selfing

In what may be a pre-emptive strike against the strong possibility that Apple will reveal a slate-style device on January 27, Amazon has said it will up the royalty for authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to 70 percent of the list price of their e-books. That's a big jump from its current 35 percent royalty rate and not coincidentally, the same number Apple doles out to developers who sell their apps in Apple's App Store.

Starting on June 30, Amazon says that for each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who select the new 70 percent royalty option will receive 70 percent of the list price, minus delivery costs. This new option will be in addition to and will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option, which is set at a 65-35 split, with 65 percent going to Amazon.

Amazon didn't have any comment about whether the new pricing was a response to Apple's royalty program for its App Store, which offers thousands of e-books as self-contained apps along with e-reader apps from Amazon (Kindle for iPhone, Stanza), Barnes & Noble, and other e-book stores. But it did say that delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be 15 cents per megabyte.

"At today's median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold," the news release notes. "This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option."

The announcement also sets some parameters around the 70 percent royalty option. To qualify, books must satisfy the following set of requirements: … Read more

Authors worldwide can now self-publish Kindle versions of their books, Amazon.com said Friday.

Amazon also said that its Digital Text Platform will now support books written in German and French.

The self-publishing platform, which allows writers to upload electronic versions of their books to Amazon's e-book reader store, was previously limited to English and to authors based in the United States.

In an effort to expand global readership, Amazon said support for additional languages is expected to come over the next few months.

The Digital Text Platform enables writers to publish without the middleman (i.e. a book … Read more

MB Subconscious Self Number is, like most every program from Mystic Board, an advertisement-delivery vehicle first, and an actual useful program... well, not at all. Although the program's description promises to "make you aware of your reaction to a stressful situation," we found that the program did nothing of the sort.

Like all other Mystic Board programs, the interface for this one was cluttered with ads, with fake menu items directing users to Donate or Make Money Online (these are actually just links that take you to the Mystic Board Web site). Users are instructed to enter … Read more

Chalk one up for the cringe-worthy marketing term "personal branding": there is a new partnership between Twitter, hub for informing the world exactly what you're doing and thinking at all moments of the day, and LinkedIn, the business-networking tool on steroids. In an announcement Monday, the two companies explained that LinkedIn status messages can sync with Twitter.

"The business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important, and more and more people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways," … Read more

Studies suggest that anywhere from 2 to 13 percent of patients in emergency rooms are HIV positive, according to Charlotte Gaydos, a clinical microbiologist at Johns Hopkins University. So the emergency room seemed like a logical place to test whether an untrained person is able to self-administer his or her own HIV test, and then accurately read the results (one line means negative, two lines mean positive).

In an urban hospital, researchers from Johns Hopkins offered people in the emergency room the option to test themselves for HIV while they waited. More than 90 percent of the people they asked … Read more

DUBLIN, Calif.--Don't tase me, bro. Really.

CNET News took a trip to the Alameda County Sheriff's Office Regional Training Center on Friday to have a look at some of the newest equipment from Taser, which was among the companies showing off weaponry at the UrbanShield 2009 training event. The electric-shock gadgets are controversial and have drummed up some bad press over the years for causing the occasional serious injury or even fatality. But the company has maintained its insistence that they are significantly safer than the alternative (i.e. guns).

We didn't get to tase anybody. … Read more

Sex with oneself in the world of plants and animals is called, fittingly, "selfing." The offspring of selfing females share 100 percent of their mothers' genes, and they can go on to produce their own offspring.

The offspring of "outcrossing" (the sexy science term for mating) males and females, on the other hand, share 50 percent of each parent's genes. Some offspring, naturally, are males that cannot bear offspring.

Of the two systems, it turns out that outcrossing produces offspring whose more diverse genetic codes lead to greater chances for longer lives, lower susceptibility to … Read more

Profit Loss Report Spreadsheet is an Excel spreadsheet that allows users to track small business expenses from month to month. It's nothing fancy, but it may be a good choice for users who, for whatever reason, don't want to use bookkeeping software.

The program's interface is simple, with a separate spreadsheet for each month, plus a report sheet and data sheet. Users add vendor names in the data spreadsheet, which are then available for selection in the other pages. Users then enter financial transactions much as they would in any other financial software, with the date, vendor, … Read more

With version 14 of this venerable archiving tool, WinZip aims specifically at Windows 7 compliance and enhancements, and adds a few other new features, too. WinZip in Windows 7 gets extensive support for libraries, tools, and recent archives in the jumplist, previews in Windows Explorer for certain file types, and basic touch-screen support. Multitouch support is limited to rotating pictures previewed from WinZip archives.

WinZip 14 also includes minor security enhancements. New automatic wiping keeps confidential data secret by "shredding" the temporary file that WinZip creates by default whenever it opens an archive. The shredding uses U.S. … Read more