01:40 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Do you remember back in February when Mr. Grisham's agent said that ebooks would be out "soon"? Seven months have passed and nothing has happened.

I've been trying to follow up on this the past several weeks and I can't get the agency, The Gernert Company, to give me the time of day. I invite all of Mr. Grisham's fans to ask his agents directly. Here is the email address:

The Gernert Company <info@thegernertco.com>

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

What was going on this week at MobileRead? Here's your chance to catch-up if you missed something!

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• iriver Story coming to Germany?
• First look: Pocketbook 360
• Where's the Pandora for e-book recommendations?
• Polymer Vision back from the grave
• E-books for the French (Canadian) market
• On the rising Tower of eBabel
• Is the end near for Mobipocket?
• Baen's Webscriptions turns ten
• EZ Reader Firmware update
• AirPaper 50t - new Chinese liseuse w\GSM

E-Book Devices - Sony Portable Reader PRS-500/505

• New Contest - Win an ebook reader Cover

10:11 PM by Oberon Design in E-Book Readers | Sony Reader

Tell us your stories.

We know so many of our fans are writers, it only makes sense to offer a contest that brings out your best qualities!

The images used for our designs come from a lot of places but each tells a story for the person who sees it. Quite often the memories these images produce lead to a different story from one person to the next.

Weave us a story about what you see in our designs and you could win a cover for your Sony Reader or Kindle DX.

Tell us why you chose the image you did. Get your ‘writerly’ juices flowing and include your own description or story of the image you have. Share your story on your own blog or website and add a link to it on our Facebook page.
Don't have a blog? No problem, you are welcome to share your story on our Facebook page.

The contest will run September 15 to October 15, 2009

Rules
Write a short story about one of the images you find on our website
Remember to include which make and model of reader you have so we can get just the right fit
Please include a link to the image you’ve chosen to write about. It does not have to be a cover of a reader, in fact it can be an image you’d LIKE to see Oberon do on a journal or reader cover.
Share a link to your blog post on our Facebook page or send us a tweet on Twitter and we'll post a link for you.
So come on, browse the images on our site and tell us a story!

See one of our stories here: www.oberondesign.posterous.com

02:19 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

If you've seen Engadget today, you might have noticed that there is a new epaper based liseuse on the Chinese market. Rather than just repeat Engadget, I went looking for more information.

The AirPaper 50T is a product of Datang Telecom, and it appears to be that company's first liseuse. I found the original press release. Datang Telecom is partnering with China Mobile, a cellular company, and the liseuse is supposed to be a subsidized model. I'm not sure what the terms of the subsidy are, so at this point I'm taking it with a grain of salt. But I did find a gallery of pictures. I would estimate the size to be about that of the Kindle. An important difference is that it has a touch screen in place of the keyboard. This raises some interesting possibilities, doesn't it?

I haven't found a spec sheet yet, but one source I found says the Airpaper has a 4 bit screen. Also, I found a gallery that identifies a Micro SD card slot on the upper edge. It also has a picture with the back cover removed.

press release
gallery
commentary
more commentary

P.S. Liseuse is the French term for a hardware device that is used to read ebooks. I am adopting it as a way to differentiate between hardware and software readers of ebooks.

09:00 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.

06:31 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

01:56 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)

01:22 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.)