10:39 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

A project was just begun at UNC-Chapel Hill to scan a vast collection of 18th and 19th century personal documents. From the announcement:

Eighty years after its founding in January 1930, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Wilson Special Collections Library is inaugurating a program to digitize large segments of the collections.

The Digital Southern Historical Collection debuted Jan. 8 with thirty-five collections digitized in their entirety, plus two more that have been partially digitized.

from:
http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/news/in...1/digital-shc/

Chronicling America just added three 19th century Hawaii newspapers to its archives.

The UH Mānoa Library is pleased to announce that the English-language Hawai’i newspapers have been digitized and OCR-ed, and are available online at the Library of Congress' Chronicling America website, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. The papers are:

* The Daily Herald (Honolulu, 1886-1887)
* The Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu, 1865-1916; online: 1877-1913)
* The Independent (Honolulu, 1895-1905)

The Daily Herald and The Hawaiian Gazette (during the years included here) represent a conservative pro-American editorial viewpoint, and The Independent represents a strongly nationalistic Hawaiian viewpoint.

from:
http://hawaii.edu/news/article.php?aId=3334

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

I'm not sure digital textbooks is the right word for this; the amount and type of material is too broad.

In a pilot program announced at FETC 2010 in Orlando, 12 schools in the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) system will replace traditional textbooks with digital content from Discovery Education. The program also includes curriculum alignment services, professional development, and hardware.

The company's curriculum alignment team analyzed the IPS district pacing guides and chose the digital content that it determined was most appropriate for IPS, including audio and video segments, images, articles, games, and interactive resources.

from:
http://thejournal.com/articles/2010/...l-content.aspx

06:44 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

The Book Blogger convention is a one day event intended to provide support, instruction, and social time for people who blog about books. It's in New York on the Friday immediately after Book Expo America. Some of the topics have already been announced:

• Professionalism/Ethics
• Marketing
• Author/Blogger Relationships
• Building Community
• Writing/Building Content

I know a couple book bloggers, and they're fun to listen to. I was planning to be in NY for BEA, so I already registered for BBC. If you want more information, you can find it here:
http://bookbloggerconvention.com/

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

From the press release:

SEATTLE, Jan 15, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that authors and publishers around the world can now use the self-service Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to upload and sell books in English, German and French to customers worldwide in the Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore). Until today, DTP was only available to authors and publishers based in the United States. Now, authors and publishers outside the United States can take advantage of this same opportunity and start offering their books to Kindle customers at http://dtp.amazon.com.

********

It's great that Amazon is expanding the number of supported languages, but only until you realize that Amazon will never be able to support most of the languages in use; the Mobipocket format cannot display text in any direction other than left-to-right. Would you like to use Arabic? Sorry, that reads right to left. Japanese? Sorry, that's written vertically.

And the Kindle has less than complete support for Unicode (which is rather odd, because no other device based on the Mobipocket format has that problem). So if you want to display a language in anything other than Latin based characters (Western European languages, basically), you're out of luck.

04:45 PM by Charbax in E-Book General | News

Here are prototypes of the 9.7″ Pocketbook e-reader using a new innovative plastic e-ink screen which is more durable and offers even better visibility than glass screens. The Pocketbook 901 is designed to be used for schools, to display school books. A version with wacom input touch screen and Wireless connectivity is also planned.

This video was posted to http://armdevices.net/2010/01/14/poc...1-at-ces-2010/

12:59 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

From the press release:

"A greater variety of electronic readers available to consumers creates a tremendous opportunity for libraries," said Chip Nilges, OCLC Vice President, Business Development. "By offering popular downloadable eContent that can be read on portable devices such as the nook and the Daily Edition, libraries can quickly adapt to market conditions and meet the changing needs of their users."

OCLC NetLibrary, the leading provider of eContent solutions for libraries, currently offers more than 140,000 PDF titles that are compatible with the Barnes & Noble nook, Sony's Daily Edition and other devices including all four Sony Digital Readers (PRS-300, 505, 600 and 700BC), as well as the COOL-ER. Titles available in the NetLibrary catalog include current bestsellers, award-winners and timeless classics, and cover subject categories ranging from fiction to business to personal growth and more.

OCLC NetLibrary uses the Adobe Content Server to provide offline eReader capability to library users. Adobe Content Server is integrated with the OCLC NetLibrary platform to offer users seamless offline access to the library's existing NetLibrary collections, providing library users a single point of access to eBook content for online and offline use. Users who have established a NetLibrary account can log in, download selected titles to their computers, and transfer them to supported devices using Adobe Digital Editions.

12:20 PM by leebok21 in E-Book General | News

Hottest IT issue now in Korea is the announcement of the World Largest Flexible ePaper by LG Display.

It's announced yesterday at Seoul. LG Display claimed for the development of 19" ePaper, yet as flexible as X-ray film. The 0.3 mm thin layer backed up with thin foil and TFT array made this display flexible. LG Display successfully debuted at 2010 CES through Skiff reader, which got immediate attention. Same technology is used for the Skiff reader. LG Display is going to start to have mass production of 11.5" display for Skiff reader during the first and second quarter of this year.

19" display is 8 times bigger than 6" like Kindle, PRS-505. The applications of this size of ePaper may be in various fields, not only for new paper reader, but for flexible advertisement panel. With this flexibility, this can go to the round surface.

Impact on eReader? It's hard to predict. It's interesting concept that can hold tabloid size of material, but portability may LARGELY limited by THAT size. It will be great, however, to use as newspaper reader for your own living room. Who knows?

12:06 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

from the blog post:

We’ve had a very busy week here in the Digital Comics lair training new publishers (!) and prioritising new features for the application. Those of you who follow us on Twitter will know that we’ve been asking for your ideas and requests, so for those that don’t, please let us know what you’d like to see in the comments below. And yes, we are working on a way to delete comics from within the application!

In this week’s update we have a massive 46 comics for your delectation. Highlights include our first game related comic, the newly released: Army of Two #1. We see another chapter in the disturbing, yet hilarious, life of Wormwood. Plus IDW are releasing the issue 0 teaser comic too – both come with audio commentary from creator Ben Templesmith. In the Marvel camp you can read the first six ever episodes of The Incredible Hulk (1962); and we introduce both Uncanny X-Men and Blade to the library. Plus more Avengers and more Daredevil. Should keep you busy for a while!

The Digital Comic Store is now selling about 700 comic books for the Playstation Portable. Given that the store only opened two months ago and that this is an entirely new format, 700 isn't bad.

I played with PSP Go for a short time while at CES. I thought the Digital Reader was actually a pretty good solution to the problem of the comic book page image being larger than the PSP screen. It doesn't just display images, and it's difficult to describe the complete process. But there is a video demo in the Digital Comic Store. If you're interested then you should watch it.