goodreads

Amazon agreed today to buy book-recommendation site Goodreads for an undisclosed amount.

The San Francisco-based company should provide Amazon with another way to get readers to buy books from it, both digitally and from its warehouses. Amazon said it also plans to use Goodreads to help authors find readers who might not otherwise know about them.

"Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world," Russ Grandinetti, Amazon vice president of Kindle Content, said in a statement. "In addition, both Amazon and Goodreads have helped … Read more

Links from Friday's episode of Loaded:

Acer unveils a dual touchscreen laptop called the Iconia

Angry Birds, the popular mobile phone game, will come to a game console near you sometime next year

The U.S. military launches its own version of YouTube called MilTube

Microsoft revamps Bing Movies

Microsoft and Southwest Airlines are bringing Santa to an airport gate near you for picture time

A new social network for readers called Copia launched this week

Facebook is close to scoring a trademark for the word "face"

Though the iPad is a fantastic universal e-reader able to handle multiple formats, you're often better off using PDF files than the EPUB format in many situations. This How To video is, if nothing else, a reminder of the fact that the PDF is your friend.

The EPUB document format is admittedly better for its adjustable fonts and formatting, and it's recognized by Apple's iBooks app. But saving your own writing to EPUB format isn't exactly simple. Getting that EPUB onto your iPad still requires connecting via iTunes with a sync cable.

PDFs are the Web'… Read more

There are a lot of advantages to the iPad as an e-reader, chief among them its capability to be a true multiformat product supporting Kindle, ePubs, PDFs, and others.

One little difficulty remains: finding ways to get free books.

Sure, Apple and others don't exactly want you to stock up on free literature if they can help it, especially in the case of books that aren't public domain. Still, we have to try, don't we? Here are the best (legal) ways not to pay.

As Nick Hornby once wrote, what you're like is not as important as what you like.

That philosophy seems to be spreading across the Internet as more and more opportunities for rating and sharing opinions present themselves. Now you can keep the late-night debates over pop culture going all week long.

Shelfari, a social-networking site centered on books, is like GoodReads in that you can add and rate books, post reviews and share your thoughts with friends.

The company just added a widget function that works with Facebook and other social-networking sites, so that other friends--maybe those who are … Read more