04:39 PM by AlfonsVH in E-Book General | News

According to De Morgen and eReaders.nl, the websites boek.be and boekenbank.be will start selling e-books for the Belgian market in October.

At the same time, the Sony Reader will be launched in Belgium.

Great news if you ask me!

06:13 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Reading Recommendations

And the trophies for the 2009 Hugo Awards go to:

• Best Novel: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
• Best Novella: “The Erdmann Nexus”, Nancy Kress
• Best Novelette: “Shoggoths in Bloom”, Elizabeth Bear
• Best Short Story: “Exhalation”, Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
• Best Related Book: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008, John Scalzi
• Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, Written by Kaja & Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio, colors by Cheyenne Wright
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: WALL-E Andrew Stanton & Pete Docter, story; Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon, screenplay; Andrew Stanton, director
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Joss Whedon, & Zack Whedon, & Jed Whedon, & Maurissa Tancharoen, writers; Joss Whedon, director
• Best Editor Short Form: Ellen Datlow
• Best Editor Long Form: David G. Hartwell
• Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola
• Best Semiprozine: Weird Tales, edited by Ann VanderMeer & Stephen H. Segal
• Best Fan Writer: Cheryl Morgan
• Best Fanzine: Electric Velocipede edited by John Klima
• Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu

Congratulations to the winners!

A full voting breakdown is available here (PDF) and full nominations details are available here (PDF).

Related: Your Poll vote for Hugo Award for Best Novel

05:54 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

It's almost two years since its introduction and we still don't know any official numbers of Kindle sales. This doesn't stop the wise guys from Wall Street to crunch their numbers through super-secret spreadsheet algorithms. So did Jim Friedland from the research house Cowen, who's estimating that we'll have 1.5 million active Kindle users by the end of 2009 -- a number to even double to 3.0 million by the end of 2010. Does this sounds crazy to you? No? Then how about this (emphasis mine):

Within 5 years, he [Mr. Friedland] estimates, 17% of active Amazon customers will own Kindles - or 4% of the total U.S. population.... In five years, he predicts, Kindle device and content revenues will be 10% of North American sales, or about $2.3 billion in GAAP revenue.

Well, let's say I am "cautiously optimistic." But after today's housing bubble I tend to take things from Wall Street with a hefty grain of salt.

[via Barron's Blog]

05:13 PM by Madam Broshkina in E-Book General | News

They're hugely different devices, sure, but could the iPhone be stepping on the Kindle's toes again? CourseSmart, which offers subsciption-based, notes-capable eBooks online, has released a full-featured iPhone app for their subscribers. In other words, yes. The app is free, but you'll need preexisting subscriptions to textbooks in order to access any. It's actually a shrewd, if somewhat obvious move for CourseSmart: lots of college kids have iPhones and iPod Touches, and while taking notes and reading long passages might be a little cumbersome on such a tiny screen, the ability to carry all your books in-pocket, complete with search and bookmarking capabilities, is a pretty big value-add.
As far back as May, it was clear that Amazon was pursuing CourseSmart for e-textbook content, an effort that may have culminated in a wimpy partnership with McGraw-Hill—a CourseSmart partner—which netted the ebook reader, and specifically the textbook-reader DX, about 100 regular old e-textbooks. This looks like something of a snub to me, or maybe just a lack of initiative on Amazon's part, but I get the feeling there's a still a lot going on behind closed doors here.

Via Gizmodo

More info here:

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/s...10/daily9.html

03:18 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

A small teaser for our Astak and Jetbook friends... in the next few days we will launch two new forum sections dedicated to your favorite e-book devices. We decided that there is sufficient demand in our community to justify the addition of these new sections -- plus more sections to come very soon.

Stay tuned!

03:10 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Edit: Just received word from Sony that there was a mix up with the dates. The event is now scheduled for Tuesday, August 25 - so one day later than originally announced.

Whoa! It's only been a few days since Sony announced the PRS-300 and the PRS-600, but today they have sent us an invitation to a press conference scheduled the morning of Monday, August 24 Tuesday, August 25 in New York. Sony's Reader team is going to be there and the big question we're all asking ourselves: What is it that the Reader team would normally do at a major press event? What say you, rumormongers?

01:33 PM by keng2000 in More E-Book Readers | HanLin eBook

CURRENT version: 2.10 based on JINKE

6" EZ Reader
http://www.theezreader.com/html/support_firmware.html

Latest: Astak V2.10 2009/07/30
http://www.theezreader.com/firmware_...0_20090730.rar
Description:
Supports Adobe Digital Editions

6" JINKE
Latest: V3update Hanlin V2.10 2009-08-03
http://www.jinke.com.cn/Compagesql/E...ice/update.asp
Description:
1.Support ADOBE DRM. Support PDF reflow.
2.Support ADE recognition and device activation.
3.Support mobi files without drm.
4.Support 5 X zoom in PDF and EPUB files.
5.This version does not support Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

6" LBOOK:
http://www.lbook.com.ua/en/downloads/firmwarev3

Latest: 2.12-20090227
http://lbook.com.ua/downloads/V3upda...2-20090227.rar
BETA:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cren...0.zip/download
Description:
New Adobe Reflow

6" Bebook:
http://mybebook.com/a11/downloads/article_info.html

Latest:September 2009 update. Firmware version NL-2.10-20090902
http://www.mybebook.com/update/bb1-20090902.zip
Description:
Changes compared to the update from August 2009
CHANGE: search with SMS-like keyboard for ePub and PDF files.
FIX: zoomlevels for ePub and PDF files are optimized.
FIX: locking and unlocking the keyboard while reading ePub and PDF files.
Changes compared to the update from February 2009:
WARNING: Removes the ability to read Mobipocket DRM protected files. (non DRM Mobipocket files can still be read)
CHANGE: This updates your BeBook adding support for DRM protected PDF and EPUB files using Adobe (r) DRM.
CHANGE: adds compatibility with Adobe Digital Editions book management software.
CHANGE: auto recognition in Adobe Digital Editions identifying the device as 'BeBook'
CHANGE: adds reflowable PDF and Epub file support.

6" PIXELAR
http://www.mye-reader.co.uk/updates.php

Latest: V3update-EN-2.10-20090806
http://www.mye-reader.co.uk/v3update...0-20090806.rar
Description:
1.Support ADOBE DRM. Support PDF reflow.
2.Support ADE recognition and device activation.
3.Support mobi files without DRM.
4.Support 5 X zoom in PDF and EPUB files.
5.This version does not support Chinese, Japanese and Korean. .

01:23 PM by ilovejedd in E-Book Readers | Apple Devices

For people who like to read fanfiction on their iPhones and prefer to do so using Stanza instead of Safari...

FLAG iPhone Companion is a collection of PHP scripts that creates XML feeds compatible with Stanza iPhone/iPod Touch for the FanFiction.Net website. The story retrieval system uses FLAG by erayd. The format of the catalog was heavily patterned on the output of Calibre's Stanza server. The ePUB conversion module (FLAG component) also makes use of the html2epub command-line utility in Calibre (0.5 & earlier).

Download and installation:
There are two files available for download. Please refer to the included readme.txt for further instructions.

ffnet.zip (104KB, md5: dd32671fc93349992f8b2cc8c05098a1) - For those who already have Apache and PHP set-up, this is a zip file containing just the PHP scripts themselves.

• Extract the contents of the zip file to an empty folder inside your document root. (e.g. C:\xampp\htdocs\ffnet)
• If you didn't extract it to ffnet, edit the settings.ini file and change dir to the folder (relative to document root) where you extracted the files.
• Edit catalog.xml to add your favorite categories.

xampplite-fic.exe (19.7MB, md5: 68bb12b6c98f8c9d16908a587883d882) - A ready-made Apache+PHP environment with the FiC scripts included. The php.ini has already been modified to load cURL and Tidy, and the pcre.backtrack.limit has been increased for compatibility with very long chapters. Apache configuration was also modified to enable mod_deflate. Uses XAMPPLite and can be installed on a flash drive.

• Extract the archive to the root directory (e.g. C:\, D:\, E:\, etc). Doesn't matter which drive letter, but it has to be in the root directory.
• Open \xampplite\xampp-control.exe, and click on the "Start" button for Apache. If you get a message from your firewall, select "Unblock".
• Edit catalog.xml (\xampplite\htdocs\ffnet\catalog.xml) to add your favorite categories. You can find the readme.txt in \xampplite\htdocs\ffnet\ for additional information.

Adding the catalog to Stanza:

• Go to Online Catalog
• Click on the plus (+) sign on the bottom right portion of the screen
• Select "Add Stanza Catalog"
• Type the Name and select the icon you want to assign
• For the URL, use http://your_ip_address/dir/ where your_ip_address is your computer's IP address (to get IP address on XP, click Start >> click Run >> type cmd.exe >> type ipconfig) and dir is the name of the folder where the FiC scripts are located (default for xampplite-fic.exe is ffnet). This only works if you're connected to your local network via wifi, though. For access over the internet, you're going to need to do some research on port forwarding. Getting a DynDNS or similar account would also be useful.

Notes:

• Calibre 0.5.14 or earlier must be installed for the script to work. You can download earlier versions here. Remember to restart your computer after installing Calibre so the environment path is updated.
• The Apache and PHP settings used are very lax since XAMPP was meant for development. If you plan on making the server available over the internet, I suggest you read up on Apache and PHP hardening. This seems to be a fairly good resource. You can't enable safe mode, though, since that would break scripts that require Calibre. Again, I'm not responsible if something bad happens.
• I highly suggest running this under a virtual machine. Not only is that potentially less harmful to your computer, it's also pretty much a requirement if you've already moved to Calibre 0.6.

Please post questions, suggestions and bug reports on this thread. Fair warning, I'm just a PHP beginner. Please be gentle.