When I was preparing my short story The Variant for the Kindle, I found a lot of confusing and contradictory information about how to do the formatting — much of it on the official help site. So I’m writing up this quick guide aimed at somebody with roughly my level of coding or design experience.

My goal was to find a program I could use to write all my drafts, then be able to export to send to the proofreader/editor, then paste in the final locked words, then export to a nicely formatted and professional looking Kindle file, ready for uploading. I think I've found a one-stop method of doing all that, using Scrivener.

On a recent long jaunt around the Aegean, I realized something important about the Kindle: it’s the ultimate travel gadget.

The Lab covered Amazon’s announcement of less-than-a-book, more-than-as-story Kindle Singles out of the chute a couple of weeks ago. Josh Benton described how the new form could well serve as a new package, a new container, for longer, high-quality investigative pieces, those now being well produced in quantity by ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting (and its California Watch), and the Center for Public Integrity. That’s a great potential usage, I think.

Is it desirable--or even possible--to read dfw's Infinite Jest on the Kindle? http://bit.ly/9BvqTp /via @rogre

This really isn’t meant to be a contentious post. It really only came about because I got a new toy, something I’ve been wanting to get for a while – a USB microsope! Here’s the model I got:

RT @tcarmody: I wrote something for @wired (with help/quotes from @DonLinn) on metadata, rights, and ebooks: http://j.mp/bo8cnm