08:45 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

This is from a week old announcement, but I thought it worth posting:

Local Books resembles popular dining apps like LocalEats or UrbanSpoon—but for book lovers. It shows you local bookstores, libraries and bookish events wherever you are or plan to be.

I've been using beta versions on my trips for months already; it's the ideal travel companion. Even if you know your area well, you're almost certain to find new places. We hope it will be a shot in the arm for physical bookstores and libraries—a new way to see how much bookishness there is around you.

At present Local Books does not show inventory from local bookstores and libraries. But, well, isn't that a good idea?

from:
http://www.librarything.com/blog/201...pplication.php

Get it on iTunes:
http://bit.ly/5Mb4mM

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

Gosh we've talked a lot this week. Here's your weekly round up of MobileRead's events.

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Notes on a brief conversation with Spring Design
• A visit to the Freescale booth at CES
• RCA Lexi
• On the Liquvista "demos" at CES
• New mainstream device available in Greece!
• Europe's dysfunctional private copying levy to remain (Ars Technica)
• Updated and Corrected: E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy (EFF)
• Tess Gerritsen on ebook readers (mediabistro)
• About the glut of devices on the ebook reader market
• Delyca S600K
• Liquavista: Threat to E-Ink?
• Wattpad closes first round of funding
• Digilife 6" E-Book
• Daza ebook readers
• Sharp PC-Z1 Netwalker Review (from L'Ombre de l'Olivier)
• How Not To Negotiate for Digital Rights (Scholarly Kitchen)
• iRex DR800 to be introduced in Europe soon
• Update released for Adobe Acrobat & Reader
• Mark your calendar: O'Reilly TOC Conference 22-24 February
• Walt Mossberg reviews the Sony Daily Edition
• JISC digitised 100k pages from 19th century newspapers
• Kindle-ADA lawsuits settled
• The neatest thing I saw at CES: PVI's flexible E-ink screen
• Quirk Books to release Tolstoy's "Android Karenina"
• South Korea plans to adopt digital textbooks next year
• Interview: Matt Mason on piracy as a business model (Spark)
• Sony adds 46 comics to the Digital Comic Store
• World largest 19" flexible ePaper from LG Display
• NetLibrary adds support for Sony Readers, Nook, Cool-ER
• Video: Pocketbook 901 at CES 2010
• Amazon expands language support in Kindle Store
• Public Service Announcement: Cherrypal is a SCAM
• Mark your calendar: Book Blogger Convention on 28 May
• Indianapolis Public Schools Replace Textbooks with Digital Content (THE Journal)
• Digitization projects - updates

E-Book Devices - iRex Digital Reader

• DR1000 firmware update with ADE rescheduled to end of Q1/2010

E-Book Devices - HanLin eBook

• Leo's Hanlin V3 eBook SDK

Portable Devices - Other Devices

• Reading capable umpcs/tablets/slates coming out this year

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.