Left to our own devices: Rage against the machine

There’s a quiet uprising going on at Amazon, where Kindle users have started a boycott of books that cost more than $9.99. Galley Cat has the exective summary, and Andrew Savikas has more at O’Reilly TOC, but what’s really interesting is to go to Amazon itself and see how the online retailer’s own tools have been turned against it: Irate readers simply created a 9 99boycott tag and are busily applying it to books they think are overpriced. There’s an active discussion as well, and a tag cloud with related tags such as “drm infected” and “overpriced.”

ICv2 discusses rumors of two e-book readers that are on their way to the American market: A possible competitor for the Kindle from Barnes & Noble (here’s more) and Fujitsu’s FLEPia, which launches this month in Japan at a retail price of $1,000. The big deal about the FLEPia is that it has color, and it also has some standard computer functions, extending its usefulness.

Keenspot is looking for comics to put on the iPhone, and they expect to expand to other platforms, including Blackberry, Android, Palm, and Nokia, in the near future. Don’t make comics? They are also looking for freelancers to do the conversions. Even if you’re not interested in a gig, it’s worth clicking over to see the screenshot of their comic in the top 20 iPhone apps, following Classics: As Seen on TV!, the bible, several volumes of Twilight, and iPhone: The Missing Manual. Sort of tells you where our priorities lie, doesn’t it?

Good news for manga fans with Android mobile phones: The Android comics viewer can now handle manga that reads right to left.

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