10:00 AM by pshrynk in E-Book General | News

Astak has released firmware updates for the 5" and 6" EZ Readers. Click here to go to Astak's home page, click on support and then Firmware Downloads. RobertB, the rep form Astak has posted here and here about the new features in the firmware upgrade.

07:31 PM by igorsk in E-Book General | News

I wasn't around in the beginning but it went something like this.

In late 90s Jim Baen created a website for Baen Books. That was common enough. But then he did something unusual - he added "Baen's Bar", where real live authors and editors chatted with the Readers. Just that helped quite a lot to improve sales. But then Jim talked some authors into posting snippets of "work in progress" to the Bar to let people "bug check" and build up the buzz before the finished book came out. Soon enough people got hungry for more and proposed him to put up the complete books... for money. Thus the Webscriptions were born.

According to Baen's FAQ the service was to begin on September 9th, 1999 but was delayed two days.

In the beginning only the complete bundle of books for a particular month were offered for $10 (in multiple formats and no DRM!). Later (at the readers' urging!) the bundle price was raised to $15 and the option of buying separate books was added. Afterward came Baen's Free Library and E-ARCs.

David Drake remembers:

[...]the traditional model of electronic publishing required that the works be encrypted. Jim thought that just made it hard for people to read books, the worst mistake a publisher could make. His e-texts were clear and in a variety of common formats.
While e-publishing has been a costly waste of effort for others, Baen Books quickly began earning more from electronic sales than it did from Canada. By the time of Jim's death, the figure had risen to ten times that.

Many publishers only now discover that Jim knew ten years ago: DRM sells less than no DRM, free books help sell more books, and if you treat people as customers instead of as thieves, they pay back with loyalty and free promotion. I'm sure Baen's example will be one of the factors which will finally kill the Tower of eBabel and DRM in ebooks.

Baen Books
Baen's Bar
Webscriptions
Baen Free Library
Baen CDs

02:56 PM by ebookreaders in E-Book General | News

The end seems to be near for the Mobipocket ebook standard. On the sign up page of Mobipocket Ebookbase, the following text is displayed:

Now that many ereaders switch to ePub, and cannot read their DRM'ed Mobipocket ebooks anymore, and Ebookbase is not accepting new Mobipocket publishers, it looks like Mobipocket is exit. Too bad, Amazon could have done much more with the format.

(via eReaders.nl)

02:22 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Last week McGraw-Hill announced a new digital format for textbooks, which they named McGraw-Hill Connect. You can read more about it in an article from the Chronicles of Higher Education. This is not a good thing. While there has been a push in the fiction ebook market towards fewer formats, the number of formats for reference titles has been going up. The list now includes:

• PDF (password)
• PDF (DRMed)
• PDF (DE protected)
• Epub
• Kindle (Topaz)
• Kindle (Mobipocket)
• Mobipocket
• VitalSource
• CourseSmart
• McGraw-Hill Connect
  
• Safari
• NetLibrary

And that's just the places where I've _found_ reference titles. (I'm sure I missed at least one. In fact, I know I left out 2 that are so specialized you've probably never heard of them.) There are times that I wonder if the publishing industry is trying to set ebooks back another decade.

One thing that I know will be accomplished is that prices of digital textbook won't go down any time soon. Given that publishers have chosen to fragment their sales among multiple DRM systems, they won't see the cost savings that they would have had with only one format.

Adoption of digital textbooks is also being slowed by the multitude of formats. This has a range of causes from students simply not being able to find the book to resistance against supporting _another_ format. (That resistance does exist, and coping with it is the responsibility of the publisher, not the consumer.)

11:53 PM by Who are you? in E-Book General | News

According to this Dutch (English Google translation) article Polymer Vision renewed the contracts with about 80% of its employees last week, and is being sold to an Asian company.

It also says Polymer Vision will now focus on ebook readers instead of cellphones.

Update: Polymer Vision was bought by Taiwanese OEM manufacturer Wistron.

Translated link

related post:
Polymer Vision is declared Bankruptcy

11:04 PM by Wetdogeared in E-Book General | News

Sony teams up with Music/bookseller Archambault, a Québecor Média Inc. subsidiary, to create www.Jelis.ca, an online store for French eBooks.

Sony has now started selling their eBook readers in Québec. eBooks at www.Jelis.ca are initially expected to have the same prices as pBooks.

Reported in the by Roberto Rocha, Canwest News Service

http://nbbusinessjournal.canadaeast....article/783724

Jelis.ca boasts being the first francophone e-book store in North America. France-based retailer Fnac has been selling e-books for nearly a year, also in partnership with the Sony Reader.

05:10 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

For new book readers, one of the trickiest aspects of book reading can be deciding what to read. Especially if you like fiction. Everyone seems to have a different idea of what's a great book, so recommendations often don't work at all. Many of my favorite books are not the best, they're just fun to read. Maybe even formula-based books, but with a formula that works for me. For example, I don't miss a single new release of Vince Flynn or Brad Thor. But other similar popular writers aren't worth my time because they just aren't fun for me to read.

Even worse, you can't tell if you are going to like a book by the first page, first paragraph, first chapter or whatever. I know that many people think you can tell, but I don't believe it. I really don't enjoy the first pages of Dickens books, but once I've invested enough into the book to get a feel for the main characters I'm absolutely hooked. Other books are really fun for the first chapter or so, like Pride and Prejudice, and then I can't make myself finish the book because it just goes on and on when I wish it would get to something interesting again. When it never seems to become fun again, I put it aside, frustrated about the time I wasted being bored. Or maybe I get lost in the details and it gets to be too much work to follow along. At any rate, there doesn't seem to be any great way to tell if I'm going to like a book or not, even with the recommendations of other honest and helpful readers.

But if you combine various recommendations that tell you what readers liked and disliked about the book and what other types of books they like, read a couple of reviews and book descriptions, and read a sample chapter or two, the odds of picking a good book really go up. You get a little bit of detail that helps you decide if the real characteristics of the book are what you like, or what turn you off.

That reminds me a whole lot of a personalized music streaming service called Pandora. They aim to play just the music you like, while keeping some variety and helping you to discover new artists along the way. If you like music, I'd highly recommend it.

What's most interesting is that they use an analysis of the relevant characteristics of music to match you to the music you like.

Since we started back in 2000, we have been hard at work on the Music Genome Project. It's the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Together our team of fifty musician-analysts has been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics ... and more - close to 400 attributes! We continue this work every day to keep up with the incredible flow of great new music coming from studios, stadiums and garages around the country

My thought for today is that something similar should work great for books as well. Study what makes books worth reading and fun or valuable. Ask people what books they like and don't like, and why. Provide a catalog of book qualities and use it to provide a personalized stream of book recommendations that can be evolved with your additional input about books you've read. In other words, do something a little deeper than Netflix or the standard social book recommendation sites. It's all the more important for books than songs - you can waste a lot more time and effort on a bad book than a bad song.

We need a better way to get book recommendations. Sure, Pandora messes up sometimes as well. But even when they recommend something I don't like, at least I can see why they recommended it, and start to learn for myself what I don't like. It's a recommendation method that gets into the details that matter, and shares the "thinking" with me. In my opinion, that's just what we need in the e-book world.

Note: In the comments, Erik (aka eaderigt) has supplied a link to the BookLamp service, which seems to be very much along these lines. They are just trying to get off the ground, but it seems promising..

12:01 AM by pilotbob in E-Book General | News

Thanks to our member Charbax for bringing us this video coverage of the PocketBook 360 at IFA 2009.

This is a 5inch eInk based eBook reader device that, according to the video was just released to the public for sale at around $300 USD. The device is ergonomically shaped and has an accelerometer that allows you to turn it 360 degrees, hence the name I assume, to view follow this link:

http://techvideoblog.com/ifa/5-pocke...-e-ink-reader/

There is also some bonus footage of the Pocketbook 302 which the video claims will be out around October with a touch screen, WiFi, Bluetooth and 3G connectivity. Their target price for this is around $400 USD.

Finally there is also a shot of a prototype of an 8inch screen sized reader they also have in the works.

There are certainly some exciting devices coming from Pocketbook this year.

Please join the discussion on this video and device already in progress at: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?p=582027

BOb