03:33 AM by doctorow in E-Book General | General Discussions

Did you ever wonder how to use Lego Mindstorm to make your Kindle collection DRM-free? Well, according to the maker, "this is an art project reflecting the relation of book scanning, copyright, and digital rights management. This is not intended to be understood as an instruction or invitation, but rather as a provocative thought experiment."

From AllThingsD:

A university professor in Austria has released the video below, showing how he has automated a low-tech approach to bypassing the digital rights management system on the Kindle.

His name is Peter Purgathofer, and he’s an associate professor at the Vienna University of Technology.

Using Lego’s Mindstorms — a basic robotics kit popular with hobbyists — plus a Kindle and a Mac, he has assembled a way to photograph what’s on the screen, and then submit it to a cloud-based text-recognition service.

Here is the video:

http://vimeo.com/73675285

03:25 AM by doctorow in E-Book General | News

This is not about the rising cost of college tuition. This is about the rising cost of college textbooks. And it's real bad!

Bloomberg has it as its Chart of the Day:

The cost of college textbooks has more than doubled since the end of 2001 even as prices for other books retreated, illustrating soaring tuition isn’t the only thing to blame for rising higher education bills as the school year begins.

The CHART OF THE DAY shows university textbook prices surged 102 percent through July from December 2001 while the costs for recreational books declined 1.5 percent. Over the same period, the consumer price index measuring the cost of all goods and services rose 32 percent.

Did textbooks just get so much better, or is it a problem that professors, who are in charge of determining what their students have to buy, usually don't have any control over the cost of the textbooks?

[image: wohnai via Flickr]

06:44 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Last month we learned how the anti-piracy outfit BREIN is able to track down suspected e-book pirates by matching digital watermarks inside e-books with the transaction records they receive from e-book sellers (not without causing a political controversy). If you've caught yourself wondering how such a digital watermark looks like, a computer science student at the University of Twente was able to get his hands on a watermarked EPUB file and dissected it into pieces. The result is astonishingly simple: embedded on every page in the book is a minuscule image that turns out to be an ordinary barcode. This barcode contains the transaction code which uniquely identifies the e-book purchase.

Other pages in the book all have the same image at the bottom that is nearly impossible to notice with your naked eye. The image is embedded as a Based64 encoded string (see the image depicted above), decoding (using the openssl base64 command) it results in an image with the dimensions of 1 by a few hundred pixels. When seen with a naked eye it looks like a thin white line. [...]

When mapping the 7-bit blocks to characters you can see almost immediately that it results in a string equal to the transaction code. So, the barcode you find on each page in the book represents the transaction code encoded in 7-bit ASCII.

So is that really all? The author of the post doesn't exclude the possibility of other "invisible" watermarks, such as random variations in text or punctuation. How to know for sure? By comparing two separate purchases of the same book.

02:44 PM by K. Molen in E-Book General | General Discussions

With the launch of Amazon India I find myself wondering about the morality of circumventing geographical restrictions only to save money. With ebooks there's no shipping costs involved, so it'd be an easy thing to do and I wouldn't notice the difference in the end product. I'm personally perfectly fine with circumventing geographical restrictions to get access to an ebook that's not for sale in my location, but I'm not sure how I feel about doing it to get a better price.

On the one hand, it's still buying the book from a legal seller and the only thing that's making it a gray area is where I'm physically located. On the other hand, I'm denying authors some of their profits.

To illustrate what I'm talking about, the Kindle ebook for Margaret Atwood's latest, Maddaddam, is $17.49 on Amazon.com and $9.98 on Amazon.in, so if I were to buy this via Amazon India I'd effectively deny Atwood approximately 50% of her royalties on that sale. I say approximately 50% because the list price show an even bigger difference, and I think authors probably earn their royalties on that price.

In addition to the authors, I'm obviously also denying publishers some profit and possibly Amazon as well, although I'm less sure about the latter.

So yeah... thoughts?

[image: Pen Waggener via Flickr]

09:53 AM by BadBilly in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Sony Canada is now selling a bundle of refurbished T1 (with one year warranty) and unlit cover for $59.99. I got this bundle at Christmas for $79.99 and have had no trouble with the Reader. This reader features MP3 playback and a bunch more bilingual dictionaries than the T2 and T3. No Facebook or Evernote integration, though.

PRS-T1 Link

Edit: Free shipping in Canada too!

09:42 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Cyprus-based Prestigio is gunning for the Russian e-reader market with the release of a new entry-level reader called Prestigio MultiReader 3664. There is absolutely nothing outstanding about this device, other than that it's relatively inexpensive. It's heading to retail and will be available for about 2700 Russian rubles (~US $80). Availability in various European countries will follow.

The specs:

• Name: PER3664BC
• Display: 6-inch E Ink screen, 600 x 800 pixels, 16 gray levels
• CPU: 480MHz Allwinner E200
• OS: Linux
• Supported file formats: PDF, FB2, HTML, PDB, EPUB, DOC, TXT, MOBI, RTF
• Connectivity: USB 2.0
• Touch: none
• RAM: 4 GB, expandable with microSD card
• Sensors: G-Sensor in 4 ways
• Battery: 1400 mAh
• Dimensions: 174x120.6x8 mm
• Weight: 162 g

Link product page: MultiReader 3664

[via it-world.ru]

08:49 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | General Discussions

As the saying goes, the only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself. That said, according to a survey conducted by Heathrow Airport, seven out of ten people going on vacation would rather schlep paper books than opt for a slim e-reader.

Heathrow Airport Retail Director Muriel Zingraff-Shariff said: "There’s no doubt that the popularity of eBooks has boomed in recent years, but when it comes to relaxing on holiday it seems you just can’t beat a good book. People want a break from technology whilst they’re abroad, so it’s understandable that people would rather swap their Blackberry for Malorie Blackman."

Which makes sense of course since the retail director of an airport would much rather have you buy paper books from the local WHSmith bookstore than buy them online, let's say via Amazon Whispernet.

The survey also found that people worry about e-readers not coping well with sun, sea, and sand, which is true, I suppose, especially if you run out of ziplock bags.

Related: Taking e-books to the beach - share your tips, E-Reader on the beach

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Here it is again, our weekly roundup! Enjoy!

E-Book General - News

• Sony's PRS-T3, more leaked specs, to debut at IFA on September 4
• Gembird to launch EnerGenie ePP2, a 9.7-inch E Ink reader with a twist
• Sony PRS-T3 gets its first hands-on (video)
• The 2013 Hugo Awards, John Scalzi nabs best novel
• Kindle Paperwhite sold out! Let's place bets (poll)
• Kobo: "Beat Amazon." Not so in Japan.
• RIP Frederik Pohl
• Microsoft to buy Nokia's Devices and Services in $7.2B deal
• Kindle MatchBook: Get the Kindle version of a previously-bought paper book cheap/free
• Doctorow on the e-book rip-off for libraries
• Android 4.4 to be called KitKat
• All-New Kindle Paperwhite V2 (accidentally) unveiled. So what's all new?
• Next-gen Kindle Paperwhite previewed by Time mag
• Google seeks patent to add "triggered sounds" to e-books
• Google aims to sync reading and listening locations between e-books and audiobooks
• The secret behind the new Paperwhite: E Ink Carta
• Sony PRS-T3 officially announced
• Should children tip their hats to a digital Dr. Seuss?
• Oyster: unlimited e-books for $9.95 a month, now live with invite (iOS)
• PocketBook unveils E Ink cover for Samsung Galaxy S4
• calibre V1.2 is out, with better support for MTP and minor bug fixes
• Paperwhite firmware upgrade arrives, spruced up dictionary lookups
• Engadget reviews Kobo Aura, verdict: it's the nicest mainstream e-reader. Not.
• E-Book pirate: We are the same as Amazon, only the price is different
• R.I.P. (Ann) A.C. Crispin

E-Book General - General Discussions

• First White House "Copyright Czar", now chief of anti-piracy group
• The e-reader "Androidified"... would you get one?
• Tablet versus lighted E Ink e-reader
• Why store your ebook collection on your ereader?

E-Book General - Deals, Freebies, and Resources (No Self-Promotion)

• Push to Kindle app on sale for $0.99 (Android)
• 65% off Baen's October 2013 Bundle
• Refurbished Sony Reader PRS-T2 w/ $25 Gift Card for $60
• Barnes & Noble magazine deal - Subscribe and get a year of back issues

E-Book Readers - Amazon Kindle

• New Paperwhite!

E-Book Readers - Android Devices

• Moon+ Reader Pro 2.1 released, adds PDF annotation support (Android)

E-Book Readers - Barnes & Noble NOOK

• Nook tablet prices drop again in UK, HD down to £79