The thing I love the best about my kindle is all of the free downloads of public domain books that I can get. This week's haul included Fanny Burney, Tacitus and the Venerable Bede. Been in nerd heaven on my sofa all weekend except for a short and ultimately embarrassing trip to the grocery store.

Apple factories to face independent inspections

The working conditions in factories which produce Apple products are to be inspected, the computing giant has announced.

The Fair Labor Association (FLA) will audit several suppliers, including Foxconn in China, at Apple's request.

Safety at the factories has come under scrutiny after a series of fatal accidents and suicides in recent years.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook said: "Workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment." ...

Apple said results of the first assessments will be published in early March.

Further inspections will take place at factories run by Quanta and Pegatron later this year. In total, the audit will cover suppliers responsible for 90% of Apple products.

Book review: 'Watergate'
Thomas Mallon's novel deftly paints a picture of 1970s America and adds an imaginative back story to the characters. ...

In "Watergate," Mallon adeptly converts the real into fiction. This is Mallon's eighth novel, including 1994's "Henry and Clara," about a couple that President Abraham Lincoln invited to sit in the presidential box at Ford Theater that fateful night he was assassinated, and 2007's "Fellow Travelers," about a gay romance in McCarthy-era Washington.

So Mallon has the experience, both in fictionalizing history and in plumbing the depths of Washington, where he lives. In "Watergate," he adroitly captures the banal venality of Nixon, the loyal scheming of his political intimates and the complex interactions among shadowy ex-CIA agents and others that ended in criminal acts.

Mallon also conjures up back stories for some of the characters and frames others from a more humane perspective than history has bestowed upon them. Fred LaRue, the prison-bound bagman who delivered about $300,000 to the Watergate burglars to ensure their silence, picks up a liberal girlfriend. Nixon's loyal and long-serving secretary Rosemary Woods drunkenly erases more than 18 minutes of a secret White House tape. Burglar E. Howard Hunt's world collapses around him with the Watergate exposé and the death of his wife in a plane crash. ...

Still, for the knowledgeable, Mallon renders the era, the people and the place in vivid detail. He's particularly good at imagining an internal landscape for Woods, and weaves in a romantic affair for First Lady Pat Nixon. His portrayal of Alice Longworth is brilliant, with biting quip rolling from the nonagenarian daughter of Teddy Roosevelt in a withering stream.

Thomas Mallon (born November 2, 1951) is a novelist and critic. He was born in Glen Cove, New York. He attended Brown University as an undergraduate and earned a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He received the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1994 and won a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1987. Mallon taught English at Vassar College from 1979-1991. Mallon is the author of the novels Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, and most recently Fellow Travelers; as well as writing four works of nonfiction. He is a former literary editor of GQ, where he wrote the "Doubting Thomas" column for ten years, and has contributed frequently to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, and Harper's. He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and became Director of Preservation and Access…

Download the Universe was born out of a conversation in January 2012. A group of writers and scientists had gathered at a meeting called Science Online to talk about the startling growth of ebooks. It was clear that ebooks were becoming an extraordinary new medium, rivalling print books in the marketplace and offering opportunities that printed books could not. We saw great things in the future of science books. There was just one thing missing: a way for readers to find out about new science books. Book reviews were showing little interest; blogs offered scant, diffuse attention. We agreed that what was needed was a science ebook review. Here it is.

Our mission is to give readers a growing guide to the world of science ebooks. We review books about science that only exist in the digital world--Download the Universe doesn't include reviews of the automatic spin-offs of print books. But we define ebooks broadly. They may be self-published pdf manuscripts. They may be Kindle Singles about science. They can even be apps that have games embedded in them. We hope that we will eventually review new kinds of ebooks that we can't even imagine yet. And we hope that you will find Download the Universe a useful doorway into that future.

So how much is a fair price to pay for an e-book?

This issue is going nuclear and a lot of people believe that charging $10 or more for the portability and convenience of an e-book is ridiculous.

Remember how much money e-readers were supposed to save book buyers? It was among the big reasons why 20 million Americans decided to take the plunge.

So why is it that consumers are still paying through the nose for e-book titles that ought to cost a fraction of the price charged for the used hardcover version?

So why is it that consumers are still paying through the nose for e-book titles that ought to cost a fraction of the price charged for the used hardcover version?

Apple will unveil the iPad 3 on March 7. A new report by Ars Technica suggests that Apple is also already close to relese iOS 6 . This would be a major surprise. Ars Technica found artefacts in their server access logs of device running on the 2,048x,1536px resolution. In addition they also found iOS 6 in several user agent entries. If iOS 6 will be already announced next week is not that certain.

That a web site can already track iOS 6 devices is though a strong indicator that the iOS 6 release is around the corner.

iPad 3 and iOS 6 spotted in Server Logs: The iPad 3 is possibly launching with a whole new iOS.

Finding Your Book Interrupted ... By the Tablet You Read It On

Can you concentrate on Flaubert when Facebook is only a swipe away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy while Twitter beckons?

People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.

E-mail lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.

That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled e-books on apps from Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder then ever to sit down and focus on reading. ...

For book publishers, who have already seen many consumers convert from print books to e-readers, the rise of tablets poses a potential danger: that book buyers may switch to tablets and then discover that they just aren’t very amenable to reading.

Oh -- I use this guy with the iPad -- works perfectly.

One of my cousins mentioned this site...anybody brought it up yet?

http://ereadernewstoday.com/free-kindle ... 2/6711504/