzad Mujcinovic from Monash University who has come up with a beautifully designed e-book for the Dyson Australian International Design Awards which could give Amazon some food for thought. His design would use the now familiar e-ink technology, but unlike the Kindle would feature a touch screen component. This would remove the need for a keyboard instead relying on a gesture based input system. Pages can be turned by sliding your finger from one corner to the other corner and double or even triple-finger gestures will advance the book by ten and 50 pages respectively. One aspect of the Livre e-book concept I find intriguing is listed in its description - ‘The silicon body adds flexibility to excite the feel of soft cover books.‘ I love the idea of having a ‘bendy e-book’!

I like the design and the idea of a multi-touch surface which would increase the reading area by removing the need for a tactile keyboard, however the design is a bit too bulky and would look a lot better if it lost half an inch in width. Overall the Livre does a better job of mimicking a book than the Kindle and the multi-touch would allow for a better user experience so it gets a thumbs up from us.

The product description:

Product Description and Principal Function(s)
As high density living puts a strain on private space, storage space tends to suffer the most. One of the items people find hard to let go of are books. To those who own a lot of books, books are much more than what meets the eye. Collections of books tend to be ones’ pride and memory on certain moments in life. When taking a dusty book of the shelf one may remember the state of mind on the first read years ago… LIVRE is a new age book, a product that addresses all of these aspects of book reading!

Why does the product represent design excellence and why do you believe it deserves an Australian Design Award?
This project represents excellence in design due to the fact that it fully addresses all that was set out to be achieved. The resulting product is an electronic device that is innovative in every way. It succeeds where all competitors’ products fail. It is not an electronic book reader as we know it. LIVRE is a product that takes books to the next level. LIVRE is the book of the future. LIVRE feels, looks and functions like a traditional paper book, yet it presents an evolved version using modern day electronics to further improve the experience and functionality!

The traditional stitched leather cover brings the feel, tactility and smell of old style books to LIVRE. The cover dsign allows the user to make DIY covers from any material or by covers to suit a particular collection of books, ie “Harry Potter” series. The silicon body adds flexibility to excite the feel of soft cover books.

Interaction happens via a thin capacitive touch screen mounted on top of an electronic paper screen (’eINK’). Browsing pages happens by striking the screen from right bottom corner towards the centre of page to go forward or from the left hand corner to go backwards. Doing that using one finger will browse one page, two will browse ten pages and three will browse fifty pages at a time.

Charging and file transfer happens via USB typeB mini port. Wireless file transfer via Bluetooth is also available.

Options like changing font size and status overview are not ‘in your face’, they are rather hidden, yet accessible at user’s discretion.

The aesthetic of the LIVRE was inspired by old style disintegrated books and modern sculptural movements. The general shape of the LIVRE is one that most readers of traditional books wish their books were by trying to fold and bend them for easy one handed holding.

LIVRE is the book of the future!

Source: Dyson Student Design Awards, Engadget,

Yesterday on this website we posted the New York Times article which speculated on how Apple is developing a Kindle-like device, well today I came across a wonderful open letter addressed to Steve Jobs (from TidBITS). It address’s precisely the reasons why Steve Job’s is wrong in his statements and why Apple should proceed with the ‘Safari Pad’.

I tend to agree with most of what is said, I also think that competition from Apple will force Amazon to become more creative and innovative, which is something they have been lacking in recently. Ultimately a war between Amazon and Apple will benefit the consumer the most.

Have a read;

Dear Steve,

Back in January, while talking with John Markoff and David Pogue of the New York Times after your Macworld Expo keynote, you expressed skepticism about the Amazon Kindle ebook reader. John Markoff quoted you as saying, “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

That seems an odd thing to say to a pair of writers whose work is read by millions of people in newspaper and book form. I don’t know where you got that 40 percent number, but other statistics would seem to disagree. For instance, the Book Industry Study Group, which has been tracking the U.S. publishing industry for 30 years, estimates that U.S. book sales in 2006 exceeded 3.1 billion copies, generating net revenues for U.S. publishers in excess of $35 billion. That’s a 3.2 percent increase in revenues over 2005. The book industry is growing, not shrinking. And if 40 percent of the people in the U.S. are reading one book or less per year, the other 182 million of us must be averaging over 16 books per year.

Reading habits have undoubtedly changed, since we have more entertainment and research options available to us than ever before. Some of those come thanks to Apple products like the iPod and Apple TV, and Apple services like the iTunes Store. But the prime mover, according to an IDC study of consumer online behavior, is that Americans are now spending 32.7 hours per week online, almost twice as much as they spend watching TV (16.4 hours per week) and more than eight times as much as they spend reading newspapers and magazines (3.9 hours). If you want to point to an industry in trouble, look no further than newspapers, where circulation is in a steep decline.

The key point is that time spent online is largely time spent reading (and writing), whether email (57 billion messages sent in 2007 by IDC’s estimate), blogs (over 70 million, with 1.5 million posts per day, according to Technorati), or more traditional online news and entertainment sources. People read more than they ever have, thanks to the Internet, and new forms of reading are appearing all the time. Witness the Japanese “cell phone novel,” meant to be read in serialized form on the ubiquitous mobile phone. The Economist reports that since appearing in 2001, the genre has grown to become an $82 million business in 2006, with some ebooks receiving over a hundred thousand downloads per day.

I’ve called out all these numbers in order to encourage Apple to acknowledge that people read vast quantities of text and to focus hardware and software design efforts on making it easier to read on the iPod, iPhone, and future devices. The iPod and iPhone can be used to read some online content now, along with small bits of text synced from a Mac, but the experience could be significantly improved with native support for PDF, better user interface support for stored text documents, and more.

But I, speaking as a reader and a publisher, would really like to see Apple create a larger version of the iPod touch optimized not just for a better video experience, but also for a best-of-breed reading experience. Apple has the hardware design and user interface chops that Amazon lacked when creating the Kindle, plus the knowledge gleaned from the iPhone and the iPod touch in terms of underlying operating system, physical design, and wireless capabilities. Equally important is the iTunes Store, which offers an unparalleled browsing and shopping experience for digital media - it could be extended to support commercial ebooks and free blogs in exactly the way it currently supports audiobooks and podcasts.

Such a device would make good business sense for Apple too. iPod sales posted their slowest ever year-over-year growth rate, at only 5 percent, causing some analysts to opine that Apple has saturated the market. Even committed iPod users will purchase replacement iPods only so often. Like the iPhone, a new “iPod reader” in a larger form factor would open up a new market for Apple, but unlike the iPhone, it would be purchased in addition to an iPod nano or iPod shuffle.

John Markoff has speculated that your dismissal of American reading habits is actually a calculated setting of the stage for just such a device. You didn’t have kind words for cell phones or the MP3 players that predated the iPod, with justification - they were (and for the most part remain) utterly awful.

So Steve, here’s hoping that an upcoming special event will feature an iPod reader, designed to do all the great things we’ve become accustomed to from an iPod, but with the addition of native support for downloading, managing, and displaying textual documents of all sorts, whether in plain text, PDF, Microsoft Word’s .doc, or XML format.

The iPod already gives us access to Beethoven and Bob Dylan, to snapshots of our children, and to The Incredibles and episodes of Lost. Let’s add to that Harry Potter and The Hobbit, 1984 and Catch-22, and the complete works of Dr. Seuss. Book publishers have been waiting for a mass-market ebook reader for years, the newspaper companies are dying for a new online business model, and normal people just want to read on the train to work. And of course, I’ll be happy to upload to the iTunes Store an entire library of Take Control ebooks that are already popular with tens of thousands of Mac users.

–Adam Engst, TidBITS Publishing Inc.

Source: TidBITS

A New York Times articleby John Markoff this past week made an interesting case that Apple is working on a Kindle-like device called ‘Safari Pad’. Whilst there is no concrete evidence that Apple is working on - or even planning such a device, John Markoff seems to think that something is definitely up.

Steve Jobs does have a history of rubbishing an industry before launching a product, he famously criticised the music and cellphone industries before launching the iPod and iPhone. Apple has confirmed that the iPod Touch is a platform and not a single product, and Intel’s new Atom processor would seem like an ideal chip for a Kindle-like device and certainly Apple’s design department can come up with something which looks better than the Kindle.

Like most discussions on this subject, this article references a comment made by Steve Jobs when the Kindle was announced “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” could this just be another of Steve Jobs diversion tactic - say one thing, and do another?

If Apple does come out with ‘Safari Pad’ we can safely assume that it will be a full-colour device which will sync to Apple’s other services like iTunes, AppleTV and OSX, which means it would offer video and music content, one thing the Kindle has going for it is that its designed for reading and reading alone which might just give it the upper hand when it comes to e-books.

The article ends with an interesting question - Wouldn’t it be ironic if Mr. Jobs could ultimately claim to have saved reading books in the digital age?

Could Apple do to books what the iPod did for music?

Source: Bits Blog - New York Times

Kindle owner John Federico recently had some trouble with his Kindle after it developed a crack on the bottom of the device, this is what he had to say about Amazon’s customer support;

I love my Kindle and I’m a big fan of Amazon - even more now after dealing with their Kindle Customer Support folks.

My Kindle developed a strange crack on the bottom of the unit where the ports and volume control are located. I called Amazon support to explain the situation and they immediately shipped a new Kindle (so I wouldn’t be without mine while they replaced it.)

When the new one arrived, the process for deactivating the original Kindle and activating the replacement was fast and flawless.

I packed up my original unit into the replacement’s box, slapped on the return shipping label that Amazon sent me and off it went, back to Kindle-land.

Nice job, guys.

Nice job indeed - it seems like the Amazon customer service guys did a great job in dealing with John’s problems, I am a bit surprised that they shipped out a replacement before requesting John’s Kindle back. However, this is a really good sign that Amazon are looking after their Kindle customers, which is impressive after you read about all the Amazon horror stories out there.

Source: brandbrains.net

Believe it or not the above picture is not that of a fine old book, but rather a modified case cover for the Kindle! This beautiful piece was made by a user on the mobileread Kindle forum, it features a hand made leather book case, marbleized paper for the end papers, gold leaf to give the impression of gilded pages and a felt-lined holder which keeps the Kindle securely in place. You still don’t believe me do you? in that case I suggest you scroll down the page and have a look at other the images.

Whilst it does look pretty, a few readers on the forums have pointed out that there seem to be some usability issues. For instance on this particular case-mod the cover does not fold back upon itself which may cause readers to use both hands whilst reading content, however the creator of the case mod assured them that it is not a big issue. I guess the only way of telling if it affects usability is by actually using it.

This case-mod simply blows the standard case you get with the Kindle out of the water, or for that matter any other case out there. I think a commercial venture which would offer this to Kindle owners would be an excellent idea, apparently this case-mod it has already fooled some people into thinking that it is a real book!

Now here are some more picture for you to drool over:

Source: user artsci on mobileread Kindle forums

Photo by lostcosmos.

If you have an image that you would like to submit for Kindle Photo of the Day then please get in touch! you can send the image via email to - please make sure you include your name and a link to your site.

Silicon Alley Insider had reported on Evan Schnittman’s - of Oxford University Press - response to unexpectedly strong sales via Kindle:

That prompted Schnittman to look at his royalty statements, which he said “stunned” him: He had expected to sell up to 200 Kindle titles in December, but says the real numbers were “an order of magnitude” more than that.

Schnittman says that a buddy from ‘one of the biggest trade publishers in the world’ called him this week and explained to him how well the Kindle formatted eBooks were selling. In light of this news Evan Schnittman went to look at his royalty statements which “stunned” him. Schnittman says he has no idea if these kinds of sales will continue, but says that this has turned him from a digital skeptic into a digital believer and with sales figures like that it’s no wonder he’s a believer now!

With all this success, it raises the bigger question - How many eBooks does Amazon sell each month?

Please leave a comment if you have any questions or thoughts.

Source: Silicon Alley Insider

Every Sunday night we will bring you our selection of Kindle links from around the web. Compiled from blogs, magazines, main stream media and other sources, we hope this list will give you a definitive overview of what’s new regarding Kindle and what the growing Kindle community is talking about.

Book Lust - New York Times

Amazon to Buy Audiobook Seller for $300 Million - New York Times

Ah no; “Kindle” isn’t mobile outside the US - Dirty Bytes

more thoughts on kindle; missing the point - John’s Blog

Stephen King: Books With Batteries — Why Not? - ew.com

The Kindle in Church - TeleRead

Online Print On Demand Space Heats Up - Read/Write Web

Does the Amazon Kindle violate network neutrality principles? - IT Knowledge Exchange

Kindle Full Review - Chaos in Motion

Kindle is My Co-Pilot - Amazon Kindle’s Blog

Top authors to go digital with ebooks - Times Online

Scott Hanselman Loves His Kindle - Kindleville

The future of reading? - durham21

DS Downloads Redux: Kindling It - n-slider

Another nail in the coffin of print and yellow page advertising - 258marketing

E-Ink, E-Readers and E-Books! - SURiMOUNT

Today on the official Amazon Kindle blog, Amazon announced that The Boston Globe is available for Kindle. The Boston Globe (and Boston Sunday Globe) is the most widely circulated daily newspaper in Boston, Massachusetts and it is owned by The New York Times Company.

There are also no reviews on the page so maybe you can be the first? Here is the Product Description:

The Boston Globe is the most widely circulated daily newspaper in Boston, Massachusetts and in the greater New England region. Host to numerous Pulitzer Prizes, The Boston Globe features local, national, and world news, and features columns in news, arts and entertainment, business, sports, travel, life, and real estate. Notable contributors include Ty Burr, Ellen Goodman, Jeff Jacoby, John F. Kerry, Bob Ryan, and Dan Wasserman.

The Kindle Edition of The Boston Globe contains articles found in the print edition, but will not include some images and tables. Also, some features such as the crossword puzzle, box scores and classifieds are not currently available. For your convenience, issues are automatically delivered wirelessly to your Kindle so you can read them each morning.

This brings the number of newspapers available on Kindle to 14. Whilst adding more newspapers is good, and undoubtedly over time we shall see more newspapers producing Kindle versions of their print editions, its seems to me that there are way too many east-coast newspapers, I would like to see some more west-coast papers make it onto Kindle. I would also like to see more foreign papers because they are clearly unrepresented, a dream for me would be the Financial Times which I read religiously. However I suspect we shall have to wait until Kindle’s international release before we see a substantial amount of foreign newspapers.

So head on over to Amazon and start your 14-day free trial, what have you got to lose?

Source: Official Amazon Kindle Blog

Many folks think that the only place you can easily get a Kindle eBook is from the Amazon Kindle store, however that is far from the case. I was browsing through the Amazon Kindle customer discussion forums today and came across a great list which shows you where you can get content for your Kindle. There are many great websites out which offer eBooks you can use on the Kindle and using them is as easy as falling off a log!

So lets see what’s out there;

Amazon.com
100,000+ eBooks ready to be instantly downloaded. Amazon.com is the daddy site when it comes to the Amazon Kindle.

Gutenberg.org
Gutenberg offers 20,000 of mostly classic titles. It also boasts a collection of titles which no longer contain copywrite. ***, ****

Worldlibrary.net
An impressive 400,000 titles and growing daily, they also aim to have over 600,000 ebooks by the end of 2008. You can find classics, modern, government ebooks in .pdf format in multiple languages. There is also a healthy collection of audio eBooks. Requires $8.95 yearly subscription fee, after which everything is free to download. *, ***, ****

Fictionwise.com
Offers both unencrypted and encrypted .mobi files. Full range of reading and many free books as well. *, **, ****

Mobipocket.com
Lots of titles, most you can find on Amazon.com in the Kindle section for less.

Webscriptions.net
This is Baen books and mostly SiFi. None are encrypted, many are free, and can be transferred directly to your Kindle. Choose Kindle compatible for the download. ****

Wowio.com
uses .pdf format. You will need to register and can download up to three books a day, free. Only available to people in the US, due to copyright and licensing restrictions. **

Fictionpress.com
FictionPress is a growing network of close to 1 million writers/readers, and home to over 1,000,000 original works. As a writer, this is a place to showcase your creativity and for a reader, FictionPress is an opportunity to feast to your heart’s content. with 900,000 original works,normally unknown or unpublished authors. Some good, some not, take your chances, you may discover the next JK Rowling. Displays in text. Cut, paste and email to yourself, or save in .txt file and upload.

Manybooks.net
20,000 titles or so. Has a Kindle format. ***, ****

Mnybks.net
An extension of Manybooks above, but if you access it through the basic WebBrowser in Kindle, you can download directly to your Kindle, the way you would an Amazon book. Choose the Mobipocket format.

Feedbooks.com
Share books, self published books and a make it yourself newspaper. With a little manipulation of the tools below, you can get your own newspaper, you could probably even directly email it to your Kindle in the morning if you allow that site to send you stuff. You will need to register, but there is no cost. There is now a “Kindle Download Guide” from www.feedbooks.com includes links to many classics, including many in foreign languages.

Ccel.org
Christian centered works. Available in pdf, word, and text, all readily transferable to your Kindle.

* They save as .pdf files that you can email to your Kindle. It sees the .pdf as a file of words, not pictures of words, so it can be resized and adjusted just as any other ebook. Download the book to your PC, and email that file to your Kendle, or freekendle@kendle and load through the USB cable if you want to save the 10 cent conversion charge.
** For the encrypted ones in .mobi, a tool can be used to allow the kindle to see it. This tool does not make a copy of the book, merely adds a flag so that the Kendle can display it (it would be hard to call this a violation of copywrite or use conditions since both formats are amazon’s). The tool and directions on how to use it are at: http://igorsk.blogspot.com/2007/12/mobipocket-books-on-kindle.html
*** Site runs on donations
**** Can be downloaded directly to your Kindle when it is plugged in as an external storeage device, simply specify the Kindle folder when selecting where to put your book.

If you know of any other sites which are missing from this list, then feel free to leave a comment with a link to the site.

Source: Amazon

Last December the news was that the Kindle’s up for auction were selling like hot cakes, I thought now that the hype and buzz surrounding the Kindle has calmed down a bit, we should go back and see what the situation is over at eBay.

In December, the Kindle was selling for an average price of $864.04, that was more than double the retail price. Predictably, since then thing have changed and this week the Kindle is selling for an average price of $421.33. The most a Kindle was being auctioned for that I could find $600.00, contrast that with the $1500 just a couple of months ago and its seems like Kindle has truly lost x-factor, at least on eBay it has.

So if you don’t like your Kindle it seems as though you can still sell without losing any money. So when Amazon gets more Kindles back in stock, the auction prices should drop a bit more so those of you who don’t own one already might be able to pick up one at a bargain price. That’s assuming Amazon ever gets any back in stock because it seems like forever now that there hasn’t been any in stock, of-course we’ll let you know as soon as Amazon gets them back in stock.

After an 8 week absence, the weekly best sellers list is back! Each week we bring to you the New York Times best sellers list. We go through the list and give you our top 3 picks so to give you an an idea of what to download for your Kindle or just to buy for your bookshelf. You can browse through The New York Times best sellers list on Amazon.com. Here are our top 3 books of the week following by the top 5 books in each category;

Our Picks

The Appeal (by John Grisham): Number 1 in Hardcover Fiction

John Grisham will be ending his absence from the New York Times Best Seller’s List (fiction) with the arrival “The Appeal.” Grisham’s first legal thriller since the Broker (2005) is a gripping and compelling read that will be hard to put down. It is also timely since it highlights the underbelly of today’s election politics.

The story centers on a small Mississippi law firm who wins a big verdict over a chemical giant, Krane, that has spread carcinogenic pollutants. Krane, fearful that this verdict, if not overturned, would set a precedent that would eventually destroy it, goes into action. It files an appeal that will find its way to the state supreme court, and hires a “dirty tricks” firm to unseat a sitting justice believe to be unfriendly. This is a viable strategy since Mississippi elects their Supreme Court justices and 69% of its voters know little about the court’s candidates.

The “Appeal” provides a believable primer on how to rig an election - pick a victim; promote an unknown candidate with no visible record; and ambush the victim by painting him/her as a extreme ideologue (this liberal judge will destroy the family). Done well…and the election process is subverted.

This is Grisham’s thirteenth legal thriller since “A Time to Kill” which was published in 1989. He has been a master at putting urgent moral issues on center stage for all to consider. He has succeeded again in “The Appeal.”

Source: Amazon Customer Review*

A Thousand Splendid Suns (by Khaled Hosseini): Number 3 in Hardcover Fiction

With his second novel, Khaled Hosseini proves beyond a shadow of doubt that “The Kite Runner” was no flash in the Afghan pan. Once again set in Afghanistan, the story twists and turns its way through the turmoil and chaos that ensued following the fall of the monarchy in 1973, but focuses mainly on the lives of two women, thrown together by fate.

The story starts decades before the Taliban came into power in 1996, and ends after the era of Taliban rule. The main character begins life as a “harami” - the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man and one of his housekeepers. Forced to live in a small shack with her emotionally disturbed and possibly epileptic mother, Mariam lives for Thursdays, the day her father comes to see her, bearing small gifts and showering her with the affection she craves. Naturally, Mariam wants to be a part of her father’s life and fit in with his legitimate family, but when she attempts to force his hand, she is rebuffed and feels betrayed by his reaction. Her impetuous actions bring an end to the life she has known for fifteen long years, and lead to an arranged marriage to a much older man, a shoemaker, whose views on the rights of women mirror those that the Taliban would soon enforce.

During the time that Mariam is dutifully enduring her unhappy marriage, a neighbor gives birth to a baby girl, whom they name Laila. By her ninth birthday, Laila has grown up to be a beautiful child with blonde hair, turquoise-green eyes, high cheekbones and dimples. Unfortunately, her mother lives only for the day her older sons will return home from fighting the jihad, and is consumed by the vision of a free Afghanistan. Laila’s best friend is a boy named Tariq, her confidant, defender and co-conspirator, and by the end of communist rule in 1992, Laila is fourteen, and beginning to see Tariq in a different way that she does not quite understand.

The enthusiastic rejoicing at the end of the jihad is silenced by the internal battles of the Mujahideen, and when the bombs start falling on Kabul, Laila and Tariq are forced apart. Circumstances can make strange things happen, and Laila soon becomes a part of Mariam’s husband’s household, by necessity rather than choice. The rest of this unforgettable story reflects the heart-rending sacrifices of these women, and allows the reader a peek behind the burqa, to the heart of Afghanistan.

There are parts of this book that will have grown men surreptitiously blotting the tears that are on the verge of overflowing their ducts, and by the time you get to the middle, you won’t be able to put it down. Hosseini’s simple but richly descriptive prose makes for an engrossing read, and in my opinion, “A Thousand Splendid Suns” is among the best I have ever read. This is definitely not one to be missed.

Source: Amazon Customer Review*

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (by Michael Pollan): Number 1 in Hardcover Nonfiction

Thinking of going on a diet this New Year’s? Better read this book before you do. In Defense of Food will convince you that the solution to our weight woes is not to go on a diet, but, rather, to go off a diet–the Western diet, that is.

Don’t be fooled by this book’s subtitle; “manifesto” doesn’t do it justice. In Defense of Food is an out-and-out assault on the way America eats. Welcome to the agri-culture war, where Big Food, Agribiz, food scientists, and nutritionists battle not for our hearts and minds but our stomachs.

Pollan documents the decline of “real” foods in our diet–i.e., things that our grandparents would recognize as edible–and the corresponding rise of processed, packaged substances full of gobbledy-gook ingredients masquerading as food on our supermarket shelves. He notes that the meat-heavy Western diet inevitably leads to high rates of heart disease, obesity, and diabetes in every culture that adopts it.

In Defense of Food lays out in depressing detail how industrial agriculture has robbed the American diet of anything resembling diversity, citing the endless incarnations of corn and soy that the food industry foists on us before concluding that the only way to achieve a truly varied diet of predominantly plant-based, naturally nutritious whole foods is to ignore bogus health claims on boxes and simply stay out of the supermarket altogether, if possible, and rely on farmers’ markets instead. Sadly, that’s not a viable option for many Americans.

His other prescriptions for our overweight, undernourished nation? “Pay More, Eat Less”–i.e., the ol’ quality over quantity adage. Scale back the Paul Bunyonesque portions, if you don’t want to look like a lumberjack on steroids. And what’s up with the 24/7 snacking? As Pollan points out, there’s really no mystery to the so-called French paradox–French people just don’t snack, or help themselves to seconds.

We, on the other hand, consume soda, chips, cookies and candy all day long, but haven’t got time to prepare a decent meal, much less to sit down and savor it with friends or family. Pollan finds the antidote for this sorry state in the Slow Food movement, which, he says, “offers a coherent protest against, and alternative to, the Western diet and way of eating, indeed to the whole ever-more-desperate Western way of life.”

Pollan’s final piece of advice is my favorite: “Cook, And, If You Can, Plant a Garden.” The simple act of growing one’s own food was a nearly universal skill (as was cooking) a few generations back, but after World War II, leftover chemicals and pesticides became the basis of our current system of industrial agriculture. The military-industrial complex invaded our pantries and installed a regime of partially hydrogenated hucksters and high fructose corn syrup imposters, turning real food into a refugee on the crunchy granola fringe.

What Pollan advocates is nothing less than a wholesale rejection of the modern American food chain. It’s a radical proposal in a time when “cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts.”

Pollan’s just the latest agri-culture warrior to call for a return to real foods; In Defense of Food is, he admits, “a work of synthesis, built on a foundation of research and thinking laid by others.” Indeed. The snappy slogan that sums up Pollan’s book–”Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants”–echoes the premise of one of Pollan’s mentors, NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle, in her book What to Eat, published last year: “eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables.”

Pollan’s succeeded in reducing Nestle’s ten word mantra to a mere seven words, which, in this era of ever shorter attention spans, may be a public service. In Defense of Food could transform the way America eats, and not a minute too soon, because we’re eating ourselves to death.

Source: Amazon Customer Review*

* - These reviews are taken from Amazon.com customer reviews and do not reflect the views or opinions blogkindle.com

Top 5 Books In Each Category

Hardcover Fiction
1. THE APPEAL, by John Grisham
2. 7TH HEAVEN, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
3. DUMA KEY, by Stephen King
4. STRANGER IN PARADISE, by Robert B. Parker
5. A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, by Khaled Hosseini

Hardcover Nonfiction
1. IN DEFENSE OF FOOD, by Michael Pollan
2. AN INCONVENIENT BOOK, by Glenn Beck and Kevin Balfe
3. REAL CHANGE, by Newt Gingrich with Vince Haley and Rick Tyler
4. I AM AMERICA (AND SO CAN YOU!), by Stephen Colbert, Richard Dahm, Paul Dinello, Allison Silverman et al.
5. TOM CRUISE, by Andrew Morton

Hardcover Advice
1. THE SECRET, by Rhonda Byrne
2. YOU: STAYING YOUNG, by Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz et al.
3. ONE MONTH TO LIVE, by Kerry and Chris Shook
4. BECOME A BETTER YOU, by Joel Osteen
5. HOW NOT TO LOOK OLD, by Charla Krupp

Children’ Books
1. GALLOP!, written and illustrated by Rufus Butler Seder
2. FLAMINGOS ON THE ROOF, written and illustrated by Calef Brown
3. STAR WARS POP-UP GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Matthew Reinhart
4. FIRST THE EGG, written and illustrated by Laura Vaccaro Seeger
5. SMASH! CRASH!, by Jon Scieszka

Paperback Trade Fiction
1. THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH, by Ken Follett
2. ATONEMENT, by Ian McEwan
3. WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, by Sara Gruen
4. THE 6TH TARGET, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
5. THE KITE RUNNER, by Khaled Hosseini

Paperback Mass-Market Fiction
1. DREAM CHASER, by Sherrilyn Kenyon
2. HARD TO HANDLE, by Lori Foster
3. DAWN’S AWAKENING, by Lora Leigh
4. SISTERS, by Danielle Steel
5. SNOWFALL AT WILLOW LAKE, by Susan Wiggs

Paperback Nonfiction
1. EAT, PRAY, LOVE, by Elizabeth Gilbert
2. THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
3. THE AUDACITY OF HOPE, by Barack Obama
4. THE GIFT OF FEAR, by Gavin de Becker
5. THE INNOCENT MAN, by John Grisham

Paperback Advice
Top 5 at a Glance
1. A NEW EARTH, by Eckhart Tolle
2. YOU CAN HEAL YOUR LIFE, by Louise L. Hay
3. THE SPEED OF TRUST, by Stephen M. R. Covey with Rebecca R. Merrill
4. SKINNY BITCH, by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin
5. THE POWER OF NOW, by Eckhart Tolle

One of the best ways to gauge whether a new product is successful or not is to examine the number third party accessory’s available. Now there hasn’t been much in the way of new accessories for Kindle for quite a while and I think thats down to the limited availability of device. However there has been a lot of buzz surrounding new accessories coming out soon, and the Kindle Travel Case by sfbags.com is the first to be covered here on blogkindle.com

Here is what the press release says on the sfbags.com website;

San Francisco, CA, February 6 – WaterField Designs announces three protective cases for the Amazon Kindle: the Kindle SleeveCase, the Kindle Travel Case and the Kindle Slip Case—all custom-fitted to the Amazon Kindle dimensions. Each stylish case offers protection and accessibility, while maintaining a light look and feel.

The Kindle SleeveCase protects the Amazon Kindle with: high-grade neoprene; impact-resistant plastic to protect the screen; a sturdy, black, ballistic nylon shell; and a lightly padded closing flap. A rear, open-top pocket stows items such as the USB cable and ear buds. A subtle grey-black checked fabric trims the bottom of the case.

The Kindle Travel Case is designed with padded, internal compartments to keep the Kindle, the power adapter, the clip light, and any additional accessories tangle-free and organized. Self-locking zippers on a front pocket and on the main compartment ensure that contents don’t spill out. Available in six vibrant colors, the water-resistant case maintains its thin, compact shape, even when fully packed.

The Kindle Slip Case sports the same vibrantly colored, water-resistant material on its exterior as the Travel Case; a lightly padded, scratch-free liner; and impact-resistant plastic to protect the screen. In the Slip Case, the Kindle remains secure while still sliding in and out easily. The open top provides quick access.

“In response to customer requests, we’ve designed three options to meet the needs of every Kindle user we heard from,” explained owner, Gary Waterfield. “For rugged protection, we offer our signature SleeveCase custom-fit to the Kindle dimensions; for those who want their accessories along, we made the Travel Case and designed it to stay nice and thin when packed; and for those wanting light protection, we’ve got the Kindle Slip Case. As is often the situation, we have our customers to thank for ideas and feedback.”

Availability & Pricing

All three products are now available for pre-order and will begin shipping from www.sfbags.com from Tuesday, February 12, 2008.

The Amazon Kindle SleeveCase with Flap: $39. Color: Black.
The Amazon Kindle Travel Case: $49. Six colors: black, silver, brown, blue, green or red.
The Amazon Kindle Slip Case: $27. Six colors: black, silver, brown, blue, green or red.

I think at $39 for the sleeve case is a slightly on the expensive side, but it sounds like a sturdy product, and compared to the standard cover that comes with the Kindle, it is a step up in the right direction.

Source: engadget, sfbags.com

Since I assume that Kindle is only the first generation of mobile ebook readers, it got me thinking of what the next generation of Kindle ebook readers might look like.

Then by accident the other day I stumbled upon this forum thread which explored the idea of what a next-generation ebook reader might look like. Whilst some of the designs are outrageous, others have obviously had a lot of thought up into them and could work. I have attached a few of my favourites designs.

Let me know what you think.