02:42 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

The Kaiser Family Foundation has been conducting a national survey on the media used by children from 8 to 18 y.o. The findings were just announced today. You can find the full details here (press release, prsentation, summary, and more).

Here's the good news: book reading has actually increased in the last 5 years, both in the number of kids reading and the amount of time spent (p30). Unfortunately, newspaper and magazine reading decreased. I'm not surprised; we all know Old Media is in trouble.

press release
report

11:19 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

from the press release:

MCLEAN, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--enTourage Systems, Inc.™, creator of the world’s first dualbook™ – the enTourage eDGe™ – announced today that the Documents To Go® software from DataViz is now available on all enTourage eDGe units. This partnership with DataViz, a leading provider of mobile office compatibility solutions, further evolves the multi-functional enTourage eDGe into a comprehensive solution for reading, note taking, Web surfing and working from anywhere.

On a related note, you can now have the Entourage Edge shipped to Canada. Also, all pre-orders have been sold out and the second set of deliveries will be in March.

********

I'm glad they did this. Most users would have needed type of office software anyway. I'd say it about doubles the number of possible uses for the Edge.

10:17 AM by sahmad88 in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

The readers have finally showed up in Sony's Outlet. Here is the link.

The Pocket Editions are $159.99 and the Touch Editions are $239.99. It looks like all colors are available except the Pink Pocket Edition.

08:05 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

In my last post, I talked about the display technology that makes e-readers possible.But the screen is only one part of what it will take to make a successful market here. I'm convinced that, as in most cases these days, it's the software that will drive the hardware and determine the eventual winners and losers in this market.

from:
http://blogs.pcmag.com/miller/2010/0...r_software.php

He's right, you know. Do you remember the Sony Librie (shudder)?

07:23 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Maplin (a UK based retailer) just posted the product page for the A10JQ, a Windows CE based device. The retail is £69.99, which is quite reasonable. Here are the specs:

• 5" touchscreen
• CPU: 480MHz Telechip
• 128MB RAM
• 480 x 272 screen resolution
• Wifi
• 2GB storage built in
• USB Host
• SDHC card slot
• microphone and headphone built in
• microphone and headphone jacks

If you look at the screen resolution, you'll see why this device is so cheap. It should still be usable as an ebook reader, though.

Why are we covering this, you might ask? Since it runs WinCE, it should be possible to use quite a few different ebook reader programs on it, including: Adobe, Mobipocket, eReader, MSReader, and ZuluReader (Epub). I've used a number of WinCE based devices as ebook readers; sometimes they work well and sometimes they don't. It's worth a look.

06:53 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Do you remember the news reports about Apple meeting with Harper Collins? Well, Mike Shatzkin think that Apple is going to offer publishers a new and better split of the retail price. Given that Amazon just announced a new royalty option, I would say it's almost confirmed that Apple will announce some type of tablet like device next week.

06:41 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

from the press release:

Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced details of a new program that will enable authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell. For each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who choose the new 70 percent royalty option will receive 70 percent of list price, net of delivery costs. This new option will be in addition to and will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option. This new 70 percent royalty option will become available on June 30, 2010.

Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today's median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.

...

• The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99
• This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book
• The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights
• The title will be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech. This list of features will grow over time as Amazon continues to add more functionality to Kindle and the Kindle Store.
• Under this royalty option, books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. Amazon will provide tools to automate that process, and the 70 percent royalty will be calculated off the sales price.

The 70 percent royalty option is for in-copyright works and is unavailable for works published before 1923 (a.k.a. public domain books). At launch, the 70 percent royalty option will only be available for books sold in the United States.

So if a book was listed for $9.99 and was about 1.4MB in size, then the seller should now get $6.69 instead of (about) $3.49. Looks like Amazon has switched to taking an agent's commission rather than that of a distributor & retailer.

12:18 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

China Hualu Group is a Chinese manufacturer of portable TVs, DVD players, and other consumer electronics under the brand name of Pegasus. All of which were in their booth at CES, as well as their ebook readers.

They brought 1 working unit as well as several mock ups of 6" and 9.7" units that are currently under development. There is a variety of models with and without touchscreen and Wifi. I gathered from my conversation that they're still developing the firmware. We discussed the benefits of Foxit vs Adobe in terms of PDF abilities; I tried to talk them into adding FBReader as well.

If you look in the last photo you'll see the working model. They're planning to have it ready by the end of Q1 2010, and I was told that the expected price was $199.

There is a website for a US based subsidiary, but the site isn't up yet.