09:02 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Adobe just announced the release of the quarterly update for Adobe versions 8 and 9. This update includes bug fixes, features added at the request of customers, and critical security updates. You can read more here.

08:04 AM by wdejager in E-Book General | News

According to the Dutch website eReaders.nl, the DR800 from iRex Technologies will be available for sale in Europe from January 18th. The 3G option will be disabled though, since it was very difficult to negotiate deals with the wireless network operators in the various European member states, according to iRex.

The introduction price of the 8" ereader will be €499. The DR800S does support ePub ebooks with Adobe drm. Most of the Dutch (and other European) ebookshops sell their ebooks in this format.

Frankly, I am a bit surprised by this move from iRex. Initially, they said to focus on the B2B market, with the iLiad and the DR1000S. Then, the Netherlands-based company started to shift their attention to the American consumer market, by selling the new DR800SG in the U.S. through an 'exclusive' agreement with Barnes&Noble. But unfortunately, B&N introduced their Nook ereader first. Maybe that's the reason that iRex comes back to Europe again?

04:43 PM by ThR in More E-Book Readers | iRex

Here it's "official" from IRex. (link found in the irex-forum)

"*Adobe PDF and EPUB support will be available via firmware update for all owners of a DR1000S (End Q1 2010)." to be found in the middle of the page.

It would be nice to hear a more official statement from Irex about the delay.

It's a shame, what they do with their customers. Would they could do wrong - they will do it.

03:54 PM by anurag in E-Book General | News

A good post arguing where publishers are going wrong when they claim ownership of digital rights of backlist titles, posted partly in response to the much discussed NYT op-ed by Jonathan Galassi.

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2...igital-rights/

Excerpt:

...

And this is what Galassi misses. He correctly notes that a publisher (in this case, Random House) will, among other things, introduce an author’s work to magazines and newspapers for publicity and rights sales, but doesn’t see the parallel universe that authors hope to participate in and e-books are ideally suited for. This is the online world, where not all of a publishers’ connections are the cozy ones around a midtown Manhattan lunch table. In an essay about digital editions of Styron’s work, there is not a single reference to Google or Twitter, though there is a plea that print will not die. An author or an estate may justly ask whether the publisher that worked so hard to bring a book into the world is the right entity to steward a book through cyberspace.

And so in the end Galassi’s argument rests on the high holy ground of moral rights, whereas authors and their heirs occupy the low ground of economic interest. We should not be surprised to see such an argument in the opinion pages of the New York Times, which increasingly has only its moral authority to rely on.

Or Galassi—and Random House—could change the story. Instead of talking about editorial prowess, the argument could be about online marketing, the building of an online community, the monetization opportunities of the author’s specially prepared Web site, the ability to monitor Web traffic and user activity through private administrative accounts, and the inventive management of the emerging online value chain. I hope Galassi is successful in winning the hearts of authors and their agents, but I would put more effort into appealing to their sense of themselves.

11:17 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

I found an interesting review of a netbook that I'd like to share.

When Charlie Stross mentioned this product I thought it sounded ideal for me. When I went to Japan I failed in my roll against SHINY! and bought one. I've now been using it for about two months. It is, IMO, almost my ideal pocket-sized computing device and allows me to do all sorts of things, particularly once I did some fairly major downloading and installing.

First things first. What is the Netwalker? Basically it is an original Asus eee on a diet. The original eee 701s had 4gb of disk, 512 Mb of memory and 1024x600 pixel display. The Netwalker has almost the same specs. There are of course differences: the keyboard is smaller (as is the screen), the processor is an ARM core instead of an Intel x86 one, the built-in flash card is MicroSD not SD/MMC and it runs ubuntu 9.04 out of the box instead of Xandros whatever that the eee came with.

continued here:
http://www.di2.nu/201001/12.htm

08:13 AM by leobueno in More E-Book Readers | HanLin eBook

After hard work, I've uploaded the first version of Leo's Hanlin eBook V3 SDK. This is the development environment was used for the development of Leo's Void (planetarium) and Leo's Wikipedia Reader. It also includes a programming language Script (similar to javascript) in order to develop applications quickly.

The sources include complete sources of Leo's Void and Leo's Wikipedia Reader.

It is released as a GNU project under the GPL. So the code is open and is available for download at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ebooksdk/

[size=14]Development philosophy.[/size]

Native development.

Development in this SDK is mainly done in windows with Visual Studio using an emulation of the device. Once developed and refined the code uses the cross compiler and SDK provided by Jinke (Tools that run on Linux) to compile ultimately for the Hanlin.

The hello world program in this sdk is as native program:

Code:

//Include the sdk main include
//This is all the code you make for a Helloword app.
#include "../sdk/EBookApp.h"

IMPLEMENT_EBOOKAPP //Include this macro in one cpp file to implement the main variables.

//The hello world app is only a page object.
class HelloPage : public EBookApp
{
public:
//Every page (or control) has two abstract methods that must be overloaded. draw the page and onkey as key event handler.
void draw(EBookPort *port)
{
port->begin();
port->clear(ColorWhite);
port->setFont(50, TextStyleBold);
port->drawString(50, 350, "Hello world!", ColorBlack);
port->end();
}
void onkey(EBookPort *port, int code)
{
if (code == KEY_BACK)
port->terminate();
}
};

//The main page object.
static HelloPage page;

//The startup application. In this case do nothing because the app is a static object.
void ebookMain(EBookPort *port, int language, std::vector<std::string> &params)
{
}

//Return the current application
EBookApp *ebookApp() { return &page; }

//Terminate and cleanup application. In this case nothing
void ebookTerminate() {}

Includes virtual planetarium sources Leo's Void and Leo's Wikipedia Reader as an example of serious develop.

Ebookscript Development

The development is done in Windows in the simulator to interpret and only needs to load in the Hanlin program source code and the interpreter of ebookscript own.

The language has built sqlite SQL server and is able to control applications using linux inlet and outlet pipes (This is how the shell is controlled and gnuchess).

The hello world program in script is:

Code:

//Include USPL constants and other stuff
import "const.uspl";
//Include the debugger.
import "debugger.uspl";

//The hello world program in EBookScript
public class Hello extends Page
{
//Draw handler. Every page draw must do a port.begin and port.end.
public function draw(port)
{
port.begin();
port.clear(Const.Color.White);
port.setFont(50, Const.TextStyle.Bold);
port.drawString(50, 350, "Hello world!", Const.Color.Black);
port.end();
}
//Key handler. If the key is back then terminate.
public function onkey(port, code)
{
switch (code)
{
case Const.Key.Back:
port.terminate();
break;
//The intro key calls the debugger. The debugger is also invocated in error condition.
case Const.Key.Intro:
EReader.debugger("hello world!");
break;
}
}
/*
Main entry point. A static function named main on any class. Notice: every static member
main is executed on startup but is not guaranteed the order execution of these functions.
It is highly recomended to define only one main entry point.
*/
public static function main(args)
{
EReader.push(new Hello());
}
}

Hybrid Development

ebookscript has ability to call native functions in shared libraries or dlls. The library can be scheduled to compile as dll and a shared library. An example can be seen in the example of sudoku, in which the solution and generation of Sudoku is done in C and other scripting language.

The language has a number of examples that are in turn useful applications. If all you're interested only in run samples download this file:

ebookscript_hanlin_binaries_1_0.zip

This file contains everything needed to test the examples including a dictionary and a map of Madrid. Extract the folder to a SD and run leoscript.exe

Examples are:

A Chess built as a frontend of gnuchess (It includes a compilation of chess)




A caculator and other programming samples

There is lack of documentation.

11:47 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Daza is a Chinese manufacturer of MP3 players, PMPs, USB drives, and ebook readers. They had a small booth over in the Hilton, and were one of the smart exhibitors who listed their product before the show, and they brought a nice pamphlet that showed all their products.

They brought 3 models, and are currently selling 2 models in China. The E-001 and E-002 are slight variations of the same device. According to the brochure, they have:

• 6" e-Ink screen
• 128MB internal storage
• SD card slot (8GB supported)
• PDF, TXT, Epub, CHM, HTML support (FBReader?)
• MP3 support
• multilingual menus

The E-003 is their new model. It has a keyboard, as well as:

• 6" e-Ink screen
• 3G option
• Wifi option
• 128MB internal storage
• microSD card slot
• PDF, TXT, Epub, CHM, HTML support (FBReader?)
• MP3 support
• multilingual menus

11:24 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Digilife Global is a Chinese manufacturer of digital cameras and security cameras and they are also an excellent example of why it's a good idea to walk all the aisles of North Hall and the Hilton at CES. They brought an ebook reader as a last minute addition; it wasn't listed in the exhibitor registry.

They wouldn't let me try the unit they had on hand, but I did get a copy of the handout and I asked a few questions. The 6" model will be released in March with a projected retail of $250. Digilife is looking for distribution partners.

According to the handout, the specs are as follows:

• Android OS
• 6" e-Ink screen
• touch screen
• up to 16GB internal storage (made to order)
• SD or microSD
• on-screen keyboard
• Wifi
• Bluetooth (optional)
• 3.5G (optional)
• Adobe DRM
• MP3, WMA, OGG support
• handwriting OCR
• Doc, PPT, XLS support (sounds like they can install docs2go)

There was also a handout for a 9" e-reader with very similar specs. The handouts are attached.