Amazon buys Lexcycle?!?

I did not expect this.

Amazon, the folks who make that great Kindle thing (I love mine), bought Lexcycle, which makes Stanza, an ebook reader app for iPhone, Mac OS X, and Windows.

One of the great things about Stanza is that it can export to Kindle formats, making it pretty easy to take a PDF ebook and export it into a .prc which is ripe for dropping onto the Kindle. I've played with Stanza on the Mac and created a pretty decent Kindle-ized version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from Project Gutenberg in very little time.

I'm hoping Amazon isn't going to kill Stanza (at least the desktop version - I'm sure the iPhone version will be folded into the official Kindle app). I would like to see is for it become an actual desktop reader app for Amazon ebook purchases, the ability to navigate both the Kindle and Audible stores while managing the Kindle itself (like iTunes and the iPod). The ability to have it serve as an RSS feed aggregator, so you can feed blogs to your Kindle via USB as opposed to paying for them over the air.

(I would also like the ability to pull text directly from Project Gutenberg, but I think that's a dream.)

Very interesting.

Detroit council votes to demolish Michigan Central

It looks like Michigan Central may finally be on its last legs, especially since both the council and the mayor are in agreement on this one.

I can't say that I've ever been in the building, though I've been doing enough research and looking at enough pictures that I could make may way through it and know where I was going. It was once a grand old building and it's disturbing that it's reached this point.

It's time for it to go, though. Let's see how long it takes.

Testing Twitterfeed

I haven't posted much lately because I'm trying to figure out how to get this to post to Twitter. This should be the first post that goes through.