07:15 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

One of the books I need this semester is Decisions for War, which is published by Cambridge University Press. It is available as an ebook, but only as an ADE protected PDF, and only from www.ebooks.com. Normally I avoid PDFs like a politician avoids responsibility, but I decided to make an exception becuase this site has its own browser based reader that I had been wanting to try, and this title is compatible.

MR first covered the eb20 back in December 2007. Rather than repeat that announcement, I recommend that you should go read it directly.

I've been using eb20 for the last couple days. I also used Netlibrary to read the book in order to provide a contrast. Both readers were displaying not just the same title but the exact same PDF. I have to saw that I am deeply impressed with the eb20.

Netlibrary has an online reader like the eb20, but it comes in a distant second place. The NetLibrary reader opens in a standard browser window, which is not good for PDFs becuase about 2 vertical inches are lost to the menu bars. eb20, on the other hand, opens in a separate window without the menu bars. It has an extra vertical inch of screen real estate. This is a big deal on a 12" laptop screen.

The reading experience is similar, in that both readers let you copy, highlight, annotate, bookmark, etc. But one way that eb20 is significantly better than NetLibrary is page turns. NetLibrary only lets you see one page at a time, and to turn the page you have to use your mouse to press the next page button. The eb20, on the other hand, turns the page with the left and right arrow keys and it scrolls the pages with the vertical arrow keys. The load time of a new page was about the same, but scrolling the page was actually faster.

One interesting difference I noticed is that eb20 automatically crops the margins. This looks to be about a half inch removed from each side. I know it doesn't sound like much, but when I am looking at part of 2 pages it's very nice not to have an inch of wasted space in the middle.

My Recommendation: The eb20 is not enough to make me want to get a PDF, but on the rare occasion that I am forced to buy one, I will check www.ebooks.com first.

01:27 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Flurry saw a 300% increase in the number of people reading on their iPhone/iTouch. They recorded, by the end of July, nearly 3 million users. They also reported that ebooks by themselves have a 14% share in the App Store, second only Games (19%). I guess this means that the Ithing really is the biggest reader.

Read more

06:20 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

We've been long contemplating how to restructure our forum hierarchy to participate the new and upcoming Sony Reader devices (PRS-300, PRS-600, PRS-2121). We have considered various options, including separating by device category (pocket edition versus touch edition) and separating by device name (PRS-300 versus PRS-600). Another third option is to put all Readers together in one Sony Reader category and avoid having too many forum sections at the end.

We understand that there is no "perfect" solution which would please everyone. For now we believe that too many sections can get unwieldy very quickly, in particular when updated/newer devices hit the street. Also, it can be argued that many Reader discussions apply to more than one model. So the option of having a single forum discussing all Reader models seems the most adequate to us. In addition we favor the possibility of tagging threads with a prefix to indicate the device model.

So here is what we have done. We converted the Sony PRS-700 forum into a new forum we simply call Sony Portable Reader (New Forum). We haven't considered moving the older 500/505 threads into that forum because first want to observe how well a combined forum section could work.

Which leaves us to the existing Sony Reader subsections in the 500/505 parent forum - namely "Content", "Accessories", "Troubleshooting", and "Dev Corner". Here too it can be argued that at least for the first three section, it doesn't make sense to separate discussions from the parent Reader forum. In regard to the Dev Corner we are considering the option to moving it out of the Reader forum and creating a new "Developer's Zone" parent forum. This would be done in another step though.

Comments are always welcomed.

07:22 PM by pilotbob in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help up choose a book as the September 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 September 27th. Select from the following books.

The selections are:

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
Belgian detective Hercule Poirot's first case, in which he investigates some strange goings-on in Styles St Mary, and has nothing more than a shattered coffee cup, a splash of candle grease and a bed of begonias for clues.

The Chinese Parrot (Charlie Chan Omnibus) by Biggs
Biggers, Earl Derr: Charlie Chan Omnibus. v4, 22 May 2009
An omnibus edition of the "Charlies Chan" detective stories of Earl Derr Biggers. This volume contains the following books:

1. The House Without a Key
2. The Chinese Parrot
3. Behind that Curtain
4. The Black Camel
5. Charlie Chan Carries On
6. Keeper of the Keys

If your view of Charlie Chan comes from the dozens of very bad, semi-comic movies made in the 1940s and 50s, then read these books and you're in for a pleasant surprise. The books have extremely well-crafted plots ("The Chinese Parrot" is my personal favourite) and are well worth reading.

Lady Molly of Scotland Yard by by Baroness Orczy
Feisty, brilliant, and beautiful; precursor of the sleuth who relies on brains rather than brawn, Lady Molly, and her faithful sidekick and admiring chronicler Mary, began appearing in Orczy's entertaining stories years before the first Englishwoman did in fact become an officer of the law.

A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch
Set in England in 1865, Finch's impressive debut introduces an appealing gentleman sleuth, Charles Lenox. When Lady Jane Grey's former servant, Prue Smith, dies in an apparent suicide-by-poisoning, Lady Jane asks Lenox, her closest friend, to investigate. The attractive young maid had been working in the London house of George Barnard, the current director of the Royal Mint. Lenox quickly determines that Smith's death was a homicide, but both Barnard and Scotland Yard resist that conclusion, forcing him to work discreetly. Aided by his Bunter-like butler and friend, Graham, the detective soon identifies a main suspect, only to have that theory shattered by that man's murder. Finch laces his writing with some Wodehousian touches and devises a solution intricate enough to fool most readers. Lovers of quality historical whodunits will hope this is the first in a series.

Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin
Loved it. This was basically 'CSI set in 12th century Cambridge.' The main character is a female doctor who is essentially a coroner. She examines remains and tries to find out what happened to them. She is loaned by Rome (Italy has female doctors in the 12th century) to investigate a series of child murders in Cambridge. I read this earlier in the year and loved it. There is some early subterfuge where she tries to hide that it's her who is the doctor because England doesn't have woman doctors yet, but the core of the story is the mystery itself of who is the bad guy.

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.

06:23 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

In a press release dated 11 August:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today released the first report of California’s free digital textbook initiative... Of the 16 free digital textbooks for high school math and science reviewed, ten meet at least 90 percent of California’s standards. Four meet 100 percent of standards, including the CK-12 Foundation’s CK-12 Single Variable Calculus, CK-12 Trigonometry, CK-12 Chemistry and Dr. H. Jerome Keisler’s Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach.

press release

You can find the digital textbooks here (as well as a report specifying exactly how well they did).
*************

Curiously enough, I can't see that a second step has been planned. I really wonder where they are going to go from here.

02:08 AM by dasony in E-Book General | News

I just ordered a PRS-600 and now this comes into the news. (I live in Korea BTW.)

• 6 inch screen with QWERTY buttons
• Supports PDF, epub, txt, ppt, doc, xls and other formats WITHOUT conversion.
• Supports Comic viewer for comics
• Expandable to maximum 32GB with memory slot.
• Up to 9000 page turns

They are affiliated with Kyobo, the biggest book store in Korean, and also with other learning contents company. They are working on contents from US, Russia, Europe and Australia.

The pre-order starts on 16th September in Korea. The price is not officially announced, but it seems it will be 350,000~400,000 KRW range, which is around 300 USD.

They are also talking with retailers in Russia and US. iRiver says the product's focus will be overseas markets so I expect it to be released in other countries soon.

07:37 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

I'm prone to strange musings when I'm tired. Tonight, I noticed something - When reading an e-book, it's very hard to get an idea of how thick or long a book is. It's not hard with a paper book. You look at it, or feel the weight, maybe look at the last page, and then you peek at a few sample pages to see how much fits on each page. Then you just sort of "know" how long the book is, and what the page count means.

But when you read an e-book, how is one to know how long the book is? I confess that to get an idea of the length, I generally do some research and check out the number of pages of the print version. Or if I'm reading a lot, then my mind remembers that magic paper-to-device page conversion factor at my favorite font size. That gives me a general feel for the length of the corresponding "real" book in paper form. Usually the e-book has a lot more pages than the paper version, especially if I'm reading on my Treo phone.

But if I don't have that magic conversion factor in my head, or if I am trying to determine how long an e-book is on a device that is new to me, it's kind of a mystery. How do I describe the book length to someone else? Some of the e-books I bought seemed like they were the equivalent of ~300 pages to me. But after looking it up, I find I bought e-books that were only about the equivalent of a bit over 100 pages. I knew it was a really quick read, but wow. I have to admit that I felt a little cheated at first, because I didn't realize how short they were when I was purchasing them. (Actually, I would have bought them anyway - they were really good!)

Now, even if paper books go away (not likely for a long, long time), there will probably still be a place for an typeset version in some format like pdf. I've never heard anyone conjecture that, but it seems self-evident to me that typesetting properly done adds greatly to the reading experience. The nicely formatted e-books available at MobileRead are a good demonstration of the value of presentation. So not everything is likely to be entirely flowable, re-sizeable text.

But... what if there really is no fixed text size? (After all, who is really going to bother nicely typesetting the average fiction e-book in the future?) Then how will we describe e-book length?

I can't think of any other alternative besides word count, and that seems to incredibly unsatisfying and aesthetically crude. It reminds me too much of school days, I suppose. But if there is no fixed standard page number to compare against, what else can we do? I suppose we could agree on a certain common text size and page layout in electronic form and make that the "agreed upon" number of pages in a book. But that seems silly to me also.

This may ruffle some feathers, or you may have some thoughts that make me realize how silly I am, but as wonderful as e-books are, I think that the corresponding paper books are awfully nice, even for simple things like setting a standard for the number of pages.

04:28 PM by pilotbob in E-Book General | News

Astak confirms that their EZ Reader Pocket Pro's are now shipping.

The EZ Reader Pocket Pro is a 5inch eInk based reader device. The device has the new Epson high-speed controller and a 400MHz processor. You can expand the built in memory with an SD card of up to 16GB capacity.

This new device now includes Adobe Digital Editions which allows support for Secure Adobe ePub and PDF eBooks which are sold at many eBook stores and available at many public lending libraries. Support for many other non-secure ebook formats is also included.

You can currently purchase the EZ Reader Pocket PRO for $199 directly from Astak's web site at http://www.theezreader.com/ for a limited time.

This device is being discussed in the Astak forum section here on Mobile Read.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?p=574993

Feel free to continue the discussion there.