07:57 AM by zelda_pinwheel in Miscellaneous | Announcements

This Saturday the Edinburgh Book Festival will be in full swing, and what better way to celebrate books than with a MobileRead meet-up ! This year's meet-up promises to be as much fun as last year's (or more! if such a thing is possible) so if you'll be anywhere in the area, hie thee to the cafe in Highland Spiegeltent for some stimulating discussion of books, gadgets, and the e-book experience! A splendid time is promised to all!

MobileRead member Mike L gives us the following details about the event:

Date:
Saturday 22nd August

Time:
2.30 pm

Place:
At the Edinburgh International Book Festival venue in Charlotte Square, Edinburgh. We'll meet in the cafe in the Highland Spiegeltent, which is on your left as you come in through the main entrance.

How to recognise us:
Look for the A4 Mobile Read logo. Failing that, just look for a bunch of intelligent-looking people poring over various and-held devices.

Other details:
At present, the plan is to meet over coffee or a beer, and then perhaps to visit the festival together, with the possibility of continuing into dinner
in the evening.

About the festival
Entry to the festival is free and open to all. There are book displays, exhibits, and some free entertainment and vents. There is also an extensive
programme of talks, workshops and discussions. These are not free, and the more popular ones get booked up well in advance, though others can be booked at the last minute.

On the day of our meet-up, the programme will include contributions from Henning Mankell (creator of the Wallender books), Pico Iyer (the biographer
of the Dali Lama), Anne Fine (noted children's author), Alexander McCall Smith (one of our most popular local authors), and many more. More
information about these events from www.edbookfest.co.uk.

More information can be found in this thread. Please let us know if you're planning to be there by leaving a little message over here.

11:07 AM by zelda_pinwheel in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Summertime is meet-up time in ebook-land ! And we're excited to announce that there will be a meet-up in Phoenix, Arizona in a mere two weeks ! This meet-up is organised by F1Wild in conjunction with members of the Kindle boards and you can find all the info in this thread.

If you're in the area, take your mind off the heat by spending the afternoon with some e-book enthusiasts for some cool conversation about books and gadgets. Special guests will include two authors publishing kindle books : Thomas Greanias and Timothy Hallinan.

Here are the important details :

Day/Date/Time:
Saturday/August 29, 2009/1pm

Place:
The Poisoned Pen
4014 N Goldwater Blvd. Suite 101
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
(480) 947-2974
www.poisonedpen.com

If you can make it, please RSVP in this thread !

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Missed some of our big stories this week? Time to catch up:

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Mobipocket ebooks useless after firmware upgrade
• Jobs: Adobe e-book development team is recruiting
• Sony's Reader team to present something August 25
• CourseSmart takes on Kindle, puts textbooks on iPhone
• Three million Kindle users by end of 2010, says analyst
• The Register on hacking the Sony Reader
• Sony Reader and ebook websites launched in Belgium in October
• Sony is going ePub all the way! And a third new Reader?
• Official list of ePub compatible e-book devices

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• 2009 Hugo Award Winners

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

• How many MobileReaders have a PRS-500?

Portable Devices - Apple iPhone

• FiC (FLAG iPhone Companion)

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• Reminder: MobileRead WSFS meetup in Montreal tonight!
• Forum additions: Astak + Jetbook next!
• Beta testers wanted: MobileRead goes Unicode

04:35 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book Readers | Sony Reader

The original PRS-500 came onto the scene with a splash here at MobileRead. But there are so many options, and many of the original PRS-500 owners have probably moved on and upgraded. Maybe even with the Sony 505 upgrade deal.

Now, with the conversion of the Sony e-book store to ePub, I'm wondering how many people with PRS-500 are affected. This poll will only pick up a few of us, but might be interesting nonetheless.

So if you still have a PRS-500, put in your vote and make yourself known!

09:45 AM by nrapallo in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Well, after much discussion , extensive polling and considerable arm-twisting , we have upon us a time and place for the 1st Toronto Mobileread.com Meet-up!

It will be a gathering to see the latest gadgetry (e-ink in all its glory) as well as those tried and true legacy ebook readers (what started it all...) and some in-between attempts...

So, mark it in your day planners, bring your ebook reader and come join us for some lively discussions (Did someone say DRM?...) and general friendliness attributed to Torontonians the world over...

Current attendance list (confirmed)

ficbot - Toronto (North York) (1)
nrapallo aka GIGABYTE ATTACHMENT MAN - Vaughan (Woodbridge) (1)
shighfield - Toronto (Scarborough) (1)
lance_ - Toronto (1)
pholy - Toronto (1)
Verencat - Montreal (2)
PeterT - (1 or 2)

Maybe list (possible)

MelC - Toronto (1)

So... please confirm here, or ask for more information, and get that word out that Toronto is having it's first Mobileread.com Meet-up...

p.s. Sorry for the short notice, but these things are 90% planning and 10% actual results...

06:33 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Interested to find out which e-book devices currently support the Adobe ePub format (including ADEPT DRM)? Adobe kindly sent us a link to a list that seems fairly up to date:

Supported eBook devices (Adobe)

The list includes: Astak EZ Reader, Astak EZ Reader Pocket PRO, Astak Mentor, BeBook One, BeBook Mini, Cybook Gen3, Cybook Opus, COOL-ER, Elonex eBook, Hanlin V5, Hanlin V3, IREX Digital Reader 1000S, NUUT2, Sony PRS-300 Reader Pocket Edition, Sony PRS-505 Reader Digital Book, Sony PRS-600 Reader Touch Edition, Sony PRS-700BC Reader Digital Book.

Thanks also to keng2000 who already reported the news to us.

02:57 AM by mtravellerh in E-Book General | News

According to the New York Times, Sony is going to adopt the ePub-format in a new, exclusive way!

On Thursday, Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.

Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied.

It seems as if Sony will strengthen the support for ePub (in its ADEPT attire), selling ePub eBooks over their proprietary bookstore. The bookstore will open up to other hardware platforms using the ADEPT engine (txtr, Jinke's Hanlin clones, Bookeen Opus (and Gen3), Cool-er, Elonex and so on).

It's unfortunately not very clear what is going to happen to Sony's own BeBB-format and it's not even known if it will be supported at all by the new models 300-600. This may evolve in a bad situation for long time owners of Sony readers.

Sony seems to try to reposition itself in the marketing war that rages on between Sony and Amazon with Apple as a potentially new rival in the ring with the rumored Apple tablet.

By opening up their hitherto closed system, they should be in a nice position to boost their sales, considering that Sony does offer a very large choice of books already.

BTW:

'Later in the year, the company will begin selling a third Reader that will, like the Kindle, allow users to buy e-books wirelessly.'

All right, folks! That might be a nice reason for Sony's press conference next tuesday. Let's wait and see!

Please discuss this in our ongoing thread here.

Edit: Sony's official press release is online now here:

In an effort to take the confusion out of digital book formats, Sony today announced its plan to convert its eBook store to the industry-standard EPUB format by the end of the year. Adopting an industry-standard format and Adobe® Content Server 4 (ACS4), a popular, cross platform server software solution that copy protects downloadable eBooks, allows Sony to make its eBook store compatible with multiple devices and its Reader devices open to multiple sources for content.

New point: Sony seems to say that they will make available the epub format to the 500:

Sony will also provide an update path for owners of the first edition Reader, model PRS-500, so early adopters of the Reader will be able to enjoy this benefit as well.

.

11:28 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Hi folks! In order to accommodate for languages with characters that are not covered by the Latin1 set for "Western" languages, we're in the process of converting our database and switching the database client to Unicode.

Before we do the conversion on our live system, however, we need to make absolutely sure that we don't screw it up. For this reason we have set up a beta test server where features can be tried out without doing any harm.

So - if you like to help us (speaking a language with interesting character sets, like Russian, Chinese, or French is a big plus!!), please send me a quick message for the login details.

To all volunteers: thanks for helping us to improve this community!