Although we (and our authors!) had hoped that Amazon would update the software on those Kindles (especially since many O'Reilly readers are also typically early adopters of new devices and technologies), it's clear that Amazon is focusing their efforts on their newer devices and apps for other mobile devices like iPad and Android.

Amazon won't disclose any data about how many customers use specific Kindle devices or apps, but we believe the number of Kindle 1 users is a small and shrinking part of the overall Kindle user base, and since there are multiple additional apps and desktop readers from Amazon, with a few specific exceptions we're now making the full catalog of O'Reilly and Microsoft Press ebooks sold at oreilly.com also available in the Kindle store. We submitted the files to Amazon early last week, and they've begun appearing in the store today.

Another unfortunate limitation with Kindle (though not unique to Amazon) is that they don't offer any way of providing customers who purchase ebooks access to publisher updates. We regularly update our ebooks to correct errata and make other changes, and free updates are one reason many O'Reilly readers come to oreilly.com for their ebooks. So we're now extending a special offer to buyers of our books on Kindle to upgrade to the full ebook bundle (which includes multiple DRM-free formats including PDF and EPUB along with free lifetime updates) for $4.99 through oreilly.com. Information on how to take advantage of that offer is included within the Kindle ebooks, and we've also posted instructions for how to add a .mobi file from your O'Reilly account onto a Kindle device. Here's a few screenshots from the latest batch of titles added to the Kindle store (more at the bottom of this post):

There are still some titles that aren't suitable for a reflowable format like EPUB or Mobipocket, titles such as the "Head First" series of books, or certain digital photography titles. But any ebook available in EPUB from oreilly.com (which is over 1,000 titles when including Microsoft Press) should now be available in the Kindle store, or will be shortly.

All O'Reilly and Microsoft Press ebooks sold in the Kindle store are unencrypted and DRM-free, and can be used with any device or reading app that supports the Mobipocket format.

Thanks to Sanders Kleinfeld and Adam Witwer for their substantial work dealing with the limitations and quirks of the proprietary Kindle format to make the reading experience for these ebooks the best it can be.

Ebooks will be a hot topic on the agenda at next month's TOC Frankfurt and at TOC New York coming up in February 2011. Registration is open for both events.

1. Brown Cloud Marketing -- advertorial "interviewing" GM of a company offering "DNS in the cloud". This might be a worthwhile service, but the way he markets it (by saying open source is "freeware" and the market leader is "legacy") reveals a rich vein of bozo. Freeware legacy DNS is the internet's dirty little secret (actually, it's the reason we have a functioning DNS), Nominum software was written 100 percent from the ground up, and by having software with source code that is not open for everybody to look at, it is inherently more secure. (security through obscurity is equating clothing with being naked yet blind). The Internet kindly did the poor man's homework: screenshot of a cross-site scripting vulnerability in their customer portal, a Nominum security advisory from 2008, and the Nominum web server is running Linux, Apache, and PHP (all legacy freeware yet apparently not the Internet's dirty little secret). (via Bert Hubert and Securosis)
2. Public Annotations on Healthcare Bill -- using technology from SharedBook, Congressman Culberson hoped to get citizens marking up the healthcare bill. They're using the software but many are just commenting on page 1--turning the hosted annotation platform into a forum with an odd user interface. It's a UI challenge: designing a way to let focused people comment on specific things, while also permitting impatient unfocused people to comment on the general topic. It's like asking for a SmartCar that seats 80. See also OpenCongress and their annotation system which also has hundreds of comments on the first few lines of the bill (including 39 on the one line "111th Congress"--apparently more contentious than you'd think!).
3. MyConnPy -- pure-Python MySQL client library, useful because it requires no C compilation to install (and thus can work on systems without C compilers installed, e.g. mobile). (via Simon Willison)
4. The Infinite Book -- design concept for an ebook reader (not a product you can buy yet). Sexy. (via Gizmodo)

1. Page2Pub -- harvest wiki content and turn it into EPub and PDF. See also Sony dropping its proprietary format and moving to EPub. Open standards rock. (via oreillylabs on Twitter)
2. SQL Pie Chart -- an ASCII pie chart, drawn by SQL code. Horrifying and yet inspiring. Compare to PostgreSQL code to produce ASCII Mandelbrot set. (via jdub on Twitter and Simon Willison)
3. How SudokuGrab Works -- the computer vision techniques behind an iPhone app that solves Sudoku puzzles that you take a photo of. Well explained! These CV techniques are an essential part of the sensor web. (via blackbeltjones on Delicious)
4. Twitter by the Numbers -- massive dump of charts and stats on Twitter. I love that there's a section devoted to social media marketers, the Internet's head lice. (via Kevin Marks on Twitter)

1. NASA Nebula Services/Platform Stack -- The NEBULA platform offers a turnkey Software-as-a-Service experience that can rapidly address the requirements of a large number of projects. However, each component of the NEBULA platform is also available individually; thus, NEBULA can also serve in Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service capacities. Bundles RabbitMQ, Eucalyptus, LUSTRE storage, Fabric deployment, Varnish front-end, MySQL and more. (via Jim Stogdill)
2. A Short History of btrfs -- Now for some personal predictions (based purely on public information - I don't have any insider knowledge). Btrfs will be the default file system on Linux within two years. Btrfs as a project won't (and can't, at this point) be canceled by Oracle. If all the intellectual property issues are worked out (a big if), ZFS will be ported to Linux, but it will have less than a few percent of the installed base of btrfs. Check back in two years and see if I got any of these predictions right!
3. Sigil -- open source WYSIWYG eBook editor. (via liza on Twitter)
4. Exponential Decay of Life -- This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. (via Hacker News)