booktwo.org

[Sorry, bit of a log jam with Stop Press over the last few days. Normal updates should be resuming…]

• Live from Amazon’s Kindle 2 press conference – Engadget – Improved downloading, more content, better design, longer battery, and the rather nifty text-to-speech feature. Nothing mould-breaking yet, but there are some things we’re still waiting to hear on…
• BookArmy – HarperCollins’ answer to LibraryThing and Shelfari finally opens its doors. Not much has changed since we first looked at the site several months back…
• Home — AuthorsPlace – Random House’s authors’ blogs site is up, although there’s not a lot of activity…
• Geoff Dyer on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker | The Guardian – quot;If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.quot;
• Bookride: John Cowper Powys. The Second Hand Bookshop. A Rant. – “It is for this reason that a bookshop–especially a second-hand bookshop–is an arsenal of explosives, an armoury of revolutions, an opium den of reactions.”
• Google Books on Mobile – Hello free mobile library.
• Times Emit: Amazon: Battle lines being drawn? – Peter rounds up the latest in the Amazon advance. Territoriality and publishers’ inability to make terms with Amazon (which I’m not entirely criticising) are going to be very, very big issues.
• Google and Amazon to Put More Books on Cellphones – NYTimes.com – “We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.” We wonder if that includes an iPhone app.
• Proboscis | Diffusion » constitution – From Giles Lane: “handy, free, pocket-sized constitutional heritage resources for legislators.”