08:23 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.

07:53 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.

07:41 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.

01:18 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.

12:02 AM by luag in E-Book General | News

German Publishers Go After Google; Apparently Very Confused About How The Internet Works
from the welcome-to-online dept

It looks like Germany may be a new front in clueless attacks on Google. With newspapers and magazines admitting that they're too clueless to know what to do with traffic Google sends them, officials in Germany are opening an antitrust investigation into Google based on some of the most ridiculous logic we've heard to date:

Hans-Joachim Fuhrmann, a spokesman for the German Newspaper Publishers Association, said the Web sites of all German newspapers and magazines together made 100 million euros, or $143 million, in ad revenue, while Google generated 1.2 billion euros from search advertising in Germany.

"Google says it brings us traffic, but the problem is that Google earns billions, and we earn nothing," Mr. Fuhrmann said.

Okay. Let's pick apart this apples and oranges comparison. First off, Google earns 1.2 billion euros from search advertising which has almost nothing to do with news. It comes from people searching for cameras or cribs or cars. Google News had no advertising at all for most of its existence and only introduced ads in the US less than a year ago. In other words, no, Google is not making more than newspapers and magazines when it comes to its News site in Germany.

And, even if Google was making more money (which, again, there's no evidence that this is true), that still doesn't excuse Fuhrmann's claims -- which basically amount to him admitting that Google figured out how to make money and the companies he represents did not. Yet the publishers he represents had all of the advantages in the world. They were local. Google was not. They had been around for many more years than Google. They had brand recognition and loyalty that Google did not. Furhmann is basically admitting what a colossal failure the companies he represents have been. They failed to capitalize on a huge opportunity. And now, when Google sends them traffic, they are still failing to use that traffic wisely. And then they blame Google for it? Wow.

continued here:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...33277814.shtml

11:52 PM by dioib in E-Book General | News

This conceptual video is a corporate collaborative research project initiated by Bonnier R&D into the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices. It illustrates one possible vision for digital magazines in the near future, presented by our design partners at BERG.

from:
http://www.bonnier.com/en/content/beta-lab

02:23 PM by anurag in E-Book General | News

Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher's Weekly that "publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy" comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were "loaned" last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.

From what we've been able to piece together, the book "lending" takes place in "libraries". On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a "card". But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons. Although there's no admission charge and it doesn't cost anything to borrow a book, there's always the threat of an onerous overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle of not paying for copyrighted material.

...

From http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/20...-costs-us.html

Fun read.

11:53 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

This review is fairly long (1400+ words)so I'm going to split it into 2 parts. The second half will be the first response to the topic.

Sony lent me a Daily Edition at CES so I could write this review. I used it during my commute to CES every day and then on the plane ride home. Now that I've had a week I think it's an interesting device. I wouldn't buy one, but I can see why it might suit someone else.

Periodicals
I prefer RSS feeds as my news sources, so I don't usually read newspapers. But I bought and downloaded a couple issues, and I'm glad I did. Periodicals are one of the Daily Edition's better features.

First of all, periodicals are listed separate from other ebooks; there's a separate tab on the main page. I like that because it makes them easier to find. The newspapers are organized by the publication's title and then by date. You can sort them by issue date or latest read. Another feature I like is that you can decide how much of a back list you want to keep for each publication. You can also decide to protect editions from being deleted.

The reading experience was also pretty good. You lose a small amount of space at the bottom of the screen to a menu with 4 buttons: Previous, Section Top, Table of Contents, Next. The Next and Previous buttons serve a dual purpose; if you're on the first page of a section (Metro, Lifestyle, Commentary, etc), you'll see Next/Previous Section. But if you're in the middle of a section, you'll see Next/Previous Article.

There is also a rather odd feature I want to point out. There is no image mode on the Daily Edition; you can't select an image and have it appear full screen. But there is a zoom option (in Epub), and it works nicely for enlarging an image. I've tried it with a number of images, and either all these images are high resolution or the Daily Edition is doing a bang-up job at interpolation.

It would be nice, though, if I could double click on an image and have it zoom automatically. HINT, HINT, SONY.

Epub
I much preferred my own collection; the ones I bought from Sony had margins at least twice as wide and were fully justified.

PDF
I've never liked how Sony handled zoom; I think the zoom should be consistent across page turns. But the Daily Edition has a new autocrop option, and for the most part it resolved the issue. I tried a couple academic PDFs, and the autocrop showed me a page that was good enough to scan the contents and look at the equations and graphs (both of which are lost in reflow mode).

I'm not sure but I suspect that Sony doesn't expect the user to stay in zoom mode. I think they expect you to spend all your time in the reflow mode. This makes little sense for complex PDFs, though.

The Sony Store
As you probably know, you can buy ebooks directly from the Daily Edition. I see the value in that; now if only the experience weren't quite so unpleasant (on par with Sony's desktop software).

I bought several bundles, and it wasn't clear exactly which titles came in a bundle. Listing details so it can be found easily is a web design 101 topic; it's a shame that Sony hasn't learned it yet.

I expect the store to behave like it is being run in a web browser and it doesn't. Sony made a number of design decisions that confused me. For example, after buying a book I want to be able to go back to the page I was on (a list of a particular author's books, perhaps). I don't want to go back to the main store page; if I did I would use the options button and select “Store Home”.

There is a back arrow, but it's not a back button. All it will do after a purchase is take me to the shopping cart screen, which is weird because all the transactions are buy-it-now. I couldn't actually put anything in the cart, so I really have to ask why it was implemented?

There are no refunds for any purchases, and this concerns me. I'd be afraid to let anyone touch the Daily Edition because they might buy something without realizing it.