05:04 AM by Tom2112 in More E-Book Readers | Astak EZReader

Well, I just bought an Astak Mentor Lite 6" for my sister. (Don't tell her, it's a surprise!) And it arrived in the mail today. I've had it for all of about 3 hours so far, and I've only had an hour or so to monkey with it.

I purchased it through buy.com, and it was a good price: $230 plus $15 shipping and handling. The package arrived without incident, and I was impressed with how well they packed the Mentor's box inside another box with a bunch of packing foam. So kudos to buy.com.

I pulled the unit out of the packing materials, and the consumer box it was in was stylishly designed. It was lighter than I expected. I popped it open and pulled out the Mentor. The mentor was securely packed within the box and protected with a heavy foam pad over the screen. It was also inside a plastic pouch. While it isn't waterproof, I will have no anxiety shipping this to my sister overseas.

Finally:
I got a black Mentor simply because I didn't like the look of the white and I figured white would show its age quicker in the long term. The Mentor was surprisingly thin. You don't really think about how thin 0.35 inches is, but it's thinner than my iPhone. It was also very light. I don't know what I was expecting - as this is my first dedicated ereader - but maybe I was expecting a big battery and extra weight and size from it.

The Mentor has a nice satin finish to it. I would have liked a glossier finish for bling-factor, but I know the satin will hold up better, give better tactile grip when holding the device, and it will fade into the background while I'm reading. So that was a good choice, Astak.

The black Mentor is nice looking, and has several buttons (seven) around the outer edge of the device. They are all cryptically labeled with unintelligible icons - except the power button which is obvious. I was shocked to learn that the "Off" notification on the screen was NOT printed on the plastic sheet of screen protector. And as soon as I pressed the power button the device booted. It booted relatively quickly, though I think it should be quicker. But then again, we all want things quicker no matter how fast they are. The boot time was not excessive by any stretch.

Once the device booted, I started playing around with it. The interface isn't complicated, but it will take a minute or two to figure out. The one thing that really puzzled me was that you could scroll down through the ebooks already on the device by hitting the down directional button, but it did not scroll to the next page after the bottom item. You have to hit the right button to go to the next page. While I suppose that makes sense from a book perspective, it doesn't make sense from a computer perspective.

The device isn't nearly as responsive as my iPhone, but it wasn't terribly slow either. I opened up one of the included ebooks and paged through it. I was completely impressed with the e-ink screen. It looks fabulous! Sure the black could be a touch blacker, but the contrast was excellent and the text was easier to read than a lot of papaerback novels I have lying around.

I thought the screen flashing between each page turn was bizarre until I found out that it is the nature of the e-ink screen to do that. The page turns weren't lightning fast, but were very acceptable - probably about the same amount of time as I would normally take turning a page in a print book.

I found the interface to be a bit klunky at first. I guess I'm just used to using Stanza on my iPhone. But after a few minutes I was navigating with ease.

The menus are a bit cryptic, and I wish the device were more configurable - but I'm a techie - I wish everything was more configurable.

I only ran into one real problem. I loaded a large (13 Mb) .RTF file onto the device and tried to read it. The device never opened the file. It sat for several minutes - I even left, went to the restroom and came back and the device still hadn't started the file. I tried navigating away, but all the buttons were unresponsive - even the power button. So I clicked the reset button on the back with the tip of a pen, and the device immediately rebooted. I didn't try that file again. I grabbed a couple other files and they all worked fine.

I did notice that the device does not support .LIT files. That's disappointing as I have a ton of them. It's not a deal-breaker though, since I can convert them to epubs if I take the time.

I should mention that the device came with a nice faux-leather carrying case. The case fits the device nicely, but the front flap doesn't close quite right. I think the magnets are misaligned, and you have to close it "just right" to get it to stay closed. Other than that, the case is nice. I don't think I would want to read too much with it in that case, but I'm sure my sister will appreciate it since she will probably throw the device in her cavernous purse.

Overall, I'm impressed with the Mentor 6" and if I didn't always have an iPhone in my pocket, I would probably buy one of these for myself. As it is, I will definitely take advantage of the device and use it to read on the plane trip to go deliver it to my sister.

Feel free to ask questions, if you have any. I will have the device for a few weeks before I give it to my sister.

04:24 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Business Insider recently interviewed Scribd CEO Trip Adler, and is reporting that:

Scribd, the YouTube for print, is working on a new way to get e-books onto your Kindle without buying them from Amazon.

from:
http://www.businessinsider.com/scrib...-books-2009-12

*****

Basically Scribd is going to open a mobile version of the Scribd Store that's tailored for the Kindle. Yippee-skippee.

07:26 AM by ebookreaders in E-Book General | News

The first official information on Google Editions has been put online by Google.

Some excerpts from the Getting started with Google Editions page:

Google Editions is an upcoming paid access product that will allow consumers to easily purchase and read digital editions of books. Consumers will be able to preview a book, as they do today in Google Books, and will also have the option to purchase its Google Edition. After purchase, the book will live in the consumer's online bookshelf, available to be accessed and read on most devices with internet access and a web browser; as well as on supported partner devices (to be announced during our public launch).

Google Editions will be offered through the Google Books program. Existing partners (publishers) will be able to sell access to their uploaded books.

Interestingly, Google will offer the Adobe content server 4 drm scheme. Publishers can also choose not to apply drm. No words about ebook formats, but I assume that the service is based on the pdf files that are already stored in the Google Books database (no ePub can be uploaded as far as I know).

Google Editions will be made available for online reading online, as can be understood from the security page:

Each consumer's Google Edition has a unique coding that caches the book when it is accessed through a browser (as opposed to a digital download; see more information on file protection here). This means that the Google Edition is broken down into fragments and temporarily stored in - and accessed through - the browser window. The Google Editions web experience, therefore, is not that of a file download - it is an experience that is optimized for reading in the browser. This allows Google to detect and protect against abuse of each Google Edition.

The publishers can set the retail price for each publication (but it should not exceed 100% of the print price). Publishers can also offer bundles; so that readers can get access to the digital edition when buying a print copy.

Copy-paste and printing limitations can also be set by the publisher:

You can also choose to allow buyers to copy, paste and print your Google Editions without restriction. By default, consumers will only be able to copy and paste up to 20% of a book's content over a sixty day period. Additionally, consumers by default can print 100% of their purchased Google Editions but are limited to printing 20 pages per single print command.

Google Editions will be launched somewhere in 2010. It is not clear yet whether only U.S. based publishers can participate, or that Editions will also be open to publishers worldwide.

It will be interesting to see how publishers, readers and booksellers will react to Google Editions. I think that the platform agnostic approach is a very clever move from Google. But since there are no details yet on how Google Editions can be read on dedicated ereaders or smartphones, it is difficult to speculate on how Editions will influence the market share of Amazon, B&N etc.

(via Uitgever 2.0)

01:02 PM by Wetdogeared in E-Book General | News

A few news snippets from MediaBistro's eBook Summit. More publishers bashing Amazon, with profitability for publishers being threatened. Plus, adverts may be coming to an eBook near you.

Amazon's $9.99 eBook Price Point Attacked as "Predatory Pricing" From: mediabistro.com (blog)

Bob Livolski, founder, Books on Board:
"It's an attack on literature so Amazon can control the industry."

@ eBook Summit: Advertising Is Coming To E-Books From: paidContent.org

- the $9.99 standard price for a digitized title—as established by the space’s leader, Amazon —is not enough to support content creation and distribution.

Fuchsberg, the president of Skiff:
“If e-books are where more consumers are spending their time, ads will inevitably follow."

Growing e-book industry discusses challenges at MediaBistro event From: DM News - Dianna Dilworth

To address this issue, Amazon has tried to push consumer adoption by setting the industry's competitive price point for e-books at $9.99 each. But publishers are concerned that this cost is not profitable and runs the risk of hurting the choice of books that will be able to be published.

12:42 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

MobileRead's resident Hanlin dev community (his name is Leo) just released a second application for the Hanlin V3 and clones. It's a reader program (and the required data files) for Wikipedia. You can fid screenshots and more information here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65834

In case you're interested, his first program for the Hanlin V3 is a star map. You can find it here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...262#post624262

If you want to find other programs he's released, his home page is here:
http://www.leobueno.net/

12:27 PM by mtravellerh in E-Book Readers | PocketBook

Our member SciFiFan again managed to create a marvelous little custom version of FBReader. The existing version of FBreader on the Pocketbook 360 is a couple generations out of date, and this custom version adds a few tweaks that improve usability. Not only does it feature page breaks before chapter beginnings (in ePub), but it also uses the motion sensor as a trigger for page turns. I don't know how he does that exactly, but he has created a mode where the automatic 360° mode is reduced to 180° up or down, right or left and a wrist movement turns pages, where a turn to the right turns a page back, while a wrist movement to the left moves a page forward! It works fine!

You should be aware that the pagebreak before the chapter counts as one paragraph. This leads to the fact that jumping back to your original reading place might be slightly erroneous the first time (you might have to move a page forward in later chapters)

It's here

http://code.google.com/p/fbreader-po...76_fbreader180

Just paste it in your system/bin! If you don't like it, just remove it from there! Don't forget to give SFF some HUGE K!

NB: I changed the link to a new version featuring a more sensible g-sensor and allowing to export external links!

12:06 PM by advocate2 in E-Book Readers | Sony Reader

From Today's Wall Street Journal:

Sony announced Thursday morning that it will sell subscriptions to the digital edition of the Journal as well as a daily summary of news events available only to owners of the Sony device. In addition, users will be able to subscribe to a daily summary of news stories and columns from MarketWatch.com, which like the Journal is owned by Dow Jones & Co.

The Journal summary will cost $5 a month on top of the $14.99 monthly charge for the digital edition of the paper, while a subscription to the MarketWatch product will cost $10.99 a month.

The article is very interesting, but I don't know if you can read it without a subscription.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000..._LEFTWhatsNews

09:41 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

A friend of mine just sent me an email he got from Amazon. He wanted to remain anonymous, so I can't tell you who. But I will vouch for him. He isn't sure how many ebooks he's returned, but he estimated the total to be around 30. I hope that's not true; in absolute terms that's a pretty low number. A fair number of people are going to be getting this email at some point.

Here is the text of the email:

Hello from Amazon.com.

We're writing regarding your request of Refunds.

Unfortunately, the number of issues you have sustained with your Kindle Store orders has led us to believe that there might be a larger issue. Since it appears that many of your orders have been accidentally purchased, we ask that you contact Customer Service for troubleshooting in an effort to avoid these issues in the future.

Effective immediately, we are unable to compensate you for any additional issues with your Kindle Store orders.

Thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,

Account Specialist
Amazon.com