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

Feast your eyes on some of the discussions from this week at MobileRead...

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• March 2011 Book Club Nominations

12:17 AM by pilotbob in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help us select the next book that the Mobile Read book club will read for March 2011.

The nominations will run through Feb 28 or until 10 books have made the list.
Voting (new poll thread) will run for 5 days starting Feb 28.

Book selection category for March per the "official" club opening thread is:

March 2011
Nonfiction

In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).

How Does This Work?
The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.

How Does a Book Get Selected?
Each book that is nominated will be listed in a pool at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.

How Many Nominations Can I Make?
Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.

How Do I Nominate a Book?
Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.

How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?
Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.

When is the Poll?
The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.

The floor is open to nominations.

Official choices each with three nominations:

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

If you missed our frontpage news at any point this week, here is the best way to catch up:

E-Book General - News

• H.264 clip running on standard E Ink panel
• Read an E-Book Week Cometh: March 6-12, 2011

03:58 PM by Steven Lyle Jordan in E-Book General | News

Read an E-Book Week is right around the corner (March 6-12, 2011), and Rita Toews is, as usual, providing great tidbits about ebooks and giving people encouragement to check ebooks out. For instance, did you know the ebook is 40 years old this year?

Yes, I had to be reminded of this one, myself… but it was in 1971 that Michael S. Hart created the first ebook, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer. And Rita has other great material on the site, such as:

• An article by the selfsame Michael S. Hart;
• Comments by Warren Adler and Nicholas Hirst;
• Promotional ideas for enthusiasts, libraries, webmasters and newspapers;
• Info on the advantages of ebooks, by Sara Rosso, ready for you to memorize and recite back to your friends;
• Specials by authors and booksellers;
• And a list of supporters and promoters that grows longer every year. (In fact, I wish I could name-drop a few of this year’s big players, but I’d probably get someone in trouble.)

As e-books become more popular Rita anticipates a time when everyone is reading electronically and Read an E-Book Week is no longer needed to promote e-books. “On a recent vacation I saw as many e-book readers around the pool as paper books,” Rita says. “What struck me, is that these were not just young people reading with the devices. A book, no matter what form it is delivered, is enjoyable to young and old alike.”

If you are an author, publisher or reader, I encourage you to find someone to steer towards Rita’s site and spread the good word of ebooks!

(reposted from TeleRead.)

04:22 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Nobody can question Bookeen's expertise when it comes to building mouthwatering e-book devices. So it didn't come as a surprise when we received word from them about a demonstration of an H.264 movie clip running on standard E Ink hardware (E Ink panel based on Pearl with an ARM Cortex A8-based TI OMAP3621 processor). And as if that wasn't enough - we were told that in a couple of weeks, we should see the same clip again, only then on color e-paper.

(Edit: Apologies to EowynCarter who gets the credit for pointing us to the video first. I missed your topic. )

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

It was the week that was. Here's what MobileRead's been talking about since last Sunday:

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• Signature guidelines updated, Google search engine added

06:04 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Updated Signature Guidelines

You know those commercials that shout at you to "Buy! Buy! Buy!" their product? With those annoying flashing lights and HUGE dancing slogans? Right! The ones you mute, skip over, or go into the kitchen until they're over. The commercials you hate!

<- click to see what's obviously a nono.

Well, we at MobileRead are trying to prevent members from having to put up with this kind of annoyance while they are reading posts in the forums, or just skimming through the day's news.

Lately, in their well earned pride over having published a book, or having a product to sell, ... well, some folk have become just a little too exuberant in their signatures. So the Green Team got together and tried to come up with some common sense guidelines for signatures to guarantee that browsing MobileRead can be enjoyed as much as possible.

Please take a moment to read the updated guidelines on signatures and ensure that your signature complies with them.

Google-powered Search Engine

In an effort to make MobileRead search results more relevant we have added a second search engine - powered by Google. You can try it by clicking on "Search" in the blue navigation bar (top of the screen) and entering your search term in the second input box.

You can also make Google your default search engine if you prefer: Under options in your control panel browse near the bottom where it says "Search Engine", select "Google" and save.

The basic search syntax is the same as you're used from Google. E.g.:

• Use "quotation marks" to surround phrases, making sure that the words you search for are found together
• Use a hyphen immediately before a word or phrase to exclude it, e.g. -word
• Use OR between words or phrases if you are looking for items which have either. The OR applies only to the word/phrase on either side, e.g. black cat OR kitten will find items that include cat and also contain either cat or kitten
• An asterisk (*) can be used inside a phrase as a wildcard word, e.g. "I like * in the morning" will match I like coffee in the morning and I like tea in the morning, among others.
• Use intitle:cheese to find cheese only within titles

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

If you've been absent and are keen to find out what MobileRead was up to this week, check out the links below:

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• February 2011 Mobile Read Book Club Vote