English: Amazon Kindle wordmark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It appears that Amazon is concerned that free Kindle book promotion blogs are becoming too successful.  A few days ago Amazon made a change to their affiliate program that is going to shut down several of the larger free Kindle book blogs (or at least radically change them).

The rule change now will make it so that any blog that has more than 20,000 free kindle books a month and less than 5% of books sold are paid books will no longer receive any Amazon Affiliate income for the month.

I do not believe that will affect Bookwi.se because I am not that big.  But I am not sure because Amazon does not currently share how many free books are purchased through my Affiliate links.  I assume that Amazon will have to start publicly showing this information so that we can know what is going on.  20,000 books seems like a lot, but it is only an average of 667 free books purchased a day.  If every visitor or RSS or email subscribers gets one free book a day I could be very close to the threshold.

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According to a Scholastic press release and a gawker article, Harry Potter is getting new covers to celebrate its 15th anniversary of the publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

The Anniversary Box Set with all new covers will be released in September.

As far as I can tell, only the one cover has been released.

It seems the last week that most RSS subscribers have not received any updates.  I believe that it is now fixed.  Please glace back at the last week and see if there are any posts that you would like to read.

http://bookwi.se

The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, and regular Amazon Kindle are now both available in Canada.  Both are available for immediate shipping.

The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite is $139 CDN and the Amazon Kindle (4th Generation Kindle) is $89 CDN.

Earlier Bookwi.se gave initial impressions and then a full review of the Paperwhite.

Also a review of a refurbished Kindle (which has the same features as the model released in Canada.

I also reviewed, and like, the official Amazon Kindle Paperwhite cover

Lilliputing (a great little tech website) is reporting that Amazon has purchased Ivona Software, which specializes in text to speech software.  Currently it offers 44 voices in 17 different languages.

I am surprised that Amazon is expanding its reaching into text to speech after it removed the feature from its e-ink kindles.  The newest Kindle Fires have text to speech (but the first generation Kindle Fire did not.)

Amazon has said it will continue to support e-ink kindles, but I do get concerned when all of their development seems to be in the tablet market.

It is always odd to me how little people pay attention to blog posts past the initial headline and first paragraph or two.  I have seen about a dozen variation of “Amazon is Testing Kindle Book Rentals” over the past couple days.  They all link back to this post, which does show a kindle book rental.

The problem is that the book has an odd title Theories of International Politics and Zombies.  It is published by Princeton University Press and is actually a political science book.  Amazon has been renting textbooks, including kindle format text book rentals for a couple years.

In the comments of this original post, one of the commenters notes that this is actually a text book, that most of the questions that were asked were either on the page (yes you can upgrade the rental to a purchase later) or were on the Textbook Rental FAQ page.

Anyone can make a mistake.  I make them all the time and I try to correct them.  But all of the blog posts that I actually have read about this, were written (or at least posted) after the comments pointing out that this is not a new Amazon Kindle Book Rental program and it is not in a testing phase.  But the re-posters did not seem to get down that far.

Last week in my review of the Wrinkle in Time Graphic Novel, I mentioned that I had read the comic book version of the book God’s Smuggler as a child.  Today I ran across a blog post about a new line of Christian Comic books and in the comments one person linked to an archive of old Spire Christian comics, including God’s Smuggler.

In the archive there is also comic book versions of The Hiding Place, Cross and the Switchblade and biography comics of Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys, Johnny Cash, Andre Crouch and a bunch of Archie comics that were also published by Spire.

This is off topic, but my wife and two friends of ours had fun with sparklers last night.  Here are some of the better pictures.  Hope everyone has a wonderful new year.

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In 2012 Bookwi.se posted 1009 posts (so far) from seven different contributors.  Today’s review was the 600th overall book review.

There were about 110,000 page views at the blog.  And another 120,000 views in the full post RSS or Email.

Also there were about 105,000 spam comments.

As of right now there are 33 people that receive posts via email, 169 RSS subscribers and 208 Facebook Fans, 13 follows of Twitter RSS feed and my personal twitter, which is what most twitter subscribers follow has 744 followers.

Thanks for a great year.