If you are a new reader here at the Spreed:Blog, you will find out in due time that we are quite obsessed with digital publishing and the ways that we take in digital content. Spreed’s goal is to make the digital reading experience more efficient on any electronic device. Our speed reading application is only one class of product we are working on. We want to streamline the entire online reading experience and make it more productive. As such we are constantly looking for the newest and coolest technologies out there that aid in the effective reading of electronic material. By far the most exciting new platform out there is the Kindle and we have covered this product here on our blog many times before. However, over the past couple of weeks there has been some very interesting news surrounding the Kindle and I just wanted to give light to all these new developments here:

Amazon Growth Slows a Bit; No New Kindle in 2008: Publishers Weekly

CFO Tom Szkutak said that while sales of the Kindle have exceeded expectations, it does not plan to release a new version of the e-reader until 2009 “at the earliest.” He noted that Amazon has ramped up manufacturing capacity for Kindle, and the device is in stock. When the Kindle was introduced last November, the readers quickly went out of stock. Amazon said the e-book reader now accounts for more than 10% of unit sales for books that are available both in digital and print formats. Bezos said purchase of e-books is “additive” to sales of print books with Kindle e-book buyers tending to buy as many print books in addition to e-books.

Oprah Comes Out For Kindle: The Guardian

Today in Chicago, and on TV screens across the USA, Oprah Winfrey is going to recommend her new “favorite gadget,” which is Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader. A brief video has appeared on Amazon’s website to plug the show — as spotted by Chris Nuttall at the Financial Times — which will also feature a guest appearance by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Kindle in the University: Brave New World Blog

Yale, Oxford and the University of California have all adopted Kindle programs, and now Princeton University Press will begin publishing Kindle-edition textbooks, launching, Robert Shiller’s new economics book “The Subprime Solution” on the device two weeks before the hard copy. Princeton plans to roll out hundreds of books through the Kindle’s online store. The questions over over the commercial ‘revenue sharing’ arrangements are between the parties and whether , as some may say, Amazon is buying trade. 

Lifehacker also picked up on the Wired Magazine article today and wrote their own post all about Spreed:News. A lot of these sites see Spreed as a way to practice Speed reading. Once we release Spreed:Docs to the public and let you all speed reading your own doucments we are hoping to move away from this notion. Spreed:Docs will be a great way to get through all of those documents you have piled up on your desk or PC, but in a fraction of the time. See the full text of the article below.

Spreed Teaches You To Speed-Read The News: LifeHacker

Free speed-reading webapp Spreed:News lets you choose from a wide array of news sources and have their articles read to you in small clusters of words. Working from the principles that make for faster reading, you can scale the tool between 240 and 1500 words per minute, and set up an account to save your favorite sources—from Boing Boing to the New York Times and dozens more—for quick browsing. Spreed offers a tally of the seconds you’ve saved from word-by-word reading, and offers an iPhone-optimized interface for speed reading while on commutes or trips. Spreed is free to use, requires a sign-up to save your feeds.

Spreed was featured in this months issue of Wired Magazine as the best way to practice your speed reading techniques. It’s a quick read and gives some very helpful hints on the best way to learn how to speed read. See the article in full below.

Learn How to Speed Read: Wired How-To

The ability to digest 1,200 words per minute is like a nerdy superpower. (Average mortals max out at 300.) We tapped Michael Tipper, speed-reading coach to the likes of Shell and IBM, for tips.

Last week we made some big announcements here at Spreed about some of our future and current products. The response from our users and the web in general was absolutely fantastic and I would like to thank and congratulate everyone for being part of a true revolution in the way people read online. Although I do not like singling people out of the crowd, I would like to say a special thank you to Chris Pirillo who put together a fantastic video review of the new Spreed interface. Thanks Chris!

Remember if you want to sign up for an early beta of Spreed:Docs, we only have 20 invites left. Click Here if you are interested in participating.

Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes

The summer is coming to a close, but the Spreed team is more excited than ever. All your feedback has been phenomenal! Without you, our dedicated users, we could not make this application as good as it is today. Our Spreed team is hard at work on a number of new items based on your requests. When we first released Spreed we had the intention of only promoting it as a mobile application. However, we keep hearing that you like the interface so much that you want to see a similar look and feel on your desktop. In response to this we have completely overhauled our website and desktop application. This new and much improved site can be found at the same URL www.spreednews.com and we will be making updates to it constantly for the next while.

In addition we are very happy to announce the beta launch of Spreed:Docs. This exciting new product uses the same Spreed Reader as our news service does, however you can now upload your own documents. Spreed:Docs will be launching as a limited beta in the next couple of weeks. We have 100 invites to give out. If you want early access please click here and fill in the application form. Once Spreed:Docs goes fully live to the public all users of Spreed:News will also have an account at Spreed:Docs with the same login information.

This is a very exciting new product for us as we have proven the validity of our software using news as the primary content and are now opening up the service to handle any Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF file you wish to upload. If you have vast amounts of information to get through on a daily or weekly basis simply upload your documents into the Spreed:Docs document center and you will be able to blast through all of it in not time. Got a big essay to write this month or need to catch up on an industry over the weekend? You will have no problem getting through all your research with higher comprehension than ever before.

We cannot wait to begin building out even more functionality on both of these properties and look forward to hearing all of your ideas and suggestions for how we can make them even better than they are today. Please feel free to email me personally at Dave@Spreedinc.com if you have any feedback. And follow us on twitter and facebook for regular updates and interesting news on the digital publishing industry at:

http://www.twitter.com/spreed

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Spreed/51827975076

Once again thank you and congratulations for being part of what Laptop Magazine is calling one of the best web applications of 2008.

Happy Spreeding,

Dave Coleman and the Spreed Team