04:12 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Vook has been very loud lately on Twitter, trying to get interested parties to download its free "Sherlock Holmes Experience" app from iTunes. This weekend, amidst all the buzz for the new Sherlock Holmes movie, eBookNewser did just that.

The App functions as a sample of what Vook is trying to do: it's the complete text of two of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stores (both of which are now in the public domain), plus hyperlinks to Wikipedia entries for terms Vook thinks deserve some explaining (the first page has a link to "opium," for instance). Plus there are short video segments (such as the one above) produced by Vook, meant to offer intriguing background information and bring the story "to life."

from:
http://www.mediabistro.com/ebooknews...7732.asp?c=rss

01:45 PM by Dulin's Books in E-Book General | News

This is the Reader from the Hearst consortium formerly known as FirstPaper. 1600x 1200 11.5 inch touch screen. Finger and stylus touch say the articles

Skiff Reader is 1/4 inch thick weighing just over a pound with a battery that will last "typically " a week" Download content with WiFi or 3g (via sprint) from the Skiff store etc. You'll be able to purchase it at Sprint stores.

The Skiff content delivery service will available for other devices.

Display is LG's flexible display using e-ink and their "foil-backed" tech instead of glass. I wonder which is more durable Platic Logics or LG?

press release

http://wireless.sys-con.com/node/1234459

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/04/s...-a-sprint-sto/

There are some photos and a 360 view at the Skiff site.

07:32 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

A number of interesting events have occurred since my last post on CES.

Jinke has updated their website to include the new ebook reader models that will be on display at CES. There will be 2 models present (with 6" and 9" screens).

Sipix epaper screen technology will be on display. That's what the 2 Jinke ebook readers will be using. You should drop by the Jinke booth and check out this E-ink competitor.

A Pixel Qi screen is supposed to be present on the Notion Ink tablet. This tablet is one of at least two that will be on display in the Nvidia booth.

Freescale just announced this morning that it will demo a concept tablet at CES.

According to their tweets, Bebook will be in Las Vegas as an off site exhibitor. The tweets hint that Bebook's new device will be using a Liquavista screen, not E-ink.

08:06 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

You may have seen the blog postings last week about these devices Almost all the posts are copycats of either this story on Twice.com or this one on Engadget. I was waiting to get the press release (attached below). I know I'm posting this story several days behind everyone else, so there isn't much I can add. But I think I can add a detail or two about the US distributor, Delstar.

Delstar is an importer and wholesaler of consumer electronics. They take an OEM product and rebrand it with their name and model number.

I was already familiar with Delstar because it is currently distributing a Windows CE based netbook. I had found the netbook through K-Mart and wasn't terribly impressed. But, while I was researching for this post, I learned from Delstar's website that it has released a firmware update for the netbook. The update adds better support for Youtube. True, it's a minor improvement, but the fact that Delstar released it at all should be counted as a point in its favor.

I have an appointment to see the devices during CES, and will post more information once I have done so.

08:32 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

Not too many years back, we all lamented the state of e-book formats and longed for an open industry standard. Many of you will remember the day when the best interoperability between purchased e-books and reading devices was the proprietary eReader or MobiPocket format support on multiple platforms. Well described by David Rothman as the Tower of eBabel, the format wars didn't seem to have room for an industry standard format that was useful for consumers, retailers and publishers alike.

Fast forward to the start of 2010, and the growing industry support for ePub is an impressive accomplishment. Sure, there are still competing formats from Kindle, Microsoft, eReader, etc. And there will always be .txt, rtf, html, pdf, etc. But the increasing support of ePub for so many dedicated readers and e-book software applications is delightful for almost any fan of e-books. Some of you long time members of MobileRead probably even remember where it came from, based on the coverage here.

I will leave it to others to write the history of e-books (and I hope that many will document all the interesting twists and turns and provide many insider stories about the important steps along the way), and maybe even correct any distorted views of history that I may have. But I do want to remember and appreciate the accomplishments of one person who many may not have even heard about - Nick Bogaty.

Nick, now with Adobe, was the Executive Director of the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum) from 2002-2007. His mission was to create an industry standard format and container (to hold all the files associated with an e-book for distribution). Many felt progress was too slow. Many felt that they would come up with something, but it would never be relevant. Many criticized the effort saying that we have too many formats already, and all a new IDPF format would do is add to the format confusion with yet another format. Most certainly, there were also many voices and opinions, making consensus a difficult challenge.

I don't know exactly who did what in the trenches, but say what you will, I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to Nick Bogaty and all the members of the IDPF team, as well as all the additional contributors who were unofficially a help to the work, as well as others on whose shoulders the work of ePub stands. It is significant to say the IDPF got the job done. So much so, that I it is often said these days that ePub is the industry standard e-book format. Feathers might be ruffled, and some may argue that it's not dominant enough, but it's hard to argue its place altogether as a significant e-book standard now.

So the next time you buy or load up a book in ePub with the luxury of reading it on a multitude of platforms and devices, you'll know that it didn't just appear out of nowhere. It came from many origins, and yet directly from the IDPF. When e-books are more common across the world than even mp3s, I hope that these people will be remembered for their part in moving e-books forward.

And to all those industry historians out there... start writing down your notes. The coming of e-books is much too important a story to let it pass you by!

06:55 AM by Nate the great in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help up choose a book as the January 2010 ebook for the Mobile Read Book Club. The poll will be open for 4 days. We will start the discussion thread for this book on January 6th.

Select from the following books:

The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster
Imagine a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth, and most of the human population lives below ground. Each individual lives in isolation in a standard 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted but unpopular and rarely necessary. The entire population communicates through a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine called the speaking apparatus, with which they conduct their only activity, the sharing of ideas and knowledge with each other.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Stephenson conjures a far-future Earth-like planet, Arbre, where scientists, philosophers and mathematicians—a religious order unto themselves—have been cloistered behind concent (convent) walls. Their role is to nurture all knowledge while safeguarding it from the vagaries of the irrational saecular outside world. Among the monastic scholars is 19-year-old Raz, collected into the concent at age eight and now a decenarian, or tenner (someone allowed contact with the world beyond the stronghold walls only once a decade). But millennia-old rules are cataclysmically shattered when extraterrestrial catastrophe looms, and Raz and his teenage companions—engaging in intense intellectual debate one moment, wrestling like rambunctious adolescents the next—are summoned to save the world.

Under the Dome by Stephen King
The town of Chesters Mill (pop. approximately 2000) is suddenly cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible barrier, preventing anything other than a small amount of air from passing through. What follows is mostly told from the perspective of Dale "Barbie" Barbara, a former Army lieutenant. After "Dome Day" as it comes to be called, the town quickly collapses into anarchy, as a small war breaks out between the power-hungry second selectman James "Big Jim" Rennie, and a portion of the townsfolk. Resources quickly begin to dwindle, and many begin to resort to monstrous acts of violence to survive.

Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan
The man on the moon was dead. They called him Charlie. He had big eyes, abundant body hair and fairly long nostrils. His skeletal body was found clad in a bright red spacesuit, hidden in a rocky grave. They didn't know who he was, how he got there, or what had killed him. All they knew was that his corpse was 50,000 years old—and that meant that this man had somehow lived long before he ever could have existed!

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
After a spaceship crashes on an unfamiliar world, a rescue ship races against time to rescue the downed ship's only survivors - two children - and retrieve the weapon required to prevent the destruction of the universe. This special eBook edition adds hundreds of annotations from Vinge which were written during the time of his original composition of this groundbreaking Hugo Award winning novel. A Fire Upon the Deep won the prestigious Hugo Award when it was first published.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies…and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World. Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long ago twentieth century. Now in the care of a network of volunteer "ad hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest hightech touches. Now, though, it seems the "ad hocs" are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war: war for the soul of the Magic Kingdom, a war of ever shifting reputations, technical wizardry, and entirely unpredictable outcomes. Bursting with cutting-edge speculation and human insight, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom reads like Neal Stephenson meets Nick Hornby: a coming of age romantic comedy and a kick butt cybernetic tour de force.

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

Bite-sized MobileRead for your weekend pleasure:

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• The best e-book reader in 2009, according to the-ebook.org
• Coos County Library District to lend Sony Readers
• Ebooks in Canadian libraries
• Book, magazine sales in Japan decreased in 2009 (AP)
• Ebooks at CES (pt 4)
• Insdream SX601 - new ebook reader
• First Look at Blio, Ray Kurzweil's Tablet-Friendly Ebook Format
• Microsoft is getting back into ebooks!
• Rise of the E-Reader - BBC Radio 4
• Mark your calender: International Ebook Reader Fair to be held in March
• PVI gets final approval of E-Ink Corp purchase
• Firmware update released for the Onyx Boox 60
• How E-Books Will Change Reading And Writing (NPR)
• BBC R4 programme about the role of the editor
• Today is Public Domain Day
• A National Scan Center: A Public Works Project (O'Reilley Radar)
• New Words for the New Year

E-Book General - Deals, Freebies, and Resources

• New image resource - Must See!

E-Book Software - Calibre

• Calibre ranked #7 as 'Greatest Open Source Software Of 2009'

E-Book Devices - Sony Portable Reader (New Forum)

• [Linux & Windows] PRS Note Reader v0.2 released

Portable Devices - Other Devices

• FBReader 0.12.1 for SmartQ

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• Wishing all of you a Happy New Year!

09:21 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

I came across a couple of lists today and I thought it would be fun to share them.

Lake Superior State University has released its 35th annual List of Banished Words:

SAULT STE. MARIE, Mich. -- Word "czars" at Lake Superior State University "unfriended" 15 words and phrases and declared them "shovel-ready" for inclusion on the university's 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.

"The list this year is a 'teachable moment' conducted free of 'tweets,'" said a Word Banishment spokesman who was "chillaxin'" for the holidays. "'In these economic times', purging our language of 'toxic assets' is a 'stimulus' effort that's 'too big to fail.'"

from:
http://www.lssu.edu/whats_new/articl...articleid=1905

And the latest words to be added to the OED were just announced:
http://www.oed.com/help/updates/latest-additions.html