Michael J. Ross writes "Years ago, technologists and consumers alike could only dream of surfing the Web using the (increasingly ubiquitous) mobile devices available, such as smartphones. But that is now commonplace, resulting from a convergence of several trends: the standardization of wireless access protocols, greater carrier coverage and bandwidth, the popularity of mobile apps, and more powerful mobile products — featuring embedded keyboards and pointing devices, greater memory, hardware miniaturization, and larger screens with better resolution. For the typical website nowadays, the primary impediment to the site working well on leading mobile devices is that the site was never intended for them in the first place. Web developers and other site builders using content management systems, can now learn how to build for mobile accessibility, with help from resources such as Professional Mobile Web Development with WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal — authored by James Pearce, who is quite active in the mobile development space." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from CNN: "As further proof of how digital media dominate today's entertainment, Amazon announced Thursday that its customers now buy more e-books for its Kindle device than all print books — hardcover and paperback — combined. Given that people seem to spend more and more of their time peering at glowing electronic screens, this was probably bound to happen. Still, the swiftness of this sea change — three-and-a-half years after the Kindle hit the market — appeared to catch even Amazon by surprise. 'Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly — we've been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years,' said Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, in a statement."

Repossessed writes "Amazon is now cracking down on Yaoi manga, with several titles that have been available on the Kindle since 2009 being delisted and others now being rejected, according to Digital Manga Publisher. DMP has also stated that Amazon has not given any rationale for the rejections and removals, and Amazon has not been answering emails or phone calls from journalists asking about the subject."

lee1 writes "Newt Gingrich has written 156 book reviews on Amazon, at one point becoming ranked in the site's top 500 list. Most of the books are cheesy political thrillers, but the newly announced presidential candidate is also trying to learn about quantum physics, and shows good taste, 'strongly recommending' Richard Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter." Gingrich is an early joiner; I'd like to see the books on the shelves of the other likely presidential candidates, too.

An anonymous reader writes "A bookseller and app developer has blamed Apple for writing its final chapter, claiming the iPad maker had pushed it out of business. 'Apple has made it completely impossible for anyone but Apple to make a profit selling contemporary ebooks on any iOS device,' BeamItDown said. 'We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us by changing the rules in the middle of the game.' The company blamed Apple's decision to impose a 30% commission on books sold through apps for the unhappy ending."

CWmike writes "Three years ago, the world's 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information. Researchers at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the San Diego Supercomputer Center estimate that the total is equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books stretching from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times. By 2024, business servers worldwide will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, the scientists say. The report, titled 'How Much Information?: 2010 Report on Enterprise Server Information,' (PDF) was released at the SNW conference last month."

ecmguru writes "My first impression of the book was that the author did an excellent job in presenting records management (RM) concepts, describing how Alfresco implemented the RM features in Share, and how you could customize this features if necessary. I was somewhat excited about reading this book because I am currently working on an RM project." Read on for the rest of ecmguru's review.

jrepin writes "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has just released in tandem the second edition of its president and founder Richard Stallman's selected essays, Free Software, Free Society, and his semi-autobiography, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution."

fergus07 writes "Researchers from the Human Media Lab at Canada's Queen's University have created a fully-functioning floppy E-Ink smartphone, which they also refer to as a paper computer. Like its thicker, rigid-bodied counterparts, the Paperphone can do things like making and receiving calls, storing e-books, and playing music. Unlike them, however, it conforms to the shape of its user's pocket or purse, and can even be operated through bending actions."

J. L. Tympanum writes "After many years as a star programmer, I have taken a position which involves maintaining and rebuilding the in-house network of a small company. There are maybe 100 machines, a mix of blade servers running Linux and desktop PCs running Windows of all flavors. Basically, I have to learn networking from scratch. I have been given an 'unlimited' budget to buy routers, switches, etc., to set up my own little test network as part of the learning process. So the question is: what's the right strategy here? What routers or switches or other equipment should I acquire? What books should I read? Should I take classes from Cisco, Global Knowledge, my local community college, or somewhere else?"

MassDosage writes "Apache JMeter written by Emily H. Halili is very much an introductory guide to using Apache's open source JMeter testing tool. Unfortunately a book that should have been good fodder to whet the appetites of testers is spoiled by shoddy editing, poor writing and very little content that isn't already included in JMeter's own user manual." Read below for the rest of MassDosage's review.

The downside of not having ones base of children's stories crafted and maintained by trained storytime engineers from the Disney Corporation has reared its warty head in Russia and Ukraine. A map of purportedly Russian folktale characters' haunts has drawn fire from Ukrainians, who object to what they see as the appropriation (from Ukraine) of such famous characters as miraculously strong Ilya Muromets, the gold-producing Speckled Hen, and Kolobok ("a cheerful talking cake who flees animals eager to eat him"). This seems like nothing that couldn't be cleared up with some artfully mis-pointed highway signs and a few tons of papier-mâché.

KuanH writes "Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide is billed as a complete guide to using Amazon's SimpleDB database API. It's most detailed for PHP. It's helpful for Python. But the Java code and explanations aren't up to the standard of the others. It includes a primer on using Amazon S3 with SimpleDB: files stored on S3, file metadata stored in SimpleDB — again, less good for Java. It also covers tuning to reduce usage costs, caching using memcached, and ways to batch-update and make serial or parallel requests to SimpleDB. However, it's missing some information that beginners might need, and it's perhaps not quite advanced enough for the more experienced. Downloadable example code is available only for PHP." Keep reading for the rest of Kuan's review.

leek writes "An Amazon.com pricing algorithm which lets sellers set prices based on other sellers' prices led to a positive feedback loop, causing the biology text The Making of A Fly to reach $23M. Biologist Micheal Eisen writes: 'What's fascinating about all this is both the seemingly endless possibilities for both chaos and mischief. It seems impossible that we stumbled onto the only example of this kind of upward pricing spiral. And as soon as it was clear what was going on here, I and the people I talked to about this couldn't help but start thinking about ways to exploit our ability to predict how others would price their books down to the 5th significant digit -- especially when they were clearly not paying careful attention to what their algorithms were doing.' The price of the book was reset but is currently back up to $976.98."

trawg writes "Sony has officially announced a new line of 'Sony tablets.' There are two models, both offering 3G/4G and Wi-Fi running Android 3.0 — one is a typical tablet with a 9.4-inch screen and the other is an 'unprecedented dual screen' type. Digital content is a big focus: music, books and first generation PlayStation titles will all be available (subject to the usual region restrictions for content)."

An anonymous reader writes "85 science fiction authors including Iain M Banks, Larry Niven, Stephen Hunt, Greg Bear and Michael Moorcock have written an open letter of protest to the BBC complaining of disrespect towards the genre, when, during an entire day of coverage of fiction by the BBC, not a single SF, fantasy or horror book was looked at. Here's the original article that sparked the open letter, along with updates. The British prime minister, David Cameron, when asked to comment, said that he doesn't have a favorite genre, so I guess he's not taking Greg Bear books to bed either!"

An anonymous reader writes "Agile Development & Business Goals: The Six Week Solution has scrum-like elements, fairly rapid iterations, automated testing, and some other things that you have come to rely on to make your Agile methodology work. But the Six Week Solution agile process has some other things, too, that make it a very interesting take on the classic Agile approach." Read below for the rest of the AC's review.

Last month we reported that Amazon was confronting lenders of Kindle e-books. Today, thebian writes "Amazon announced yesterday that it would allow 11,000 libraries in the US to lend ebooks. The press release doesn't say exactly when this will start. Amazon is trying to speed the adoption of the Kindles. If people are slow to flock to the device the reason is the high prices the publishers cling to. Amazon itself sometimes undercuts Kindle prices, and almost always some booksellers on the Amazon Marketplace undercut the Kindle. There's no indication about what books might be offered through this program."

jm2dev writes "The title is self descriptive, you will learn what a REST architecture is, the concepts behind it, advantages and constraints, and how to implement web services in a RESTful way serving and consuming content using the Java programming language, as command line applications, desktop graphical client, run by an application server or even as standalone applications. Almost everything you need to know to start working with web services in Java the REST way is covered by this book." Read on for the rest of Jose's review.

vellorean writes "I have been reading Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook by Sarath Lakshman, published by Packt, for a while. While most people I know learn shell scripts themselves, I was looking to refresh my concepts a little as well as have a reference lying around on the table for fast access." Read below for the rest of vellorean's review.