02:58 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

All this fuss about creating electronic books, and yet the future might be paper books after all. New research has demonstrated the ability to create a capacitor that can potentially power paper electronics. This may eventually open the door for circuits that are printed on paper, and cheap disposable electronics.

Imagine that... your e-books and paper books are the same thing. Products should be available for holiday shopping in the year 2096 or so.

See more at PhysOrg.com.

05:12 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

At long last! Sorry for the delay guys, but here are your winners for our MobileRead Spring Contest.

The main prizes go to:

PocketBooks:
GeoffC and nikkie

Astak Pocket PROs:
Blue Monkey and Freckles

The 20 Directebooks vouchers go to:

• AJ Starr
• argentsly
• ATDrake
• cassidym
• cu_cannon
• desdemona
• DocChip
• dsvick
• Ham88
• Historiann
• karenh
• Latinandgreek
• Lettir
• loldevin
• MantleTyper
• PKFFW
• R_Dollish
• SilverGhost40
• Sourpy
• sqrt(-1)

Another round of Directebook vouchers for outstandingly entertaining entries go to:

• Beppe
• LCF
• omk3
• poohbear
• SneakySnake
• Steve Jordan
• WT Sharpe

So who killed pshrynk? The answer: mtravellerh! All of you who submitted the right answer - you have shown us some excellent deductive and wildly creative reasoning that would even make Sherlock Holmes tremble with envy.

Even if you didn't win a reading device or a voucher this time, a big thank you to everyone for making this such a great game. As promised, attached you find the special, leather-bound in a crush proof cover, gold-leaf collector's edition of Rock Lobster's case notes for your maximum enjoyment.

My personal thanks to the MobileRead team who I believe did an amazing job in making this contest come true. You guys rock!!!!

Last but not least, thank you to our friends at PocketBook, Astak and Directebooks who sponsored this contest.

PS: Be on the lookout for more MobileRead contests soon!

10:25 AM by Steven Lyle Jordan in E-Book General | News

Barnes & Noble announces PubIt!, essentially a self-publishing platform on their own servers, ala Amazon's Digital Text Platform. It seems accepting ebooks from the likes of Smashwords doesn't satisfy them, they want to be a direct supplier. (It could also cause those who use the service to possibly bypass services like Smashwords, thereby possibly cutting down the amount of material processed by Smashwords and sent to competitors like Sony and Kobo... but I'm sure that's an accidental result of the move. )

02:42 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | General Discussions

As an e-book reader, have you ever looked at the number of titles available for free on the web, or available conveniently for purchase, and felt lost? Maybe you have downloaded a huge collection, and feel lost in the mass of titles. (For some, huge might mean 50 e-books, but for others it might mean 100,000 e-books in this digital age of wider accessibility!) You might even feel like there are so many books out there for you, that reading has become almost a job as you try to get through your reading list faster and faster. Instead of just enjoying books, you feel like you are trying to become more and more efficient as you can't wait to get to that next book.

While I've been thinking about this dilemma/paradox a lot recently, I couldn't help but write out a thought or two today because of the intriguing article at TeleRead by Alejandro Sanchez, Starving in a bountiful harvest: how ebooks are making my life more stressful. Sure, individuals deal differently with information overload, so you may not feel this at all. But I bet you at least know someone else that does. As Alejandro puts it,

Books in their dead-tree form, make me feel as if each one has created an intimate relationship with me, that I am beginning to lose with the works that makeup my ever expanding collection: at last count its well over a thousand e-books. Don’t get me wrong, I do have vivid memories of working a late shift and tearing through “War and Peace” or the sense of connection that I established with Hugo’s “Les Miserable”: both being free e-books from feedbooks.com. But, everything in between, I am beginning to view with a bid of dread. I know that I can form an emotional attachment to a writer’s thoughts but am beginning to realize that a writer’s work may need to be even more powerful than before to excite me.

My own feeling is that I usually approach my choice of the next book to read based on a type of book. I might have a series that I follow by a favorite author, and decide to read the latest book. Or I might choose a technical book, based on the subject I am trying to learn about. Or I might have a lot of energy and decide to tackle a classic that I've been wanting to read, such as War and Peace. Maybe I want a civil war book, or a top business title, or something significant from history, etc. In the old days, all I really had to choose was my book source. I'd wander into the library or bookstore and browse until I found the right book (or three or ten!) at the right price. I didn't worry very much about picking just the right book because I was just happy to find a few that I was excited about. I didn't really have to keep track of which books I was currently reading, because they were all there on my desk or table.

But now that's all changed. I had pretty much stopped reading for fun until MobileRead and PDAs and e-books came onto the scene, as well as the enthusiasm for reading I found from everyone at MobileRead. Now, I have files on various computers and phones as well as a dedicated e-book device. I actually have to make a list of the 5-10 books I'm reading, or trying to get to, or else I lose track. And yes, in the process, every book does indeed probably become less special.

In addition, there are so many source of e-books of every type and quality. Check out this list in the MobileRead Wiki with sites for free downloadable e-books. I'm pretty sure that this easily exceeds the available libraries of the richest men on earth throughout all of human history before the digital age. When I want a book now, I can randomly pick one of those sites, and maybe feel guilty about the 14 other types of books I'm trying to read, or feel like I'm missing out on the latest novel. As I don't usually read through books very fast, I have to admit feeling all the more jealous of all the people here at MobileRead that seem to finish a book a week or even a book a day.

So now I definitely feel a bit more stress about which books to read. The world's collective library is at my fingertips, so covering the most important books has become a lot more important to me. Life is short, and my interests are wide, so I know I can only sample what's out there.

How do I pick the right books, and manage my reading list? And it's also quite frustrating not getting to read the first part of the book for free before purchasing - I tend to shy away from buying e-books now unless I have a way of knowing for sure that I will like them, or unless the prices are too good to pass up. For SciFi reading, for example, Steve Jordan Books has became a favorite of mine. Others gravitate to Baen books for similar reasons. Both offer DRM-free books. Many other authors I follow have been because of a paperback novel that I bought first based on a recommendation, or was given as a gift. You get the idea. But what about new types of books? There are so many to choose from.

It must be a little bit how people feel when they suddenly come into large amounts of wealth - ecstatic until they realize the responsibility of properly handling the money. You have to have the right financial manager, and you have to make sure that he won't steal it all, or that it's somewhat protected from lawsuits and taxes and market fluctuations. You have to make sure you don't get caught short by ignoring the taxes owed. You have to take care of anything that you acquire, such as a home or a boat or a company or whatever. And maybe the most important of all, you probably want to invest in other people's lives and improving the world. So making the most of your money is not as easy as it sounds. I've heard that the burden of all this can make people wish they never received all that money. Personally, I'd really like to give it a try, but as for most of you, I'm much more likely to be a part of the daily grind to earn a living with an average job and living in modest circumstances.

With this sudden abundance of wealth in the form of e-books, are we really prepared to take advantage? True, one can just turn a blind eye and simply pick a book based on the mood of the moment and ignore everything else. But for some of us, reading is so important and valuable, we want to read the best stuff, and we almost anguish when we compare the number of books we can read with the number of books we'd like to read. For his honesty about longing for some of the innocence and simplicity of the old days with paper books, is accused of secretly being a paper book lover. But I appreciate his comments, and I think that there is commonly a definite sense of being overwhelmed with the choices. An e-book version of information overload.

Clearly, we have some work to do as a reading community and industry to figure out how to deal with the embarrassment of riches we have with e-books today. We're the trendsetters and the first generation of e-book enthusiasts, and in many ways this generation will set the paradigm for e-book readers that will last a long time.

So what are the ways people can simply and comfortably find the right books to read. How to best sort through their libraries or online libraries and maybe even keep a "to-read" list? How to keep track of what books they've read and what they liked or learned from them? How to know what books you might like based on the kinds of books you liked/disliked in the past? Or how much of these concerns should just be thrown out the window in order to bring back those carefree days of picking the next book to read like we used to do.... "Wow, that book looks interesting. I think I'll read it."

I'm pretty sure this will connect with someone here, unless the multitude of e-books is just pure joy and benefit for all, with no downsides? Let us know what you think with your comments and thoughts!

06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Have something interesting to say about e-books or mobile computing? Join our forums and share your view on topics like the ones discussed at MobileRead this past week...

E-Book General - News

• Plastic Logic preparing Color epaper launch for 2012
• Call for comments: OPDS Catalogs 0.9 draft (open catalog standard ebooks)
• Spring Design Alex just got a firmware update

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• MobileRead's Win an iPad - E-Reader Survey

08:40 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

crossposted from The Digital Reader

Spring Design is pushing out a firmware update for the Alex. It's not available on their website; you have to wait for your Alex to check for for it. I'm told it checks once a day.

I've just heard back from Spring Design with the details. Here is what they told me:

• updated the user manual and replaced the PDF with Epub (it nowhas all the Epub reading features like font sizes)
• the Alex now automatically shows up as a USB drive (like other Android devices, it had to be manually mounted before)
• repartitioned the internal memory to support the upcoming Android 1.6 OS (coming later this month)
• fixed a System Hang bug

08:12 AM by zelda_pinwheel in E-Book General | News

Keith Falgren has announced that the 0.9 draft of the open catalog standard, OPDS, is now ready for review, and they are looking for comments and feedback. OPDS is an open standard format for book distribution; it's the equivalent of epub for book catalogs. It allows people to easily create their own catalogs of books based on any criteria pertinent to them, and easily share those catalogs with anyone.

OPDS is already being used by sites and applications like the Internet Archive, feedbooks, InkMesh, Smashwords, Aldiko, Stanza, LibraryThing, Goodreads, our own dpierron's calibre2opds...

Here is the email :

Subject: [openpub] Call for comments: OPDS Catalogs 0.9 draft, an Atom-based standard for ebook distribution

Hi,

The OPDS Catalogs 0.9 draft at
http://code.google.com/p/openpub/wiki/CatalogSpecDraft is now ready
for your review and we'd love to get your feedback and comments.
Please submit any and all critiques or comments to the openpub mailing
list (http://groups.google.com/group/openpub) or add an issue
(http://code.google.com/p/openpub/issues/entry) by 19 May 2010.

What are OPDS Catalogs?

OPDS stands for "Open Publication Distribution System" and OPDS
Catalogs enable the aggregation, distribution, and discovery of books,
journals, and other digital content by any user, from any source, in
any electronic format, on any device. The OPDS Catalogs specification
is based on the Atom syndication format and prioritizes simplicity and
speed.

Is this vaporware?

Nope. The OPDS Catalogs 0.9 draft is based on a lot of existing,
in-production software and collaboration between ebook reading
systems, publishers, and distributors. Feedbooks, for example, already
distributes more than 2 million ebooks every month using its OPDS
Catalogs (http://feedbooks.com/catalog.atom) and ebook readers like
Aldiko, Stanza, QuickReader, FBReader, Ibis Reader, and others already
support the evolving specification. Publishers and libraries have been
early adopters of the OPDS Catalogs as the specification has evolved
toward 0.9 as well. Some highlights:

* Internet Archive (1.8 million free books,
http://bookserver.archive.org/catalog/)
* O'Reilly Media (hundreds of technical ebooks,
http://catalog.oreilly.com/aldiko/main.xml)
* PragPub Magazine, from The Pragmatic Programmers
(http://pragprog.com/magazines.opds)
* Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com/atom)

OPDS Catalogs are the first component in the Internet Archive’s
BookServer Project (http://www.archive.org/bookserver).

Thanks for your feedback,
Keith Fahlgren & the openpub community

Related :
The Book Server project on the Internet Archive
"Powered by OPDS" on the feedbooks blog
dpierron's calibre2opds, a system for generating an opds catalog from calibre which works with Stanza
Adobe Teams Up With Stanza to Create Open EBook Catalog Standard

05:56 PM by Dulin's Books in E-Book General | News

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Art...-next-year.htm

Plastic Logic aims to have a manufacturable colour display by the end of 2011 and to move it into volume production in 2012, according to Achim Neu, Director SCM, at Plastic Logic, speaking to the International Electronics Forum 2010 in Dresden today.

"We have built a colour display and it is working at our Cambridge laboratory", Neu told the conference.

"aims" being the important word. This along with their news about the speed of their new plastic electronic arrays (switch fast enough to drive video) makes me believe that Q2 will be a nice upgrade.