The New York Times published an article yesterday which tells you just about everything you need to know about the state of the Kindlesphere.

On e-book sales:

Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.

In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

On the Kindle in an iPad world:

One reason Kindle book sales have held their own is that owners of iPads and other mobile reading devices buy Kindle books, which they can read on computers, iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys and Android phones. But, except for the free uncopyrighted books, Kindle owners must buy or download content via Amazon. “Every time they sell a Kindle, they lock up a customer,” Mr. Shatzkin said.

Some industry analysts say that many people do not consider the iPad to be a reading device the way the Kindle is, and see a need to own both. Amazon’s latest sales figures are “clearly an indication that the iPad is complementary to the Kindle, not a replacement,” said Youssef H. Squali, managing director at Jefferies & Company in charge of Internet and new media research.

And the impact of the Kindle price reduction:

The growth rate of Kindle sales tripled after Amazon lowered the price of the device in late June to $189 from $259.

Every single one of these larger trends mirror my personal experience to a T:

• I’ve pretty much abandoned buying hardcover and paperback books.  If a book isn’t available on the Kindle, I almost always wait it out and instead find another e-book to read.
• Owning an iPad hasn’t decreased my Kindle usage, it has actually increased it and also made me more aware of the value of the platform.  There was something about seeing my Kindle content show up on the iPad, that just cemented the entire value proposition around its ubiquity.  And it goes without saying that trying to read on the iPad’s LCD screen both in bright sunlight and for an extended period of time only makes you appreciate the Kindle’s e-ink screen even more.
• Since the Kindle price has dropped and Kindle deals have been abound on everything from woot.com to Amazon’s own refurbished sell off, I’ve only been thinking more and more about Kindles as viable gifts for friends and family.  I’ll be shocked if there’s not some sort of Kindle charged to the credit card before the year is out.

This is all great news for the Kindle.  Keep your fingers crossed for an August Kindle refresh.

Anyway, I think we should build nothing but shrines there. One of every kind of church. Spare no expense. I thought they should move Shea Stadium there. Thats another kind of shrine. No serious business at Ground Zero from now on. Just contemplation, prayer, reflection and baseball. When they try to blow it up they’ll seem like the spoiled sports and sore losers that they are.

via Scripting News: A mosque at Ground Zero.

Earlier tonight I was catching up on my RSS feeds and stopped in my tracks when I read this paragraph from a recent Dave Winer post.   Not two minutes later I saw Marco Arment excerpt this exact quote on his blog.

I’ve realized over time that a lot of my favorite bloggers read each other’s content, and it results in an echo chamber of sorts around good posts.  I don’t mind it all that much though.  If nothing else it is an affirmation that I’m in good company, and I’m reading content from people who are interested in the same stuff I that am.

So while I have a little guilt that I’m mainly just adding to the echo chamber with this post, I just loved Dave’s sentiment and felt I had to share.

Squeeze Hidden Functionality Out of Every Corner of Your Mac with the Option Key.

I would be shocked if you didn’t pick up a couple of new OS X tricks after reading this Lifehacker article.

Almost all of my writing starts in TextEdit. I’m an unabashed champion of it and I think it does not get nearly the credit it deserves. I have it set to default to plain text, 90 characters x 50 lines, Menlo 12pt for my font after a long flirtation with Droid Sans.

via Talking Tools: Patrick Rhone of MinimalMac.com | Bridging the Nerd Gap.

Patrick Rhone has written before about why he thinks TextEdit is one of the best, yet underutilized Mac apps, so it was interesting to see this further explanation of his TextEdit “setup” in a recent interview.

I tested these settings on my own Mac, and in an instant discovered a slew of features in TextEdit that I was previously unaware of.  Come to think of it, it was definitely the first time I even opened the TextEdit Preferences menu.

Patrick – mission accomplished.

Until iTunes 9.0.2, if you had a smart playlist parameter that said the song had to be unrated un-starred, and — while listening to the playlist — you rated a song, the playlist would stop immediately because the just-rated song would disappear from it.

In the new version if you rate a playing song that disappears from a smart playlist, iTunes simply jumps to the next song and begins playing.

via iTunes gets smart playlist rating bug fix – Finer Things in Mac.

A friend of mine once walked into a souvenir shop and saw a t-shirt with a picture of William Shatner as Captain Kirk screaming “KHAAAAAAN!” from the infamous scene in Star Trek II.  It put a huge smile on his face because we always joked that was Shatner’s finest acting performance, and at that moment he immediately realized we were not alone in our assessment.  There were other people who, unbeknownst to us, shared our amused appreciation of it.

Reading that Apple fixed this smart playlist bug made me feel the exact same way.   I never knew if the “disappearing song” issue was a feature or a bug, but it sure drove me crazy.  I’m glad to see that, once again, I wasn’t alone.

Daring Fireball: Translation From Apples Unique Dialect of PR-Speak to English of the Letter From Apple Regarding iPhone 4.

Absolute gold.

It turns out that FaceTime is like an Egg McMuffin and not like Coca-Cola. Coke is a combination of many readily-available ingredients plus the mysterious, top-secret, and proprietary Merchandise “X” that turns a Cola into a Coke. When Apple created the FaceTime standard, they combined existing, open, off-the-shelf standards for network communication, handshaking, and media streaming into a new recipe, creating a technique that practically anybody can replicate.

via iPhone 4 review: It’s a brand new, better smartphone :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Andy Ihnatko.

These are the treasures that await when you take the time to read a 6000-word Andy Ihnatko review.  Not only is Andy the only journalist I can think of who would even put an analogy like this into a review, he is the only one who could pull it off.

In a world where people are too chicken to be the egg, I want to be both the chicken and the egg.

via Scripting News: Why I sometimes work openly.

What a great line.

So I got thinking. How did I develop the basic skills I have right now? Mostly by copying heroes. When you’re fresh starting out, you have no fear of diving in and copying something directly. It’s like playing guitar. When you start playing guitar all you want to do is play the first verse of your favorite song. Big success! You don’t need to write the next great guitar symphony or a hit single. It’s totally satisfying to learn to play something somebody else can already play. And you get better by doing it.

via How do you turn inspiration into skill? – 37signals.

Basically this is exactly what I am doing right now by emulating John Gruber’s technique of creating a quoted linked list post for a piece of content that I liked.

via: kevinrose.com: Some Ideas for E-Books

Kevin Rose walks through five items on his wish list for Amazon and Apple to add to the Kindle and iBooks, respectively. He nails a key point — e-readers are Internet-connected devices, however we’re still talking about bookmarks and highlights as opposed to new features that would dramatically enhance the reading experience.

Every idea here hits the mark.  I’d love to see all of these hit the product roadmap for both Amazon and Apple.