books

Online consumers may one day be able to sell or trade their digital items to other users, at least if a new Amazon patent comes to fruition.

Granted to the retail giant on January 29, the patent dubbed "Secondary market for digital objects" describes an electronic marketplace for swapping digital items.

You'd start off by housing your purchased music, videos, apps, and e-books in your own online storage space, just as many of us do today. When you get tired of listening to the same songs or reading the same books, you can move those items to … Read more

A little more than a year after introducing its self-publishing book software, Apple is heavily promoting some works that were made using it.

The company today began promoting some of those titles in a new section called "Breakout Books" which rounds up books that have high user ratings. That spans across three genres: romance; sci-fi and fantasy; and mysteries and thrillers, along with a collection of other titles.

The promotion, spotted by The New York Times, comes just days ahead of when Inkling, which was founded by former Apple executive Matt MacInnis, plans to hold an event in … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Google Glass to use bone conduction instead of traditional headphones.

- Google searches expose racial bias, says study of names.

- Vampire Weekend announces new album details in the NY Times Classifieds section.… Read more

MacBook Pros equipped with a Retina display are not exactly priced to move. Best Buy and Amazon are trying to change that.

Best Buy, for example, is now selling the 128GB version (model MC975LL/A) of the 13.3-inch MacBook Pro Retina for $1,549.99, $150 off the regular $1,699.99 price.

Need 256GB of solid-state storage with that gorgeous Retina screen? That model (MD213LL/A) is now $1,799.99, $200 off the regular price of $1,999.99.

The pricier 15.4-inch models with 256GB and 512GB solid-state drives (MC975LL/A and MC976LL/A, respectively), also … Read more

If you have a laptop system, you might be familiar with the frustrations that can be involved with using it in a desktop environment where you might need to clear a space on your desk to set it up, or have it sit awkwardly to the side while you connect a keyboard, mouse, an adapter for an external display, and other peripherals.

There are several options available to help in these situations, with one that I recently outlined being the new Thunderbolt docking solutions that are beginning to enter the market. While these options reduce the number of cables to … Read more

Don't hold your breath for a sequel to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

Speaking to the press yesterday during the BlackBerry 10 launch event, CEO Thorsten Heins wasn't particularly upbeat about tablets.

"The tablet business is rather difficult," he conceded.

Indeed, the tablet market has seen a lot of entrants, but only a few winners. While Apple's iPad franchise continues to dominate, its market share is eroding to only a few players, including Google's Nexus 7, Amazon's Kindle Fire franchise, and a few of the Samsung Electronics tablets. But that doesn't leave a … Read more

Apple has released a set of EFI firmware updates to address a rare problem where some systems might unexpectedly shut down or stop functioning after the battery has been used extensively.

Apple's determines battery health in part by the number of charge cycles it has been through (one charge cycle being a sum of partial charges that equates to one full charge), and depending on the system claims that batteries should last between 300 and 1,000 charge cycles. However, a rare problem in some systems might result in a nonfunctional computer if the system detects that 1,000 … Read more

Today's news: the iPad has hit 128GB. That's fine. But my real question is, why does the $999 11-inch Air still have only a 64GB SSD?

If you look at the world of business-targeted Windows 8 tablets, many of them have 128GB storage options...including the upcoming Surface Pro. The logic is clear, especially if you're in a business where you need to store tons of files locally and don't want to sync in the cloud. In that sense, a stepped-up storage option for the larger iPad makes obvious sense.

The real benefit of 128GB of storage, though, would be in the 11-inch MacBook Air.… Read more

Yes, it's true. After several frustrating delays, Research In Motion is ready to formally pull back the curtain on its next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system and its first wholly new BlackBerry in a year and a half.

Whether RIM has enough up its sleeves to really wow the public remains to be seen. But there's no question that the company has everything riding on the success of BlackBerry 10. A hit would inject life into RIM and offer proof that it has a place in an industry that it once dominated -- while failure could accelerate a breakup … Read more