12:02 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Hey, you! Want a shiny new Apple iPad? Sure you do! We're giving one away! But we are making you work for it. All you need to do is go fill out the following survey, which should only take 30 seconds or so. Once you've completed it, you will be automatically included in the drawing.

If you are browsing as a guest (now is always a good time to join us), please include your e-mail so that we can notify the winner. No personal information, including e-mails, will be given out to any third parties.

Please only submit once, if you are found to be cheating we will force you to buy us an iPad (there are a few of you already trying to cheat us by entering multiple times - we will be expecting our iPads soon).

The survey will close at 11:59pm EDT Friday, May 21st, and one winner will be chosen at random. Thanks and good luck all!

Link to the survey: https://www.mobileread.com/survey2010

Prize restriction: Subject to the availability of the Apple iPad in your country. Sorry guys!

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

Just in case you've missed anything, here is the list of our frontpage news this week.

E-Book Readers - More E-Book Readers

• Review: Spring Design Alex

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• MobileRead Spring Contest – E-book readers and vouchers

06:43 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

With the sound of birds chirping and the Saturday morning rumble of our neighbor's lawn mower, we can say with almost absolute certainty that spring is upon us (*). Now – think beach chair, poolside or just a nice cool spot under a tree. Think spring reading. Think brand new e-book reader!

That's right folks, we thought we'd celebrate spring with you, our devoted readers, by launching our spring contest! The following prizes are up for grabs:

Two (2) PocketBook 302 devices
Win an e-book device from PocketBook, featuring a 6-inch E Ink-based touchscreen, 1 GB internal memory, enough battery to flip through thousands of pages, with bluetooth connectivity, and support for notes taking, dictionaries and MP3s.

Two (2) Astak EZ Pocket PRO devices
Win an e-book device from Astak, featuring a 5-inch E Ink display. It's compatible with a plethora of e-book formats, offers eight levels of greyscale, text-to-speech functionality, and a handy scroll wheel for smooth page-turning and PDF reflow. The device comes in winner’s choice of 6 colors, and includes the case and ear buds for the MP3 function.

Twenty (20) E-Book vouchers from Directebooks.com
Win an e-book voucher from Directebooks with a value of US $20. Directebooks offers over 170.000 titles with money back on every purchase!

Could you be one of the winners? Of course! Just keep reading...

How it works

Take a bit of an Agatha Christie mystery and combine it with your analytical uber-skills. The crime scene: a cold-blooded murder in the moderator suite. Your job: find out who the murderer is.

Super star detective Rock Lobster (principally unconventional, always broke) is going to present chapters of the crime story in this thread. Each day he'll add one chapter, for the following nine days. The first two chapters will be posted today, after the announcement. If you vigilantly follow his story to the end, you shall be able to identify the murderer. Get the murderer's name and mail it to us to springcontest@mobileread.com by May 16th. Make sure to also tell us your username!

Down to the details:

• You may enter only once.
• The contest begins today, May 3rd 2010, and ends on May 16th 2010, at 11:59 PM EDT.
• Deadline to send us the solution (name of the murderer) is May 16th 2010, at 11:59 PM EDT.
• You must send the solution including your username to springcontest@mobileread.com. Submissions to other mail addresses, and/or submissions by private message or visitor message can not be considered.
• Amongst the eligible entries four winners will be randomly drawn for the grand prizes (e-book reader devices) and 20 winners will be randomly drawn for a US $20 e-book voucher each
• If you are chosen, you will be notified via private message. Winners must respond within four days after being notified. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.

Huge thanks to the great folks at PocketBook, Astak and Directebooks for providing the contest prizes!

Good luck everyone!

(As always, we're grateful if you link to us or tweet about this contest!!)

(*) For all of you living in the Southern Hemisphere, feel free to save this part for October reading.

MobileRead team members are not eligible to participate

02:47 PM by Nate the great in Android Devices | Spring Design Alex

Author's Note: The following is a repost of my review of the Spring Design Alex. Please do me the favor of reading it on my blog. BTW, you might also want to read my other posts on the Alex. They cover my first and second impressions of the device, and that's where you'll find my opinion on the hardware. I also found an unboxing video the other day (I think it's worth watching).

So my Alex arrived last week, and I've had a lot of fun playing with it. I have to say that this was an easy review to write. I've found very few things wrong with the Alex, and in general, I like it.

Browsing

You can browse with just the LCD screen, and it will feel much like your standard, vanilla, Android browsing experience. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) But then there is something that the Alex can do that no one else can. You can display a web page on both the LCD and epaper screen. You can't interact with the page as shown on the epaper screen, though; it's just there for display.

I do like browsing with the epaper screen. Learning how to do it was easy, and I rarely made mistakes. If I wasn't wedded to my laptop, I'd probably use the Alex for some of my browsing (RSS feeds, blogs, forums).

Email

I had high hopes for this. didn't work for me. All of my email is tied into my Gmail account, and the Alex refused to accept the security certificates from Google. And do you know what's really odd? I can still log in to Gmail with the browser. This was a waste of time. The email client isn't very good, and it only works on the LCD screen. I much prefer using the browser to access Gmail. That way I can use the epaper screen as well as the LCD.

BTW, I'd had trouble before because the time and date were wrong on my Alex. I didn't realize that would cause problem.

Apps

Yes, you can install third party apps on the Alex. Some will not work, and you can't use any of them on the epaper screen. When you use an app, it will feel like you're using it on an Android phone. It's too small for me.

But it's still a nice feature. I've installed the eReader Android app, and I like that I can have 2 ebooks open at once. Another good use would be to have Twitter (or some other social networking app) open while reading an ebook. You could tweet while reading. Again, it's not for me, but I can see the value in it.

The Reading Experience

If you've looked at pictures of the Alex, I'm sure you've noticed that it's longer than most other 6' e-readers. If you're concerned that it might be awkward to use, don't be. I think the page turn buttons are just right for holding the Alex in my right hand. I can't hold it in my left, true, but that's fine by me. It's quite good as an e-reader. I think that will satisfy almost everyone.

BTW, you can hold it in your left hand if you leave the LCD screen on. There's a white icon on the screen that's labeled “ePUB”. It acts as a right page turn button.

The in-book menu takes a little getting used to. There's the white icon on the left, and on the right is the book title and author and a slider bar that shows your current location in the book. There is a row of 12 icons along the bottom: Library, table of contents,the annotation options, dictionary, font size, go to page, and ad to collection.

The row of icons turned out to be a better idea than I originally thought. I could tell at a glance what each icon did, and even though they're not all on the screen at once, it was easy to scroll the row to find the one I wanted.

The Alex has quite a lot of annotation options: bookmark, highlight, text note, voice memo, and you can link to external files (audio, video, PDF) as well as linking to web pages. At first I was concerned about the in book menu; the icons are small and I thought I'd have trouble selecting the right one. I was wrong. It was surprisingly easy to use, and very rarely did I mess up.

I've read several ebooks on the Alex, and I've tried out all the annotation options. In general, I like it both as a basic reader and for its annotation abilities. I did find one problem, though. This is a small niggle, but I quickly learned to turn off the LCD screen when not in use. The brightness of the LCD really bugged me when I was trying to read off the epaper screen.

Reading Addendum

I discovered last night that the Alex has a second fully functional reading mode. I went to see a movie last night, and of course I brought the Alex with me so I could read during the trailers. When the lights dimmed, I turned on the LCD screen and kept reading during the opening credits. I synced the LCD screen so it showed the same contents as the epaper (scrolling was required). I tapped the screen to turn the page.

This second mode isn't going to win out over the epaper screen, but it's nice that Spring Design gave us the option.

A Second Reading Addendum

Someone pointed out that I forgot to discuss specific format support. Epub support is great, PDF not so much. You cannot use all the neat annotation features with PDFs. Also, the Alex does not reflow PDFs.

Library

The Alex doesn't have the best library interface, but it's pretty good. There are 5 menu options: recent downloads, my collections, titles, authors, and latest read. You can sort the title list by author, title, or date. The author list is an actual index of authors, not just another list of the titles. I'm glad it's there because that's how I like to organize my library ebooks. You can also search the contents of the library by title or author.

On the downside, I did find a quirk with the library: it can't see folders. It's not just that you can't use a folder inside the library; it's that the software can't see folders at all. If you copy a folder full of ebooks on to the Alex, they will not be seen and added to by the library. Weird, huh?

But the library works well, so it's not a big deal.

Bookstore

As you probably know, the Alex has Wifi and you can download ebooks from the web. In order to make this easier, Spring Design put a bookstore on the Alex. Now, I expected to see the bookstore. But I didn't expect that it lists multiple ebook sources, including several that only carry free ebooks: Feedbooks, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg. Yes, all those sites are available online, but this makes it a lot easier for the average user to find ebooks. This was a pleasant surprise.

BTW, the bookstore isn't an app. Clicking on one of the stores takes you to the website. The bookstore experience is web browsing, basically.

Conclusion

I do like the Alex. It has a solid hardware design and it's both easy to use and very capable. If you buy one, I bet you'll be very happy with it. On the other hand, it costs $400 and I'm not sure it's worth the money.

06:00 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 - General Discussions

• How a book is made

E-Book Readers - Amazon Kindle

• Announced : Kindle Software Update Version 2.5

E-Book Readers - More E-Book Readers

• Kobo eReader is shipping!

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• Forum Maintenance 05/01 @ 4am EST
• New Kobo eReader forum

10:31 PM by pilotbob in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Hear ye.... Hear ye...

Mobileread is pleased to announce a new forum section for all things Kobo including the recently shipping Kobo eReader.

You will find the Kobo eReader section as a sub-section of the More Devices section. If you can't find it, here is a link for ye...

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=223

See you all there.

(Management)

05:47 PM by midtoad in E-Book Readers | Kobo Reader

I just received notification that my Kobo eReader has shipped. Chapters / Indigo website says they will ship in May, so this is good news.

Time for a new sub-forum?

03:38 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

No worries, we don't expect any downtime, but who knows, anything is possible, hence the heads-up to you for our planned forum maintenance this coming Saturday at 4:00 am Eastern Time.