Crave

One big reason readers choose e-books over ink and paper versions: The digital ones are cheaper.

That wasn't the case when e-books first appeared a decade ago. But Amazon has made a point of selling its Kindle titles at a discount to physical editions, even if it means losing money.

And then there are the titles that Kindle owners really, really love--the ones they get for nothing. As the Washington Post noted earlier this week, the list of best-selling Kindle titles is dominated by free books:

Amazon's customers have made it clear that $9.99 is still too high for their taste. Most titles in the company's list of top 100 Kindle bestsellers are priced below $9.99, and the most popular price point is $0.00.

The good folks at MediaBistro have gone ahead and counted, so you don't have to. As of a day ago, 64 of Amazon's top 100 Kindle titles cost nada.

How exactly does that work? I understand why Amazon is able to hand out public domain works like "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" and "Pride and Prejudice" for free. But I'm not sure what's going on with titles like Noel Hynd's "Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker: Recipes for Entertaining" (#9). Anyone want to weigh in?

I'm also not sure what conclusions we can draw from the dominance of freebies on the Kindle charts. I'm tempted to say that Kindle buyers are rabid but indiscriminate readers, and they'll lap up whatever you put in front of them.

But without a real sense of the numbers, which Amazon is never going to cough up, it's hard to tell what the sales patterns really look like.

I suspect, for instance, that a lot of the freebies are picked up by readers in the first few weeks that they own a Kindle, when they're looking to download something simply for the sake of downloading something.

I also assume that the Kindle charts are skewed by hardcore early adopters' reading habits. And that the patterns will start changing now that more casual users are picking up the Kindle for the first time.

And in case you were wondering--because I was--says it is not counting free book downloads when it releases sales statistics like the one it put out on Saturday, when it said more customers had purchased Kindle titles than physical books on Christmas Day.

Story Copyright (c) 2009 AllThingsD. All rights reserved.

Google's Chrome OS Netbook's rumored specs are out, and they're looking pretty good.

According to IBTimes, the Google Netbook will house an Nvidia Tegra platform with an ARM CPU. If the rumors hold up, it will also have a 10.1-inch multitouch screen that supports HD, come with a 64GB SSD, 2GB of RAM, and other standards like Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, a Webcam, and so on. Not surprisingly, the Netbook will run Chrome OS and come pre-installed with a suite of Google Apps.

The rumors also indicate that the Netbook will be available by holiday season 2010 for a subsidized price of under $300, which is impressive for the type of hardware they're talking about. It would be sold directly from Google's Web site, and the company may partner with a network operator to sell it as a bundled 3G plan.

If these rumors turn out to be true--which at this point, who knows--that's a welcome step up from the current generation of Netbooks. (Via IBTimes)

This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.

Kyocera Laylo

(Credit: Kent German/CNET)

Apologies for missing this in the pre-Christmas rush, but MetroPCS added the Kyocera Laylo and Domino to its lineup last Wednesday.

The Laylo, aka the Kyocera M1400, launched last April at the CTIA 2009 show. The slider phone has a VGA camera, text and multimedia messaging, Bluetooth, a 500-contact phone book, a speakerphone, a personal organizer, a voice memo recorder, speaker-independent voice recognition, instant messaging, and a WAP browser. It is $99 for the carrier's no-contract service.

The Domino S1310 has a basic candy bar design. Inside you'll find Bluetooth 2.0, a WAP 2.0 browser, support for BREW, text and instant messaging, a personal organizer, and a speakerphone. It will cost you $69.

(Credit: Solid Alliance)

The latest version of the Crazy Earphones are a follow-up to offbeat buds released earlier this year that seem to be sprouting bananas, bolts and sushi.

The new batch goes on sale in January for about $22 apiece. Each comes with small or medium-sized silicon ear caps, as well as a cell phone jack.

Solid Alliance boasts they are "even sillier" than the first Crazy Earphones.

Via Crunch Gear

(Credit: Flickr/K嘛)

Welcome back to another Yuletide Mini-sode of CNET's The 404 Podcast. We'll be keeping you company all season with fresh episodes, year-end wrap-ups, CES 2010 previews, and much more!

Today's special holiday edition of The 404 is dedicated to The Fifth Element, easily one of our favorite movies of all time. From the epic vision of the distant future to the colorful characters and of course the operatic techno scene, this movie retains its entertainment value after almost 13 years.

To celebrate, we run off a list of our favorite scenes and quotes from the movie, then play a quick game of trivia. For example, did you know that Ruby Rhod wasn't supposed to be the original name for Chris Tucker's character? It was actually Loc Rhod! The original name appears in the script and the movie novelization.

Lots more to talk about, so check out the show and keep it hot hot HOT!

World of Warcraft runs well in Ubuntu.

(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

If you are looking for an operating system that offers the best values, none can compare to Linux.

First of all, it's free. Most Linux distributions can be downloaded gratis from the developers' Web site and you can install it on however many computers you want. Secondly, it comes with a lot of things, such as office tools (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation), audio and video playback, Internet and e-mail, instant messaging, and so on. Basically everything a general user would want to use with a computer is there when the installation is done. For those applications that are not there, chances are you can download them for free.

Wine is more than just an emulator; it makes Windows applications run in Linux much like they do in Wndows.

(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

There's also a Linux application called Wine that allows you to run Windows software within Linux. What is special about Wine, however, is the fact that it's not a traditional virtual environment and therefore runs Windows applications very much the way Windows does, without much overhead. Unfortunately, not all Windows applications work with Wine and even if they do, you might not be able to install or run them the way you do in Windows.

Wine, which was developed in 1993, is a recursive acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator," though this doesn't make it true that it is not an emulator. Rather than acting as a full emulator, it implements a compatibility layer, providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call, and processes to substitute for the Windows NT kernel. The Wine project has run into a lot of difficulties, mostly because of the incomplete and incorrect documentation of the Windows API. For this reason, after 15 years of development, the first version of Wine (1.0) was release in mid-2008.

Over my Christmas break, I decided to try out the latest version of Wine with my most frequently used Windows application, which is called World of Warcraft (or WoW). Just so that it's clear that I am not antisocial, this didn't take away much time spending with friends and family, as it actually took me less than an hour to do the whole thing.

I started out with getting an ISO image of the ever-popular Linux distro Ubuntu version 91.0. After that, I burned the image onto a CD and started the installation from it.

If you have ever installed an operating system, such as Windows, the installation of Ubuntu is very similar to that. You just need to insert the CD into the optical drive, boot the computer from it, and follow the instructions. The installer will do everything for you, including configuring the hard drive and setting up dual-boot if you want to use it on the same computer that also has Windows installed. In this case, make sure you pick the amount of hard-drive space you want to use for Linux carefully, as this can't be changed once the new OS is installed.

You need to launch the Windows executable file using Wine Windows Program Loader to run a Windows-based application within Linux.

(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

Note that in case there's no free space on the hard drive, the Linux installer will automatically shrink the partition used by Windows and free some space for Linux. This process, apart from making the Windows partition smaller, doesn't change anything else and your Windows should work like normal. However, a good rule of thumb is to make sure you back up important files prior to installing Linux.

In my case, I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on the same Core 2 Dual machine with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive that runs Windows 7 into a dual-boot setup and the whole process took less than 30 minutes. After that, at boot up, I have the option of booting in either Windows 7 or Ubuntu.

Once the installation is done, though Ubuntu runs fine, chances are not all the hardware components, such as video or sound, have their optimized drivers installed. You need to manually do this by running the Hardware Driver utility (System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers); this utility will list the hardware components that require proprietary drivers and you just need to install (or activate) them. In my case, I needed to do that for my video card, which is a budget Geforce 8300GS with 510MB of RAM.

Wine can be installed for free and the process takes just less than a minute via a broadband connection.

(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

The next step is to install Wine. You can do that via Ubuntu Software Center (Applications -> Ubuntu Software Center). Here, you select "Get Free Software" then search for "Wine." In my case, I found two versions of Wine: Wine Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layers and Wine Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layers (Beta Release). I picked the beta release. (Obviously newer is better, right?) The installation of Wine literally took a few seconds with the Internet connection I used, which was really fast. If you use a regular DSL, this might take around a minute.

Now it's time to install WoW. I did it the way I've always done in Windows in the last couple of years: copying the whole "World of Warcraft" folder over from another computer. This is because installing the game from scratch would take hours, considering all the updates and the almost 20GB of storage space that the game requires. With Linux, however, you might not be able to install WoW from scratch anyway. The WoW installer that I tried refused to continue, citing that the computer doesn't meet the game's requirement. This is probably because it could read the computer's hardware via Wine.

Because WoW wasn't installed from scratch, I couldn't launch it from Wine's Start Menu (which resembles that of Windows'). Instead, I need to call the game's executable directly. The trick is that you need to call it via Wine Windows Program Loader by right clicking on the Wow.exe file and choose "Open with Wine Windows Program Loader." It won't work if you just double-click on it.

(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

And that's it, the game loaded and worked just like in Windows. I could run it in full-screen mode, Windows mode, using the add-ons, etc. The performance was decent. At the recommenced settings, I had consistently 20 frames per second in Daralan, the notoriously slow and laggy area of the game. In other areas, such as dungeons, I was able to get up to 45fps, which was really impressive considering the budget video card.

Overall, it was a really interesting and exciting experience. However, WoW crashed during start-up a couple times; this could be solved by simply restarting the computer or reinstalling Wine. This is probably where the "beta" notion of Wine is to blame.

Other than WoW, I tried a few other Windows applications, such as iTunes and QuickTime, and they worked, too. however they didn't always work the way you expect in Windows.

All in all, Wine will not make an alternative to Windows, but the fact that now I can run my favorite game in Linux makes me believe that Linux is really an ideal operating system for savvy users. So if you think you are one, make a backup of your Windows computer and try it out. It's a lot of fun and doesn't cost anything.

(Credit: Olive)

Christmas has come and gone, but it's not too late to think about giving yourself a post-holiday treat. And Olive is here to help. The company is offering a free copy of the Beatles Remastered CD collection to anyone who purchases an Olive 4 or Olive 4 HD digital music server. Yes, at $1,500 to $2,000, this is no impulse buy, but if you're in the market for a high-end digital music server, having the Beatles CDs (a $200 value) thrown in for free just might get you to take the plunge. (We liked the previous Olive product we reviewed back in 2006, and we'll be reviewing the Olive 4 in January.)

Update: The deal originally ran until December 28, but Olive has now extended it until December 31. Check it out here, and be sure to read the terms and conditions as well.

(Credit: Physorg.com)

The cell could be available in Japan around fiscal 2011, according to the interview with Panasonic President Fumio Otsubo, carried on Physorg.com. Fiscal 2011 in Japan begins April 1, 2010.

The electronics giant has been developing fuel cell home cogeneration systems. But it recently took majority control of Sanyo Electric and is expected to take advantage of Sanyo's rechargeable battery and solar-power know-how.

Panasonic and Sanyo have apparently already test-manufactured the storage cell and plan to sell it with a power-monitoring system that displays consumption on home TVs.

Via Physorg.com .

This 13-inch MacBook has been modded into tablet form.

With all the crystal-ball-watching over the seemingly imminent Apple tablet, one issue hotly debated around the CNET offices, but infrequently mentioned elsewhere, is the hypothetical device's status as a mobile computer.

There are two schools of thought on this: either the Apple tablet (or iSlate, or whatever it ends up being called) will be a 10-or-so-inch tablet PC with a full Mac OS X operating system; or it will merely be a larger-screen version of the current iPod Touch, which has a closed, limited phone-like OS.

The former would mean it could very likely run any software you'd run on a MacBook, from Firefox to Photoshop, and maybe even install Windows 7 via Boot Camp or Parallels. The later points to a hermetically sealed ecosystem, where apps would have to be approved and sold through an official app store (as in iTunes).