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The company had hoped to have the e-book reader available in its highest-volume stores this week, but online demand is outstripping supply. "> <!-- script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://i.cmpnet.com/informationweek/js/tab.js">&lt;/script --> <!-- <script src='http://i.cmpnet.com/ads/graphics/as5/redirect/tw_mcafee_081021.js'>&lt;/script> --> http://www.informationweek.com/rss/all_st

Today, influencing is very important skill that everyone needs for the success. In the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Megan Colter, you will get to know about your own style and will be able to learn skills to influence others and the people you work with.

Getting in shape for a changing job market.

Brian Joseph Davis suggests a new style of author contract.

Chapter 1: You stumble upon an interesting book at your neighborhood bookstore. Chapter 2: You go home and order it from Amazon for half as much. Chapter 9: Your favorite bookstore is bankrupt.

Interesting look at how there are new niches in old technologies formed as the demand for archiving increases but the technologies that formed the originals fall out of popular use.

Is the KindleFire really that great? Has anyone used one yet?

I haven't played with the Fire yet, but I'm always very dubious of the "tech analyst". Let's face it, dominating the Android tablet market isn't all that difficult right now, as there is a dearth of poorly built, poorly performing Android tablets on the market today. My own personal opinion is that the OS offers a lot of promise, but ironically the real value of the Fire is its connection to Amazon's own "walled garden" of products and services, which flys directly in the face of Android's selling characteristic of "openness".

Randomly, my friend won a Kindle Fire at an office holiday function and I got to play around with it last night. Here are my impressions: First, it's very simple to use though it has that same noticeable lag that all Android tablets seem to have, though I will say not as pronounced as others. It has a rubber-like backing in the same style that the NOOK Simple Touch employs, so it feels good in your hands and won't slide around. Here's one thing that I was surprised about; it's a bit of a brick, meaning it's a lot heavier than I expected. For an eReader, weight seems like a big deal, so I would definitely take one for a test-spin before buying if you can, especially if you're going to use it for long reads. My friend only had one copy of a book, and I thumbed through pretty quickly, and the Fire seemed to handle it well. It had a lot less lag page turning than it did starting apps. On the web, the Fire did pretty well, it downloaded and ran pages smoothly for the most part. Though I will say I went to one of my favorite sites (arsenal.com) to watch some video highlights of yesterday's game, and even though it has a 7 inch screen, the video "wasn't optimized" for the Fire, so the playback size was smaller than it would have been on my iPhone (postage stamp size). On ESPN.com though it seemed to handle video there much better. My other complaint was that the Fire didn't seem to recognize page widths very well, so you have to do a lot of pinching to get the right view of a page in portrait view. So, I'll put down my pocket-protector, ease off the dork-pedal a bit, and just say for the price it's a solid tablet that runs pretty well.

Interesting reaction from the ABA to Amazon-as-job-creator speech given by the President.

If your novel isn't by someone famous, won't receive a star in Publishers Weekly, or can't generate a slavish "At Home" featurette in That Other East Coast Newspaper, how do you get someone in the media to notice it? Swag, of course.

Name: BookLamp Quick Pitch: A book recommendation engine built on book content and writing style instead of sales data. Genius Idea: Making it easier to discover good books that haven't neared the best seller list yet.

Story in Washington Post about how indie bookstores are cropping up in the aftermath of Borders' crash-and-liquidate.

Nick Carr (of "The Shallows") is skeptical of the Kindle Fire's new "X-Ray" feature. He writes, "A person of the web may see X-Ray as a glorious advance. A person of the book may see the technology as a catastrophe."

Nicholas Carr, author of "The Shallows", raises another alarm about enhanced reading tools for e-books, but what doesn't like may be just what others find most compelling about e-books.

Will DRM kill the Kindle?

Ethical dilemma -- how far can a publication ethically go to get a hold of its story sources?