06:38 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Jinke released a firmware update for the Hanlin V3 (and Bebook, EZReader, Walkbook, lBook, EcoReader, as well as other OEM models) on 24 November. It appears to be a relatively minor update; the only features listed are support for Swedish & Thai, as well as an improved zoom setting for PDFs. This is only the second update for the Adobe DE firmware.

You can find the update here. Also, about 2 weeks back Jinke also released a firmware update for the Hanlin V5, which can be found here.

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I have question. Did Jinke implement the ability to reflow PDFs?

02:32 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

If you've been following publishing news this past week you'll have read the reports about Borders UK having financial difficulty. Distributors walk away, Borders website stops taking orders, Borders UK up for sale, etc. The latest report from The Bookseller blog is that Borders UK has entered administration.

Edit: It's now officially happened. London based MCR has announced that it has been appointed as administrator for Bokrders UK.

In the coming weeks at least one uninformed reporter will claim that ebooks killed off this company. That reporter is an idiot. If anything killed Borders UK (other than managerial incompetence), it was the internet, not ebooks. In the US (which has the most developed ebook market) ebooks account for about 1% of book sales. Web retailers account for about half of all book sales. Which do you really think affected a brick&mortar store more?

02:26 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Aptara just announced their latest SaaS product, eGen. It's a large scale Epub creation software aimed at major publishers.

I'm sure it's nice and all, but even with a large number of titles to convert I'd still stick with calibre. I have had a few conversion runs of two hundred or so titles. Calibre was more than capable of the task. And this was on my 1.8GHz Pentium M laptop, too.

10:53 AM by pilotbob in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help up choose a book as the December 2009 eBook for the Mobile Read Book Club. The poll will be open for 7 days. We will start the discussion thread for this book on December 27th.

Addendum:

This month is "wild card" and the original plan was to poll all the books that didn't win for the year. But, I realized this would be over 100 books...(the poll only allows up to 30 items) and many people were unhappy with the last poll since the "majority" didn't vote for the winner. Although mathematically with that many books to choose from that will probably always happen.

So, I am making a wholesale decision to change December to "Second Chance" month. We will poll among all the "runners up" from this year. I hope no one is too upset by this.

Select from the following books.

November:
The Picture (or Portrait) of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Spellbound before his own portrait, Dorian Gray utters a fateful wish. In exchange for eternal youth he gives his soul, to be corrupted by the malign influence of his mentor, the aesthete and hedonist Lord Henry Wotton. The novel was met with moral outrage by contemporary critics who, dazzled perhaps by Wilde's brilliant style, may have confused the author with his creation, Lord Henry, to whom even Dorian protests, 'You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.'. Encouraged by Lord Henry to substitute pleasure for goodness and art for reality, Dorian tries to watch impassively as he brings misery and death to those who love him. But the picture is watching him, and, made hideous by the marks of sin, it confronts Dorian with the reflection of his fall from grace, the silent bearer of what is in effect a devastating moral judgement.

October:
Verdant Skies by Steven Jordan
The summary is here: http://www.stevejordanbooks.com/novels/verdant.htm

September:
Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers
When advertising executive Victor Dean dies from a fall down the stairs at Pym's Publicity, Lord Peter Wimsey is asked to investigate. It seems that, before he died, Dean had begun a letter to Mr. Pym suggesting some very unethical dealings at the posh London ad agency. Wimsey goes undercover and discovers that Dean was part of the fast crowd at Pym's, a group taken to partying and doing drugs. Wimsey and his brother-in-law, Chief-Inspector Parker, rush to discover who is running London's cocaine trade and how Pym's fits into the picture--all before Wimsey's cover is blown.

August:
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Little Brother is my first young adult novel, a story about hacker kids in San Francisco who use technology to reclaim democracy from the Department of Homeland Security after a terrorist attack and the concomitant crackdown. It was published by Tor Books on April 29, 2008.

July:
My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
In this 1919 short story collection, P.G. Wodehouse’s beloved star characters, the very silly Bertie Wooster and his unflappable valet Jeeves, must face the perils of pushy relatives, swooning debutantes, and the hare-brained schemes of well-meaning friends.

This collection also features the fictional hi-jinks of another favorite Wodehouse character, the hapless Reggie Pepper, whose piles of money never seem to make up for his utter lack of intelligence. Wodehouse will keep every reader giggling at the wild adventures in which Reggie manages to find himself and the ridiculous dilemmas from which the lucky Bertie is rescued, without fail, by the ingenious Jeeves.

June:
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
In a remote Hertfordshire village, far off the good coach roads of George III's England, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet -- a country squire of no great means and his scatterbrained wife -- must marry off their five vivacious daughters. At the heart of this all-consuming enterprise are the headstrong second daughter Elizabeth and her aristocratic suitor Fitzwilliam Darcy, two lovers in whom pride and prejudice must be overcome before love can bring the novel to its magnificent conclusion.

May:
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The classic horror story of the scientist that learns how to reanimate flesh and creates a being in the likeness of man out of body parts taken from the dead. A story originally written in 1831 yet still has incredible meaning today.

April:
Union of Renegades: The Rys Chronicles Book I by Tracy Falbe
Dreibrand Veta has killed for his country. At the frontlines of imperial expansion, he seeks to rebuild the fortune of his noble family. In his daring travels he encounters the rys, a race far more powerful than the human empire that bred him. More here: http://www.falbepublishing.com/brave...Renegades.html

March:
A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird
A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains is a rare, gem of a book which contains letters written to her sister during her six-month journey through the Colorado Rockies in 1873. Traveling alone, usually on horseback, often with no clear idea of where she will spend the night in what is mostly uninhabited wilderness, she covers over a thousand miles, most of it during the winter months.
A well-educated woman who had known a comfortable life, she thinks nothing of herding cattle at a hard gallop, falling through ice, getting lost in snowstorms, and living in a cabin where the temperatures are well below zero and her ink freezes even as she writes. She befriends desperados and climbs 14,000 foot mountains, ready for any adventure that allows her to see the unparalleled beauty of nature. Her rare complaints have more to do with having to ride side-saddle while in town than with the conditions she faces. An awe-inspiring woman, she is also a talented writer who brings to life Colorado of more than one hundred years ago, when today's big cities were only a small collection of frame houses, and beautiful areas were still largely untouched".

February: ( Tie for second place )
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
My first novel was published in January 2003. It concerns the machinations of technologically immportals who have occupied Walt Disney World’s Haunted Mansion and who aim to preserve it from the depredations of modernizers who would renovate it.
The book won the 2003 Locus Award for Best First Novel and is a finalist for the 2004 Nebula for Best Novel.

Prague by Arthur Phillips
A first novel of startling scope and ambition, Prague depicts an intentionally lost Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune—financial, romantic, and spiritual—in an exotic city newly opened to the West. They harbor the vague suspicion that their counterparts in Prague, where the atmospheric decay of post–Cold War Europe is even more cinematically perfect, have it better. Still, they hope to find adventure, inspiration, a gold rush, or history in the making. What they actually find is a deceptively beautiful place that they often fail to understand. What does it mean to fret about your fledgling career when the man across the table was tortured by two different regimes? How does your short, uneventful life compare to the lives of those who actually resisted, fought, and died? What does your angst mean in a city still pocked with bullet holes from war and crushed rebellion?

January:
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
When a Victorian scientist propels himself into the year 802,701 AD, he is initially delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty, contentment and peace. Entranced at first by the Eloi, an elfin species descended from man, he soon realises that this beautiful people are simply remnants of a once-great culture ? now weak and childishly afraid of the dark. They have every reason to be afraid: in deep tunnels beneath their paradise lurks another race descended from humanity ? the sinister Morlocks. And when the scientist's time machine vanishes, it becomes clear he must search these tunnels, if he is ever to return to his own era.

12:35 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Amazon just announced a firmware update for the Kindle2. The K2 will finally get PDF support. This update will also include improved battery life. Amazon is claiming 85% longer run time with Whispernet on, but no improvement to the 2 week standby. It sound like they've added a standby mode to the software that manages the connection.

press release

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Update: I went looking for the update and I found this page. The update also adds to the K2 the ability to rotate the screen. Shiny.

US Kindle update
Int'l. Kindle update
Kindle DX update

12:08 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

This was just announced on their blog:

Smashwords today announced a distribution agreement to supply ebooks to the Amazon Kindle Store.

The news follows other important Smashwords distribution agreements we announced in the last three months with Barnes & Noble, Sony and Shortcovers.

I'm so pleased to call each of these retailers a valued Smashwords partner, and I look forward to working with them to showcase our fast-growing catalog of nearly 5,000 independently published ebooks.

Our Amazon agreement marks an important milestone in the evolution of Smashwords. We launched in May 2008 as an ebook publishing platform for indie authors. In May of this year, we expanded the platform to support small publishers. In the last couple months, we've transitioned to a full-fledged distributor of ebooks capable of serving authors and publishers around the world. We're just getting started.

press release

11:05 AM by rwsimon in E-Book Readers | Sony Reader

I received my upgraded PRS-500 from Sony this morning. Here's the first few observations:

1) None of the content was missing. All my books were still there.

2) So, apparently, LRF and LRX are still supported.

3) The menus on the reader (books by author, date...) now have alphabetical submenus (A-C, etc.)

4) I don't see any particular difference in speed or behavior except that when I call up a book or change font size, at least for the first time, there is a "formatting" process that takes place for several seconds.

5) There is still no support for the Mac. I tried installing the Library software for Mac, but the Reader is not recognized by the software. (I run the PC software in Parallels under Windows XP.)

I just installed Library 3.01 for the first time, so I haven't really tried out anything new other than putting an ePub file onto the Reader, which worked fine.

So, the very preliminary news that that nothing bad happens to the Reader with the upgrade. I'll report on anything more I discover if there is anything else to report.

09:39 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

OnlineCourses.org just posted a collection of links to the many things you might want to know about ebooks. MobileRead is on the list twice ( numbers 25 & 32).

You already know that the Internet is one of the most convenient, effective means of researching and finding information for your classes, but did you know that in some cases it can replace all of your hefty textbooks and reading assignments too? With ebooks, you can read, stream, and listen to lessons, classic literature, poetry and reference books on the Internet or your mobile device. Here are 100 useful links for ebook lovers.

http://www.onlinecourses.org/2009/11...-ebook-lovers/