Summary: News - 1) First impressions of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9". 2) The Waterstones-Kindle partnership unfolds in the U.K. with a free hour of reading eBooks in the stores. CORRECTION 11/17/12- Eolake Stobblehouse points out that I probably was not comparing apples with apples in my video comparison of the iPad 3 and the Fire HD 8.9". He emailed me as follows: "I was surprised at your report that the movie looked sharper on the Fire than on iPad 3. Because the Fire has a resolution of 1920×1200 pixels, and the iPad has a 2048-by-1536 resolution, slightly higher. I would thus guess that somehow the movie file that you got from Amazon was somehow better than the one Apple served. "If this is insulting, I apologize, but are you sure you got the HD version in both cases? Maybe Apple's was 720 lines HD and the Amazon was 1080 lines? "I’m only saying this because the result is so unexpected." Tech Tips - Brett McNeill has a better way to find the total number of locations on the Paperwhite Kindle than the one I offered last week. Also, the $69 basic Kindle's virtual keyboard has turned out to be no barrier to enjoyment of the device for at least one 85-year-old user, my father. Interview (starts at 14:15) - I spoke with Brian Mockenhaupt on the day after Veterans Day this week, to discuss his new Byliner Original, The Living and the Dead: War, Friendship, and the Battles That Never End. It's a moving account of three friends, Marines deployed in southern Afghanistan, and the dire toll war takes on them and their families. Highly recommended. Content - I didn't realize it when I recorded this week's episode, but the Kindle version of the poet John Ashbery's Planisphere that I bought in 2010 is no longer available at Amazon.com. Sorry about that. You can check out a paperback version of it here, or you might be interested in his The Tennis Court Oath: A Book of Poems, which is available for Kindle. Next Week's Guest - Neil Strandberg, Director of Member Technology at the American Booksellers Association.
