04:34 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | General Discussions

It's not that we're surprised after hearing of the DOJ's proposed order to prevent Apple from entering new e-book distribution contracts for five years, that publishers are anything but unhappy about the plans. In a court filing (provided by Cnet) yesterday afternoon, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Holtzbrinck, and Penguin Random House argue that the proposal would effectively eliminate the use of the "agency model" for distributing and selling e-books.

[T]he provisions do not impose any limitation on Apple's pricing behavior at all; rather, under the guise of punishing Apple, they effectively punish the settling defendants by prohibiting agreements with Apple using an agency model.

This would, according to the publishers, go directly against what has been agreed on before in separate settlements with the U.S. ahead of the trial.

[T]he Proposed Order directly conflicts with the consent decrees that the Settling Defendants negotiated with Plaintiffs and that were entered as Final Judgments by this Court, which specifically provide that "a Settling Defendant may enter into Agency Agreements with E-book Retailers" with certain enumerated limitations. As a result, the relief sought by Plaintiffs effectively modifies the Settling Defendant's existing Final Judgments and unreasonably and unnecessarily restrains the Settling Defendants' independent business decisions beyond the scope and time provided for their respective consent decrees.

On the other hand, while it's true that the proposed order would restrict publishers from entering into agency agreements with Apple, it would not prevent them from entering into agreements with any other party, as agreed on in the previous settlements.

[via Digital Reader]

03:10 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Listen up, folks. We need your help. As our Facebook presence has increased, so has the need to interact with Facebook members who visit us on Facebook. As a result we're now looking for a long time member who's familiar with us and who would be willing to field questions and respond to Facebook feedback on our behalf, to join the MobileRead Team.

If your fingers itch to update your Facebook status message every few minutes and if you refresh your Facebook page faster than light to see the responses from your friends, then we'd love to hear from you. Please drop us a line by sending an e-mail to alexander@mobileread.com, or by reporting this post and telling us why you'd like to be the Facebook Face of MobileRead.

01:50 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Readers | Apple Devices

If you're an avid users of Adobe's Creative Suite, you're probably already familiar with their recent shift to making software available on a subscription basis. Love it or hate it, it seems the dawn of software as a subscription is now upon us. With the release of the Adobe Reader 11 update, iPad and iPhone users can now take advantage of Adobe's CreatePDF and ExportPDF cloud services - but only after making the required in-app purchase.

So what's new in 11?

• Ability to buy Adobe CreatePDF service using In app purchase
• Convert an image to PDF using Adobe’s CreatePDF service
• Create PDF files from a variety of file formats using CreatePDF service
• Ability to buy Adobe ExportPDF service using in app purchase
• Export PDF files to various formats (Word, excel, etc..) for editing using ExportPDF service
• Bug fixes and Security updates

CreatePDF is priced at $19.99 per year, while ExportPDF (which includes CreatePDF) is priced at $89.99 per year. Well... nobody said these services would come cheap.

[via Engadget]

07:29 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

OverDrive Media Console is a popular app for on-the-go access to e-books and audiobooks from public an college libraries. According to LibraryJournal, a redesigned version of the app will be released for iOS and Android devices on August 20th.

Changes in 3.0 include: a redesigned user interface, the ability to sync bookmarks across multiple devices, variable speed playback for audiobooks.

Link to the article: here

Below is a video showing OverDrive Media Console 3.0 in action.

Related: Overdrive Redesign

05:32 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

E-Paper is great but there is still plenty of room for improvements. Think of a better, more paperlike contrast, faster response times, the introduction of color without sacrifice in display resolution, just to name a few. Christopher Mims of Quartz muses that following the acquisition of Liquavista, Amazon could be working on a new display technology "with unique properties—like long battery life and amenability to being used outdoors and in natural light - which not even Apple and Samsung could match".

The answer lies in a recent acquisition by Amazon of a company called Liquavista, which makes full-color displays that are reflective, like e-ink, but fast, like the LCD screens in our phones, tablets and televisions. The technology works on a principle called electrowetting, in which each pixel on the screen consists of tiny capsules of an oil that respond to electrical charge. [...]

This means there is no way of knowing when, or even if, Amazon will unveil a reflective, full-color display of its own devising. Amazon has demonstrated in the past that it will go as far up the technology pipeline as it needs to in order to accomplish its goals, and even once considered getting into the business of making its own microchips.

Link to the article: here

04:17 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | General Discussions

If you haven't already heard, like you know, about a gazillion times why paper books are supposedly better than e-books, then the following list of 10 reasons (via BuzzFeed) will be completely new to you. Otherwise feel free to skip in its entirety.

1. You can read books in the bath.
2. No need to turn off your book on a plane!
3. You can read in the sun.
4. They fill your shelves.
5. Antique books are amazing.
6. You can’t get an e-book signed.
7. Libraries and bookstores!
8. Finishing a long book is more rewarding this way.
9. They inspire tattoos!
10. Books don’t die.

[image by Luca Mascaro via Flickr]

07:23 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

The title is a pretty innocuous phrasing of a great big bombshell. A coalition of e-reader manufacturers consisting of Amazon, Kobo and Sony, filed a petition requesting the FCC waive its rules requiring e-readers to be accessible by people with disabilities.

According to the Coalition petition (PDF):

The public interest would be served by granting this petition because the theoretical ACS ability of ereaders is irrelevant to how the overwhelming majority of users actually use the devices. [...]

Granting the petition is in the public interest because rendering ACS accessible on e-readers would require fundamentally altering the devices to be more like general-purpose tablets in cost, form factor, weight, user interface, and reduced battery life, and yet the necessary changes, if they were made, would not yield a meaningful benefit to individuals with disabilities.

According to the letter (PDF) supplementing the petition, e-readers are a distinctive class designed primarily for reading, because they all share the following characteristics (that make them different from, let's say, tablets):

• they have no LCD screen;
• they have no camera;
• they are not offered or shipped to consumers with built-in email, IM, VoIP or other similar ACS client applications and the device manufacturer does not develop ACS applications for them;
• they are marketed to consumers as reading devices and promotional material about them does not tout the capability to access ACS.

Anybody care to bite?

02:44 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

What do you hate more: spam or CAPTCHAs? At MobileRead, we've been using CAPTCHAs to prevent spammers from creating hundreds of fake accounts - every day! It doesn't stop all spam, but generally it does a good job of detecting the bad guys. Unfortunately, CAPTCHAs may also hinder people with disabilities, such as vision impairments, to the point that they cannot use a website. In Australia, various disability groups have now began to set up a petition encouraging major companies to get rid of CAPTCHA tests. From the petition:

They’re frustrating for all internet users, but for me and millions of other people who are blind or vision impaired, CAPTCHA tests prevent us from engaging on the web and accessing online government services, because they can't be read by screen reading software

I have been blind for about seven years and CAPTCHA has fast become one of my most hated aspects of the web. [...]

It is time to kill CAPTCHA once and for all.

I hope you will join my organisation, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) and fellow non-profit disability advocacy groups such as Blind Citizens Australia, Media Access Australia, Able Australia and the Australian Deafblind Council in calling on organisations big and small to phase out the use of CAPTCHA.

To be debated in parliament the petition will require 10,000 or more signatures.

[via IT News]