05:29 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Although not all authors and publishers are keen to allow things that would make e-books more available, like electronic text-to-speech, overall e-books have been a blessing to visually impaired blind and partially sighted people, according to a new report by the UK-based Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). Over the past four years, the charity looked at what they consider the 1,000 most popular books and determined the proportion of those that were available as an accessible e-book.

In 2012, 84 per cent of the top 1,000 titles were available in braille, audio and large print, formats using eBooks.

In comparison, in 2011 it was 73%; in 2011 it was 45%; and in 2009 it was none, according to the study.

Other key findings:

• By genre, 99% of the Adult fiction, and 77% of the Adult non-fiction titles included were available as fully accessible e-books in 2012. These figures compare to 93% of Adult fiction and 62% of Adult non-fiction in 2011.
• 43% of Children's titles were available as accessible e-books in 2012, compared to 30 per cent in 2011.
• 49% of the top 1,000 titles of 2012 were available as audio books, compared to 42% in 2011.
• 25% of the most popular 450 Adult non-fiction titles were available as unabridged downloadable audio books, compared to 43% of children's titles, and 75% fiction titles in 2012.
• 81% of the most popular General and literary fiction titles were available as unabridged human speech audio books, compared to 40% of Saga and romance titles in 2012.

Related: How important is text-to-speech capability to you?, Amazon, Kobo and Sony request e-readers be exempt from accessibility laws

[via booktrade.info]

03:21 PM by usuallee in E-Book General | General Discussions

I just read Louise Erdrich's The Round House. Pretty good book. But no quotation marks were used to denote dialogue. As far as I can determine, Cormac McCarthy started doing this and now lots of literary authors are mimicking the trend.

To me, there is no stylistic reason to omit quotation marks, except to self-consciously announce an author's intention that This Is A Literary Work. I find it utterly pretentious. Your thoughts....

[image: Tsahi Levent-Levi / flickr]

10:25 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Clearly, Amazon wants to think global. Just when we learned about Amazon's plans to expand their Kindle operations to Russian, Indian and Chinese markets, the company announced this week the launch of its Mexico Kindle Store. Also, e-book fans in Mexico can now buy the Kindle and the Kindle Paperwhite locally at Gandhi for 1399 Mexican pesos ($105) and 2399 pesos (~$180) respectively.

“The vast majority of Mexicans do not have access to a bookstore in their town, so we’re happy to launch the Mexico Kindle Store today and bring a huge bookstore with over 2 million titles to anyone with an Internet connection,” said Pedro Huerta, Director of Kindle Content, Latin America. “We are also excited to bring Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite to Mexico at Gandhi stores. Kindle Paperwhite offers an unparalleled reading experience, with a display that reads like real paper, an innovative built-in front light, a small and light-weight design and 8 weeks of battery life so customers can easily dive into their favorite books.”

Quite consequently the Kindle Direct Publishing platform is now available to Mexican authors and publishers as well.

“Mexican authors and publishers can now self-publish their books in the new Mexico Kindle Store with KDP, making their books available to customers in Mexico and all over the world,” said Pedro Huerta, Director of Kindle Content, Latin America. “KDP is a powerful, self-service platform that allows authors to boldly experiment and fulfill their dreams of publishing. We’ve already seen many Spanish-language authors experience great success using the platform, and, in fact, there are many KDP titles in the Mexico Kindle Store already.”

[via Teleread]

[image: arvind grover / flickr]

04:51 AM by sun surfer in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

I was having a look at some past selections on the list and happened to notice that this book club will be reaching its fifth anniversary in October!

At first I thought it'd be November from the list, but then out of curiosity I went to find the oldest thread to have a look at where it all began and found that the book club was actually started in the beginning of October 2008 by the mysterious PsyDocJoanne (and pilotbob was also right there from the start), with the initial book given a month to read first so was considered the November selection.

So congrats to the book club for chugging along for almost five years now and for those that've made it possible! I've certainly enjoyed it since I came on board here. We should celebrate with punch and pie.

04:23 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

While Barnes and Noble is still working on restoring investor confidence, its official Android app continues to evolve. The latest update brings the following changes:

• Changed Night Theme back to black per user feedback
• Fixed empty My Files filter when two or more sideloaded items are duplicates
• Popular Time Inc. magazines now available
• Enlarge book illustrations for more detailed imagery
• Now accessible to blind & low vision users leveraging Android assistive technology, including screen magnification (OS 4.2 or higher) & TalkBack (OS 4.1 or higher)
• Bug fixes
• Some users may need to Sign Out then Sign In again to complete the upgrade

You can download NOOK for Android for free via the Google Play store.

03:26 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Hot on the heels of the 1.0 milestone release, calibre, our most popular e-book library software, is ready for another incremental update. Version 1.1 tidies up a whole bunch of stuff, including:

New Features

• Rewrite the HTML metadata parser to make it faster and more robust
• Book list: When sorting on a currently unsorted column, use the last applied sort for that column, instead of always sorting in ascending order
• PocketBook driver: Scan for books files in the entire device not just in the 'books' folder

Bug Fixes

• Fix a regression in 1.0 that could cause the dates in custom date-type columns to change in some timezones when using the edit metadata dialog to make unrelated changes
• When replacing formats in a book with a very long title+authors on windows, calibre could leave behind the old format file, because the filename shortening algorithm has changed. Handle that case
• Fix content server giving an error if you return to the top level page after using the virtual libraries
• Fix calibredb not updating the running calibre instance properly in 1.0
• Fix a regression in 1.0 that broke splitting of multiple valued field like tags into many items during a rename
• Fix a regression in 1.0 that caused an error when trying to set values for tags with the same item repeated, with different case
• Fix a regression that broke downloading news when output format is set to PDF
• Creating a catalog with an already existing catalog in the library would cause a temporary duplicate entry in the book list. Also fix the author sort for catalogs generated in the AZW3 format not being correct
• EPUB metadata: When changing the title in an EPUB 2.0 file that has multiple titles, remove the extra titles
• Fix a regression in 1.0 that caused Search and Replace in the bulk metadata edit dialog to be much slower than before
• Fix a regression in 1.0 that caused incorrect sorting and searching on some composite columns (columns built from other columns)
• Fix a regression in 1.0 that prevented the moving of libraries inside calibre
• Virtual Library tabs: If the user activates a hidden tab via the Virtual Library button, change the name of the All Books tab to reflect the hidden virtual library
• Ignore text records in the database that are damaged, instead of erroring out. Lets the rest of the data be used
• Fix regression that broke calibredb catalog when sorting on the id field
• HTML Input: Handle malformed OPF files when converting
• Ensure that the Formats custom column (if present) is updated when a new format is created as a result of a conversion
• Fix a bug in 1.0 that broke the Check Library function on computers with non-English locales
• Content server: Fix blank username causing error on startup
• Fix sorting of book list by multi-valued fields like tags not correct in the new backend

New and improved news sources

• VFR Magazine by Krittika Goyal
• Daily Mirror

Unsure how to use calibre? Check out the calibre forums where you're likely to find all the help you need.

07:41 PM by GA Russell in E-Book Readers | Barnes & Noble NOOK

Forgive me if there is already a thread on this, but I haven't found it.

The chief executive of Barnes & Noble's retail division, Mitchell Klipper, has in the past few days sold two-thirds of his shares, raising $5.5 million.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...97Q01D20130827

Related: B&N reports $87m loss for Q1 2014, NOOK business plunges 20%

(image: Mike Kalasnik / Flickr)

07:15 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Hosting the "Beyond the Book" event in NYC today, Kobo just announced a whole bunch of new e-reading devices, including the Kobo Arc 10 HD - their first 10-inch tablet, and quite a beauty it is!

To start with, below is a list of the new devices along with the specifications.

Kobo Aura

Specs:

• Display: 6-inch E Ink
• CPU: 1.0 GHz
• Connectivity: WiFi
• Storage: 4GB
• Price: $149.99 (retail starting September 16)

Kobo Arc 7

Specs:

• Display: 7-inch, 1024 x 600 pixels
• CPU: 1.2 GHz MTK 8125
• Camera: 0.3 MP (front)
• RAM: 1GB, with 8GB storage
• Price: $149.99

Kobo Arc 7 HD

Specs:

• Display: 7-inch, 1920 x 1200 pixels
• CPU: 1.7 GHz Nvidia Tegra 3
• Camera: 1.3 MP (front)
• Connectivity: 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0
• RAM: 1GB, with 16GB or 32GB storage
• Android 4.2.2
• Price: $199.99 (16GB), $249.99 (32GB)

Kobo Arc 10 HD

Specs:

• Display: 10-inch, 2560 x 1600 pixels
• CPU: 1.8 GHz Nvidia Tegra 4
• Camera: 1.3 MP (front)
• RAM: 2GB, with 16GB storage
• Price: $399.99

[via Engadget]