11:22 AM by Greg Anos in E-Book General | News

Will Spidey get psychotherapy? Will Bruce Banner get suppressed? Will any more characters get to die and then get better? Will comics get special, even longer copyright than other forms of entertainment? Stay tuned, as goody-two-shoes Disney will be soon be owning all the neurotic and stressed out characters of Marvel.

Stan - my heart goes out to you......

Ralph

NY Times

10:54 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

It's been 4 days since the US release of the Pocket Edition and Touch Edition. Now seemed like a good time to gather the early reports into one place. A fair number of MR members who have purchased one of the new Sony readers. We also know of a hands on video.

PRS-300 hands on review (by MR member DRMoze)
PRS-700/PRS-600 side by side (by MR member Wetdogeared)
PRS-600 hands on video (Thanks, Mobile Tech Review)
PRS-600 with lots of pictures (by MR member DougFNJ)
PRS-600 (by MR member cjs603)
PRS-600 unboxing ( by MR member afsandiego)
comments on the PRS-600 PDF zoom (by davidspitzer)

P.S. We also know of a video of the New York press event:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...363#post568363

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

It was the week that was. Here's what MobileRead's been talking about since last Sunday:

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Sony Reader Daily Edition - ad photo leaked
• Sony Reader Daily Edition - SCOOP!
• Sony eBook Library (EBL) 3.0 links
• MR at Sony Daily Edition press conference
• Sony PRS-600 gets first firmware upgrade
• More details for the txtr emerge!
• Sony's London press conference - roundup

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• September 09 Book Club Nominations

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• MobileRead Meetup in Paris, France Saturday, 19th of September

07:13 AM by AlexBell in E-Book General | News

I’ve had my ECO Reader about 36 hours now, and it’s time for a review.

I bought this reader because I wanted to be able to read Mobipocket and ePub ebooks on the same reader, wanted folders, and wanted a reader with an Australian support desk. The ECO Reader fully meets all these requirements, and I’m very pleased with it.

At the moment I’m using the same SD card as I used in my Cybook Gen3. In the ebooks folder on the card I have a folder for each author (and a couple for SF Anthologies and Mystery Anthologies) and have had no problem in loading ePub books into folders which contain Mobipocket ebooks. For example in the Trollope, Anthony folder I have ‘The way we were.prc’ and ‘Barchester Chronicles.epub.’ When I select the book I want the ECO reader instantly chooses the correct reader and opens the book.

I really like the folder setup on the reader. One can have multiple levels of folders. I have 20+ ebooks by Lois McMaster Bujold in three different series and one stand alone book. The first level folder I set up is Bujold, Lois McMaster. It contains the stand alone book and three subfolders. Each of the subfolders is named Bujoldn, series name, where n is a number given to a series and series name is the name of the series. I have renamed the files to show the positions of the book in the series. So when I open the overall ebooks folder I find the folders in author’s name order. When I select Bujold, Lois McMaster I see Spirit Ring (the stand alone book), and folders for the three series in order the series were written. When I select a series, for example The Sharing Knife, I see the books in that series in the order of the series. The ECO reader sorts by file name (which need not be the book title), and displays the book title taken from the metadata.

The support and information given by the vendor, DA Information Services, is excellent. All my enquiries have been handled very promptly and efficiently, and I am confident that if the reader does need service it will be dealt with just as efficiently and rapidly. As an example, one needs to install a Nokia battery when one receives the ebook reader. The package includes the battery, a screwdriver and spare screws as well as a cable, an Australian style wall plug, standard 3.5mm earphones, and a printed manual.

There are of course opportunies for improvement, as there will be with any device. Although the manual is full and detailed I found some of the explanations hard to follow. There is an option to order books within a folder. The manual states that the ebooks can be ordered by title, but as mentioned they are ordered by file name. Nearly all the many options are selected from a contextual menu revealed by pressing the key on the lower right confusingly labelled the OK key, but bookmarks are managed in a totally different way which I found counter intuitive. And I’d like to see more gradations in font size, especially between the smallest and next smallest in ePub books. These quibbles are minor. My Cybook will be relegated to spare or reserve, and the ECO Reader will be my first choice.

Finally, the manual recommends that one charge the battery for at least 12 hours before use. I strongly suggest that new owners follow this advice since this will prevent some minor glitches that I experienced when I started using the reader almost immediately. One can read ebooks while the reader is charging.

Regards, Alex

01:25 PM by zelda_pinwheel in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Well, summer is almost over, time to be serious and put our noses back to the grindstone. *snif* ! What better way to console ourselves, than with a MobileRead meetup ? Come join us to shake off the end-of-summer blues with an evening of lively discussion and much geekery ! As usual we'll start with drinks and continue over dinner.

When : Saturday, 19 September 2009

______________________

C'est déjà la rentrée, fini les vacances, il faut passer aux Choses Sérieuses de nouveau. Pour se consoler de la fin de l'été, rien de mieux qu'un RendezVous MobileRead ! Venez nous retrouver et oublier le retour au boulot / à l'école (pour ceux qui sont partis) le temps d'une soirée de discussion animée et, bien entendu, moult gadgets. Comme d'habitude, nous commencerons par l'apéro, et passerons à table par la suite.

Quand : Samedi, le 19 Septembre 2009

07:56 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Very little _new_ news was announced in London Wednesday. The cat had been let out of bag on the European release of the Reader Pocket Edition and Reader Touch Edition by the leaked service manuals. The only really interesting news would have been the Reader Daily Edition, even though it was foreshadowed by yesterday's event in New York. Sadly, it isn't scheduled to happen any time soon.

The Touch Edition and the Pocket Edition are available for preorder from Play.com, WHSmiths, bol.com, (parts of) Sonystyle Europe, and Waterstone's. Bol.com has also opened a new ebookstore with over 100k titles (public domain in English, for the most part).

As we've reported elsewhere, yesterday Sony released version 3.0 of their Ebook Library. This latest version adds Mac support, as well as the ability to download the annotations from the Touch Edition.

One last interesting tidbit is that Sony UK has a list of libraries which support ebooks. The list can be found here.

09:25 AM by CommanderROR in E-Book General | News

A new press release from the makers of the txtr just arrived and gives us some more tidbits of information.

The most important news here is that txtr will be cooperating with e-plus and ecotel to bring Kindle-like on-the-go bookshopping capabilities to the txtr.
No exact details like prices and terms of use have surfaced yet, but the news that somebody has managed to form this kind of deal in Germany is already quite an amazing feat in itself!

The other exciting news is that the txtr will be launched on the Franfurt Book Fair on the 14. of Octobre 2009. All information about prices, subsription fees and content will become available then. It's another date to look forward to!

The attached .pdf is in german, if somebody feels like translating it he's welcome to...

09:03 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

I believe there are not too many people who can call the Sony PRS-600 their own, but this doesn't stop Sony from pulling the trigger on a first firmware upgrade. The upgrade is supposed to resolve an issue where the PRS-600 cannot read data from a memory card.

Sony PRS-600 V1.0.01.08040 download link for PC:

http://download.sony.com/prs/prs-600...0.01.08040.exe

Sony PRS-600 V1.0.01.08040 download link for Mac:

http://download.sony.com/prs/prs-600...600Updater.dmg

Related discussions:

• Sony eBook Library (EBL) 3.0 links