reader

Sony has reached a deal with Google to offer access to more than a half-million public domain books from Google available on its current models of its Reader. The books will be available for free to users of the Reader via Sony's eBook Store, which now boasts more than 600,000 titles. The move is seen as a direct challenge to Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, which has access to over 245,000 titles along with newspapers, magazines and blogs.

Google is not not not building a social network. Really. They’re not. They’re just adding features to every product ever made to enable you to communicate and otherwise share information among your peer group and store all your information in a centralized place. That’s soooo not a social network, so I don’t need anybody telling me about how Google Reader’s new comment feature shows that they’re a social network.

Google has added a lot of sharing-based features to Google Reader in recent memory, but it has now launched the ability to have conversations among those who are sharing items. Google acknowledges that this is a key element of sharing that the service has been lacking. I would have to agree.

Ever had trouble getting your embedded videos to show up in Google Reader? You're not alone. Apparently your site has to be on a whitelist for it to work for you. For example, YouTube videos work, because YouTube is on the list. WordPress videos don't, because Wordpress is not on the list. Somebody complained about the problem in a Google Groups post, and was met with a response from a Google Reader Engineeer, Mihai Parparita:

Google Reader has undergone some changes. The objective seems to have been to simplify things and give the whole thing a cleaner look and feel. While I'm sure the changes will still receive their share of critics, I for one am generally pleased with the update. Let's take a look at the changes. First off, if you can't find something that is supposed to be there:  

We English speakers are truly lucky that so much of the world is willing to accommodate us, learning enough of the language to at least give directions to the nearest bathroom.  But there's an amazing amount of written content out there that isn't in any given person's native language, and to help with this issue, Google Reader has gained an auto-translate option.

Google Reader has added some new data to the Trends department. For those who do not use Google Reader, or pay little attention to the Trends feature, it simply lays your reading habits out graphically so you can see when you are reading feeds the most, what you are reading the most, what you are reading the least, and so on.

Plastic Logic has launched a new electronic newspaper reader similar to Amazon's Kindle, but it's about the size of a regular piece of copy paper. Like the Kindle, this reader utilizes E-Ink's black and white display technology.