Of Kindles and pencils: Yes, that’s a Kindle 2 next to a pencil. I’m just curious if Amazon might be overdoing it. Would a somewhat thicker machine mean a more rugged E Ink display? I don’t know. What do you think? I would agree that thin-and-light could be good for elderly people and others who’d have trouble up holding a regular book.

Detail: Yes, word fans, I’m gonna keep spelling Nook with a cap N, just as the Times’ Brad Stone wisely did in reporting that the Nook was sold out for the holidays.

E-books, e-magazines and newspapers can piggyback on each other, so it’s good to see Conde Nast demoing a Wired Magazine edition for the ever-rumored Apple tablet.

I hope the idea evolves the right way, with such features as customizable, reflowable text. Didn’t Shakespeare say, “Kill all the designers”? More seriously, shouldn’t smart designers learn to live with reflowability?

Needless to say, Conde Nast’s concept and similar ones could be used with hardware from other vendors.

I continue to believe we’ll see an Apple tablet in time, but if not, then other vendors will fill in the gap.

Significantly, Comcast and other cable interests are starting to set up shop on the Net, with movies and other offerings for subscribers. The more enticing the content, the more market for hardware. And movie-capable hardware could work great for e-books—perhaps displayed in double-page format.

And speaking for twin pages: When the devil is the new Kindle for PC app going to have them? That would be high on my list, along with other wrinkles such as a choice of fonts and optional all-text bolding, which can be useful even on many LCDs.

Would Gary Price—the founding info-maven of ResourceShelf—buy The Case for Books in an electronic or paper edition?

TeleRead promised an answer, and directly from Gary himself, here it is. – D.R.

The winner? The e-book version, which I’ve been reading on Kindle for iPhone. A few of the reasons why:

1. In all of the last-minute stuff I needed to do before a trip, I didn’t have time to go to the bookstore.
2. I purchased the book the night before my trip. I could have even bought the book in the taxi on the way to the airport or while I waited to board at the gate.
3. Like it or not, Price. It was about one-half the cost of the print edition. By the way, some/all of the essays are likely available for free via New York Review of Books.
4. It seems I’m always losing things so this way I had nothing to lose (except my iPhone, which I would be taking with me anyway) and one fewer item to place in my already-overflowing carry-on bag.

Have I read any of the books on my actual Kindle device (1st gen) since I returned home? No, I continue with my iPhone.

I still have issues with low-light reading. An Amazon rep suggested I could buy a book light and attach it to the Kindle cover. Well, I have a book light and have attached it to the cover. It’s a mediocre experience at best.

(1) “Price of devices,” (2) “price of e-books,” (3) “Smartphones,” (4) “Apple’s rumored tablet computer,” (5) popular authors’ ambiguity over e-books, (6) digital rights complexities, (7) standards issues and (8) librarians’ fears about their jobs.

So, gang, what’s your take? I myself don’t think in terms of either one kind of e-gizmo or another—or even P vs. E. For a long time, there’ll be many choices, even in the latter area. Cellphones aren’t going to kill the Kindle, or vice versa.

Related: eWeek piece arguing against e-readers and other single-use devices.

Apparently. Fron the Kindle Facebook page:

“Kindle Customers, We have heard from many of you that you would like to have a better way to organize your growing Kindle libraries. We are currently working on a solution that will allow you to organize your Kindle libraries. We will be releasing this functionality as an over-the-air software update as soon as it is ready, in the first half of next year. – The Kindle Team.”

(Thanks to John Hagewood for the link)

But now comes word from BusinessWeek that Sony will also sell e-books elsewhere—in the new Sony Online Store, the current name.

This one will sell music, movies and downloadable apps, too. The feeling among Sony watchers is that the new Sony store will use an iTune-ish approach.No startup date has been announced. 

I’m curious if or how the new Sony store may works with the existing eBook Library software. What’s more, might the current eBookStore vanish? I don’t think so, but who knows?

Is Sony in time going to do the e-book-capable multimedia table that Apple is supposed to offer us? That certainly would jibe well with Sony’s history as a hardware company and the store’s multimedia approach. I’m just extrapolating and guessing. But if you work for a publisher and need to anticipate future possibilities, add this one to the brew.

Also, what e-book format will the new Sony store use? ePub? And what about the DRM situation? Will Adobe-DRMed ePub be the norm? And what if publishers don’t want DRM? Will Sony in fact offer publishers a choice, as I believe it’s indicated?

Apple has backed off from DRM in the real iTunes Store, at least when it comes to music (it is selling “protected” books in the ScrollMotion format). Sony should do the same with e-books.

Perhaps social DRM could be a compromise. I’ll query Sony to see if it has any word on the DRM and format issues and other book-specific details.

Related: Techmeme roundup and Google News roundup.

Photo Note:

I’ve had more time to play around with the Astak, and the bloom is off the rose. Yes, the e-ink screen is truly amazing, and far clearer than the touch-sensitive Sony reader’s. However, it has certain other problems.

In Praise of Astak

Before I start talking about the Astak’s shortcomings, I should mention that the company itself has some astoundingly good customer service. For one thing, they monitor the Astak forums on MobileRead and pop up to answer questions.

Whenever I have posted a technical question on the forum, I have almost immediately been emailed by an Astak representative with suggestions and offers of advice. Now, granted, I do not know whether this is their default behavior toward all users, or just because they know I’m reviewing their product. I’d like to think the former is true.

Another nice thing about the device itself is that the firmware is remarkably easy to upgrade. Just put the firmware file on an SD card, slide the card in, and reboot into upgrade mode using a combination of keypresses.

My only complaint in this regard is that the instructions I found for upgrading on their website were not entirely clear. One of the buttons to be pressed is mentioned as the “increase volume key”. I assumed that meant the rocker switch on the right—but after that did not work and I searched some more, I learned that those instructions only applied to the 6” Astak reader devices; for the 5”, you press the page-forward button left of the screen instead. Just a little confusing.

Now let’s talk about some of those shortcomings.

Battery Life

One of the things that makes e-ink so great is that it only uses power when you turn the page. The e-ink page uses micro-capsules that are rotated by current, but require no current to stay set as they are. This is why e-ink readers have such a long battery life.

This should mean that, theoretically, an e-ink reader should use almost no power at all when it is “idling”. I should be able to leave it “open,” like a book, for days on end and pick it up with the same battery level that I left off.

(Granted, there may need to be some minor power consumption—but since it is not driving a display, surely it should use less than a digital watch, which is able to run for months on a single tiny battery.)

Unfortunately, this is not the case with the Astak. If I leave it alone for several days and forget to plug it in, the battery drains completely dry—and requires approximately “overnight” to charge back up to full again. This puts a damper on what ought to be one of an e-ink reader’s biggest advantages.

A Peeling Reader

I also noticed that my sample has started to develop a flaw remarked upon by other Astak users: the peeling paint problem. About half of Astak owners have found that, with a little wear, the paint covering their reader starts to peel off. Here you can see it starting on mine, right around the left page-turn arrows. (You may need to click to enlarge it to see more clearly.)

It is only a cosmetic problem, of course, and Astak’s excellent customer service again comes to the fore: they will, on request, provide replacement units that do not suffer from this flaw. Not everyone even cares about a replacement; one Astak user on the Baen Bar has just peeled all the paint off of his and been quite happy to keep using it that way.

Ex-Calibre

For some reason, I have not been able to make Calibre work with the Astak. I am not sure whether this is the Astak’s problem or some flaw with Calibre (which worked just fine with my Sony).

When I posted to MobileRead about it, it was suggested that I should remove the Chinese language manual from internal memory, as it messes with Calibre’s ability to connect.

I wanted to try to do this, but it seems at the moment I cannot get the reader to connect to my computer’s USB at all. It just shows a “charging” indicator and blinking light, and does not give me a “press Enter to connect” dialogue. But others seem to be able to use Calibre with their devices just fine.

It was not a great handicap, however; I ended up just using an SD card reader to copy my books directly onto my card, which I then put in the Astak. It just takes a few extra steps to make the copy.

If I were going to keep this reader, I might be more concerned about getting Calibre working with it—but since I will be sending it back, I am not going to let it bother me.

Moving on to formats…

Mobipocket vs. ePub

First of all, the majority of the books I read are unencrypted ePub these days, from Baen. I recently downloaded all of my Webscription purchases and put them on a directory of the 2-gig SD card I normally use for my digital camera, and put that in the Astak. The books load right up with no problem.

Reading ePub books on the EZReader is, well, “EZ”. They load quickly, and I am able to access the table of contents, zoom, search, even use the read-aloud feature (once I had updated the firmware to the latest version).

However, a Mobipocket book I read on it did not fare so well. This was 1634: The Baltic War, from one of the Baen CDs hosted on The Fifth Imperium. It was not available in ePub format, so I loaded the Mobi.

I found that, though I was able to read the file, the Astak reader was unable to parse the Mobi table of contents. There was a table of contents I could jump to, but it was all HTML links and I couldn’t figure out how to click on any of those links (if it was even possible at all). I ended up having to use the “jump to page” function in the menu to navigate through the book.

Furthermore, every so often the reader would lose track of my place. I would turn it back on to find myself a few dozen or hundred pages back from where I had been. If I find myself faced with a Mobi-only title in the future (at least while I still have the Astak), I will probably go to the extra trouble to convert it with Calibre first.

eReader and PalmDoc

In email correspondence, Bob Barry, the Director of Global Business Development for Astak, said that the Astak already supports non-DRMed books in Fictionwise’s eReader format, and they are negotiating to add support for eReader DRM as well.

However, I tried testing with three unencrypted eReader books I created myself and that I had verified opened on other devices, and the Astak did not even see them in a directory listing of the SD card. Very disappointing. It appears the Astak may not be the eReader e-reader of my dreams after all.

I was able to open a book in the PalmDoc format, though since it had no table of contents navigation through it would have the same problem as Mobipocket.

Awkward File List Navigation

I should also note that the navigation through the file list is a bit of a pain if you have a large directory. My Baen e-book files take 27 screens to list, alphabetically by title, and there is not any way to jump to specific titles. (Nor can I sort them in any way except title, date, or type, which is not terribly useful in this situation.)

So if I were to want to read Worlds of Honor or Young Miles, I would have to resign myself to paging through 27 pages of files to get to the ones I wanted.

I suppose if I copied my Calibre directory onto the card rather than my unsorted Baen ePub directory I might at least be able to navigate the directory tree by author, but I would still need to know what author wrote the book I wanted.

However, I cannot now remember whether Sony’s file list interface was any better.

PDF

But the PDF format is where the Astak easily falls the shortest. I had expected that, being a more recent device, it should handle PDF files at least as well as the Sony did. (You may wish to read my review of the Sony’s PDF capabilities for comparison purposes.) However, its performance left a number of factors to be desired.

First of all, I loaded the image-only PDF of “Bronte’s Egg”. Full-page, it looked about the same as it did on the Sony, only smaller by an inch. However, when I used the “rotate” option and turned the reader 90 degrees, when I pressed “page forward” the device simply crashed back out to the file list again. I tried multiple times, and it always behaved in this way.

Moving on to Dragon Warriors, we see that in both the portrait and landscape versions, the text looks pretty good. The problem comes when we use the “zoom” function, to break the PDF out of its formatting and zoom the text in a few times. The result: the first column on the page is nowhere to be found. The text below the header starts at the beginning of the second column.

(The Sony was not perfect in this regard either, but at least it put the “Introduction” header at the middle of the page and kept the first column of text before it. But no amount of paging up would reveal that first column of text in the Astak.)

Spycraft, the 160-megabyte overformatted bloat-monster, took more than a little time to load, but once it did it looked fairly decent, if much too small to read. Rotating 90 degrees did improve the readability some—but attempting to zoom in further simply zoomed out instead—and it remained zoomed out through each of the several zoom levels, until I finally reached the one that zoomed it back in to its original half-page view.

Also, zooming, rotating, and page-turning were all extremely sluggish—not that I am surprised, given the 160-megabyte size of this monster.

Spirit of the Century, a much smaller book and less-bloated PDF, came off considerably better. The smaller page size meant it is more readable in general on the Astak, and the non-cruft formatting meant it came off considerably better zoomed in as well.

Tables of Discontent

One other annoyance had to do with the table of contents. The Astak would read the PDF’s table of contents, and this included multi-level TOCs such as the one from Spycraft.

In a multi-level table of contents, if I clicked on “4. Chapter 4: Skills” I would get another table of contents, starting off with “1. Chapter 4: Skills” and then listing subheads for 2, 3, and 4.

So assuming I want to start off at the beginning of Chapter 4, I would click 1 for “1. Chapter 4: Skills”, right? Wrong. Clicking 1 would put me back at the main TOC. To go into the chapter, I would need to click 2 or up for one of the subheads. This is not a very intuitive interface design.

Conclusion

Although ePub files are a joy to read on the Astak, other formats are considerably less so—and the interface makes getting to those files somewhat awkward when I have a lot of them. With that in mind, though I am enjoying using it while I have it, I find I will not regret sending it back when the time comes.

“Do I really have to answer? I’m not sure,” Friedman told New York University publishing students after someone asked about Open’s position on DRM. “Initially, I was very against the idea of no-DRM. But now I’m not sure."

DRM as the Lysenkoism of big publishing

Ideally she soon will be sure—of the negatives of DRM for consumer trade publishing. Among big New York publishers, the DRM ideology is a little like the old Soviet genetics. If you were a geneticist and wanted to get ahead in the Stalin years, you toed the party line and favored Trofim Lysenko’s brilliance over the shaky, unproven theories of Mendel (sarcasm alert).

Like Lysenkoism, DRM is a laugh—since it’s so easy to scan paper editions of bestsellers and put them on P2P networks; and as for typical books, publisher Tim O’Reilly is right on the mark when he says obscurity is more of an obstacle than piracy. If you want to discourage pirates, the embedding of readers’ names in e-books would be far, far more effective than the usual DRM.

Will the top people in book publishing ever wake up, given the Depression—yes, the D word, not the R word—that book publishers and other communications-related companies have been in? DRM isn’t merely an inconvenience for legitimate buyers of e-books. It just might be a job-killer—as a reducer of books’ value as a medium.

On top of everything else, DRM is a tax on readers and publishers. The technology tends to be proprietary and DRM providers need to charge for their services. In addition, DRM adds to the cost of publishers’ infrastructure and increases the compatibility challenges of the e-book industry. For now at least, reader gizmos from Amazon, Sony and B&N can’t read each other’s “protected” books. Sony and B&N hope to be able to play with each other soon, but then there are scads of other brands out there—not just dedicated e-readers but many other devices such as cellphones.

Smartly, Harlequin’s new digital-only imprint, Carina Press, tells writers that its contracts will not cover use of DRM. And O’Reilly, one of the most tech-hip of publishers, is shunning the technology in line with the wishes of the company’s founder.

For more information on Jane Friedman and Open Read: Read Sarah Weinman’s AOL Daily Finance article, source of the Friedman quotes on DRM.

In the DRM area: See The Pirates of Publishing: A view from the crow’s nest, by William Johnson, a Masters Candidate in the NYU publishing program.

The newest entrant in this product-and-service category is eGen, from Aptara, which claims eGen “produces eBook-ready content faster and at a far lower cost than other available methods.” Press release here. Data sheet here. FAQ here.

According to the latter, "eGen automatically converts illustrations and graphics, in place of the manual Photoshop intervention typically required for eBook conversion." It also "automatically converts MathML to SVG."

Supposedly it can automatically convert tables and figures. "Though there can be exceptions, based on the quality and complexity of the input. eGen identifies upfront any elements which may require manual intervention, including complex tables, large figures and large equations, and pricing details for the manual task(s) are provided accordingly."

The ePub format is of special significance since many devices like the Sony Reader use it directly. Stores associated with other e-readers, such as the Kindle, which relies mainly on proprietary format, can convert from ePub. Of course, the best solution would be the universal use of ePub at the consumer level. Imagine all the money the industry would save, as opposed to the use of proprietary approaches such as Amazon’s and ScrollMotion’s.

Meanwhile, remember that the statements in the Aptara material are from—Aptara. I’d welcome independent perspectives. Can eGen really do as good a job with charts as it claims? How to the actual costs compare with other solutions? Anyhone have any pet alternatives to mention?

A prep school in Massachusetts created an uproar by saying e-books would replace paper books in its library.

Now a private high school in Toronto says it is tossing out p-textbooks in favor of Sony e-book readers. The school has deployed at least 110 readers already and is ordering hundreds more.

“Our student survey shows that they are twice as likely to read a book available in an e-book format as in hard copy form," says Sam Blyth, chair at Blyth Academy.

Catnip for students raised on tech

There has been a growing emphasis among schools to engage student interest through technology, and this initiative appears to be, in part, a response to that. A comment from Sam Blyth is of special interest:

"When they were told they would be able to download books free, we asked them ‘Would you be more likely to read outside of school?’ they came back with a yes, and that clinched it."

As a teacher, I have long agreed with the growing chorus of e-book fans who say that the problem is not print versus e-book versus whatever, but that fewer people read for pleasure. Might not e-book readers help popularize recreational reading among the growing number of young people raised on technology?

Textbook access is just one benefit. Schools are using the readers to download other documents such as schedules to keep with them at all times

A back-saver

Meanwhile children are spared the burden of carrying traditionally bulky textbooks to and from school with them. In my work, I have seen students struggle with rolling backpacks full of binders, lunch items, school supplies and books on top of that. A slim little e-book reader would certainly remove a dozen pounds or more from the typical student load.

Granted, e-book readers might not be a perfect solution. Pearson Educational Media is providing content, and I wrote in the summer about my not very positive university-level experience with Pearson. I hope the company is offering more junior users a better vetted and more useful experience. And a future user community seems to not be available yet.

Netbooks a possibility, too—for both reading and writing

School board members in the public school system appear to be waiting for integrated virtual assessment tools and other trimmings. But some already are tech-boosters. One trustee quoted by parentcentral.ca visited a school in Littleton, Colorado, using netbooks with great success. “It was amazing to watch how involved every single kid was in what they were doing.” See a related blog item from the Littleton on the success students have achieved in writing with netbooks—which might also be used in reading.

While we don’t yet have the tools for a perfect system, Blyth is still to be praised for trying to innovate—and for taking advantage of the opportunity to try and hook students into pleasure reading while they are at it, too. There is great potential in the e-market, both for pleasure reading and for environments such as a school. I just wish publishers would realize that there are so many great things which can happen, and that the best way for them to survive and thrive in the digital age is to embrace it, rather than fight to keep the status quo forever.

Editor’s note For a different perspective, read about disabled student Robert Kingett’s reservations about the Kindle and also E-textbooks not ready for college students yet? Likewise of interest would be the New York Times series on the future of reading, including the issue of whether the Internet has helped or hurt—in addition to various viewpoints on e-books and the brain. For research findings and other observations on e-books in K-12, check out our past items on the work of Dr. Richard Bellever at Ball State University. In addition, see—from the Huffington Post—the latest version of my proposal for a well-stocked national digital library system for K-12 users and others. – D.R.

Update, 12:55 p.m.: New links: E-books go to college, but books still rule the campus, not Kindle in AOL Daily Finance and Sony Reader follows Kindle to the Great White North in Engadget. Also see Google news roundup.

We’ve known for a long time that a lot more people read e-books on multi-purpose than dedicated devices—they’re cheaper, they do more, they’re easier to pocket.

And more people have them. It is estimated 1.7 million people own a dedicated e-reader, and that number may rise to 4 million by the end of the holidays. But Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches.

“The iPod Touch is always at hand,” Shannon Stacey, who has written several romance e-novels, said. “It’s my calendar, it’s my everything, so my books are always with me.” Ms. Stacey, who also owns an early Sony Reader model, said she had now bought twice as many e-books for her iPod Touch as for her Sony.

But others are still dubious:

“The Kindle is for people who love to read,” [Ian Freed, vice president for the Kindle division at Amazon] said. “People use phones for lots of things. Most often they use them to make phone calls. Second most often, they use them to send text messages or e-mail. Way down on the list, there’s reading.”

Of course, we know that people who read e-books have been in love with their small screens for more than ten years. E-books were one of the first big “killer app” uses for the Palm, and e-book vendors eReader and Fictionwise have been in business ever since.

Some have even gone so far as to predict “the end of single-purpose devices,” but that is probably still premature.

Will this affect your own plans? One more Nook or Kindle sale? Or are you not interested in the Daily Edition Reader in the first place? And what do you think might be the reasons for delays?

The wireless reader is now available for preorders at least.

Update, 9:08 a.m.: The NYT is featuring the above headline on the Extra Home Page. Good for the Times! Ahead I’ll reproduce a screen shot of the head from Extra. Now if only the paper will retain the blog headline option! – D.R.

The New York Times is mysteriously killing the wonderful “Extra” option, which, if you turn it on, will turbo-charge the home page with blog headlines blended in with news stories. December 1 is when the option will vanish. Without offering an explanation, a home-page notice directs readers to the  Blogrunner aggregation service, which, for now, has a lower Alexa “reach” score than TeleRead.

I’m baffled why Extra option is disappearing and will ask the Times for an answer. “Extra” is one reason why I spend far more time with the Times than the Washington Post even though I live in the D.C. area.  Is  “Extra” not bringing in enough readers to justify the bother of having it? Is the Times worried that outside blogs are enjoying too much exposure? Or does it want to protect Blogrunner? In the Times place, I’d worry more about the total number of eyeballs and less about Blogrunner individually.

And speaking of the Times: Story shows how the Times still doesn’t get e-books

The smartphone-vs.-dedicated-reader debate, long familiar to TeleRead community members, is the topic of a feature called Library in a pocket.

The most interesting stat is from the Codex Group—predicting that there might be four million owners of Kindles and other dedicated devices after the holidays, far more than the current estimate of 1.7 million. There are 84 million smart phones and similar, at least 50 million of which, being iPhones and iPod Touches, can run e-book software like Stanza and a Kindle app.

Sure enough, as required by law, the Gray Lady ends the feature with a story of a father who keeps paper books around for his kid. Hmm. Does this mean that parents should do likewise with paper newspapers? Just as oddly, the Times does the future-of-books act with too much of either-or-approach. An e-book-hip reader responds with, “Does the future of transportation lie in airplanes, or cars?” As someone who goes back and forth between an iPod, a laptop and E Ink devices and a desktop, I’m hardly alone; and stories like this annoy the hell out of me.

Update, 9:08 a.m.: What this post’s headline looks like on the home page of the NYT’s Extra Home Page

To the New York Times’ credit, it is now featuring the above headline on the Extra Home Page. This is how it looks—a kind of virtual hall of mirrors.

Reminder/Disclosure

We’re a news-and-views outfit, and it’s always possible we may have dealings with the Times—or other media. That said, as you can see from the above, we’ll not let business issues get in the way of our coverage.

But if you use a Linux desktop and are sufficiently adventuresome, yes, you can use the Wine Windows simulator to run Kindle for PC.

Details at Lifehacker. Anyone care to tell how the tip there works out?

“More than 90 top newspapers and magazines are available in the Kindle Store for single purchase or subscription. Available for the first time on Kindle is the National Post. Additionally, all of Canwest’s major daily newspapers will be available on Kindle. They join top papers such as Le Monde (France), the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph (U.K.) and the Washington Post.

The Canadian-targeted Kindle is said to let you choose from 300,000 books although blogs and Web browsing apparently are not available (thanks, eBook Reader).

Big thanks to Steve Windwalker, TeleRead contributor and editor of Kindle Nation Daily, our original tip source in this case! That’s Steve shown on the Kindle screen.

Some Sony hardware news today: Wireless Sony e-reader apparently ready for preorder now—and meanwhile the Sony PRS-500 firmware update is out.

Press release…

National Post welcomes Kindle to Canada

Further to today’s announcement by Amazon.com, National Post, and soon all of Canwest’s big city daily newspapers, will be available on Kindle devices.

“Whether in print, online, or on-the-go on mobile devices and smartphones, our quality journalism is accessible to Canadians where when and how they want it, throughout their day,” said Dennis Skulsky President and CEO Canwest Publishing. “Amazon’s Kindle is another exciting step and whatever comes next, we’ll be there too. We’re excited to be celebrating Kindle’s arrival today and I look forward to what the future holds as we continue to explore and develop innovations in multi media publishing and outlets for our unparalleled content.”

“This is great news for National Post fans who can now subscribe to the full edition and have it “delivered” daily, wherever they are in the world,” said Gordon Fisher, Publisher National Post.

This is also great news for Canadians who already use Kindle devices “down south”. According to the Canadian Snowbird Association there are in excess of 100,000 Snowbirds that flee the harsh Canadian winter and head to all parts South every year. For those who enjoy using their Amazon Kindle while in the US, for the first time this season, they will be able to subscribe to their favourite Canadian hometown or national newspaper too.

Kindle devices and newspaper subscriptions are available exclusively at The Kindle Store www.amazon.com/kindlestore.

About Canwest Global Communications Corp.

Canwest Global Communications Corp. (www.canwest.com) is Canada’s largest media company. In addition to owning the Global Television Network, operating 18 industry-leading specialty channels and having ownership in 5 specialty channels, Canwest is Canada’s largest publisher of English language paid daily newspapers and owns and operates more than 80 online properties.