11:35 AM by pilotbob in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help us select the next book that the Mobile Read Book Club will read for August 2009.

The nominations will run through Jul 26th.
Voting (new poll thread) will run for 5 days starting Jul 27.

Book selection category for February per the "official" club opening thread is:

August
Contemporary (can be any genre)

In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).

How Does This Work?
The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.

How Does a Book Get Selected?
Each book that is nominated will be listed in a poll at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selec
tion.

How Many Nominations Can I Make?
Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.

How Do I Nominate a Book?
Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.

How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?
Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.

When is the Poll?
The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.

The floor is open to nominations.

Official choices each with three nominations:

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy
"The book tells the story of Julian West, a young American who, towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up more than a century later. He finds himself on the same spot (Boston, Massachusetts) but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000 and, while he was sleeping, the U.S.A. has been transformed into a socialist utopia."

The Road Home by Rose Tremain
"In the wake of factory closings and his beloved wife's death, Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to London, seeking work to support his mother and his little daughter. After a spell of homelessness, he finds a job in the kitchen of a posh restaurant, and a room in the house of an appealing Irishman who has also lost his family. Never mind that Lev must sleep in a bunk bed surrounded by plastic toys--he has found a friend and shelter. However constricted his life in England remains he compensates by daydreaming of home, by having an affair with a younger restaurant worker (and dodging the attentions of other women), and by trading gossip and ambitions via cell phone with his hilarious old friend Rudi who, dreaming of the wealthy West, lives largely for his battered Chevrolet. Homesickness dogs Lev, not only for nostalgic reasons, but because he doesn't belong, body or soul, to his new country-but can he really go home again?"

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
Jules is a young man barely a century old. He’s lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World. Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago twentieth century. Now in the care of a network of volunteer “ad-hocs” who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches. Now, though, it seems the “ad-hocs” are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It’s only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it’s war: war for the soul of the Magic Kingdom, a war of ever-shifting reputations, technical wizardry, and entirely unpredictable outcomes.

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft.
From user hudson on Feedbooks: "One of the best longer Lovecraft novels, a story of a doomed antarctic exploration party that uncovers the eldritch nightmares buried and sleeping under the snow." I've been reading a lot of Lovecraft recently, but haven't read this one yet.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith's widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to "help people with problems in their lives." Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witchdoctors. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency received two Booker Judges' Special Recommendations and was voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the Times Literary Supplement.

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

Is it really Sunday again? Hoorah! Time to dig in to another digest of MobileRead delectables

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Cooler finally arrived
• Jointech JE-100 review
• Amazon close to a deal on a UK Kindle / to include 3G and Wi-Fi

07:07 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Alright, let's take this all with a grain of salt, but according to Mobile Today, bookworms in the UK might soon have a good chance to purchase the Kindle device. According to the magazine, the launch date is currently being finalized as Amazon is "in advanced negotiations" with a mobile operator. Meanwhile Slashgear speculates that the operator could be either T-Mobile or O2, both with extensive Wi-Fi network coverage. Yes, you heard that right - the Kindle UK edition is rumored to have Wi-Fi connectivity in addition to 3G!

Amazon is believed to have set for a Kindle UK launch date before Christmas 2009.

Interested? Care to speculate? Join our ongoing discussion.

(thanks to Carl for the tip)

Related: Amazon Kindle not coming to Germany any time soon, says report

10:02 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

MobileRead was the first to announce the release of the JE100 last month, and now we are the first to review it. Sweetpea, a MR member from the Netherlands, is the first brave soul to buy one. You can find Sweetpea's review over here.

UPDATE: I was just over at the JE100 product page, and I noticed that Jointech changed the description to say that the JE100 has Wifi.

Second Update: The review does mention the web retailer where you can buy the JE100, but it's buried in the middle of a paragraph. Here it is, so you can find it:
http://www.sale4online.com/

02:30 PM by mtravellerh in More E-Book Readers | Interead COOL-ER

My Cool-ER finally arrived today. It was safely tucked in a big Jiffy-Pack. The Cool-ER itself was in a small cardboard box. Not a lot of extras coming with the reader, I'm afraid. There is a headgear-adapter and a Mini-USB cable. Not even a manual in that box! There was no cover in the package and no cover seems to be available right now.

The reader itself is not really black, it's more of a coal color. It's only plastic but it seems to be sturdier than the Cybook and at the same time lighter (about the same or a little lighter than my iPod Touch)

A foil was glued to the Cool-ER for additional protection. At first glance, the volume control on the right was easy to manipulate while the four buttons on the left couldn't be manipulated easily. The On/Off button needs to be pressed a little longer. Startup takes exactly 30 seconds and the reader starts right into the library. Interestingly, a splash screen advises that NTX reader is starting! Up side: You don't push buttons involuntaryly on this one! ;(

Menu navigation is not very glamorous but quite self-explanatory. BTW: I could change font size in two clicks (I read in a review that it takes 8 clicks) Strange, that! There are only three fonts available and I hope that there is a way to add new fonts (no manual no fun). There are 8 different font sizes on offer. The step between the smalest font and the second smalles is a bit steep, another step would have been nice here. Meanwhile, the NTX font isn't good for german texts, so I have chosen Arial.

The reader started right away and the battery was half full so I am quite sure that the device has been tested before delivery. In one of the folders (yes, there are folders and you can even add new ones), there are a few ePubs from Project Gutenberg (Ulysses, Alice in Wonderland in English and Italian, for example). There were already four folders present, one of them a music folder.

Connecting to the PC is easy as a pie. XP and Ubuntu recognized the reader right away, Ubuntu as external drive, XP as external drive and as reader (ADE offered right away to activate the reader). Transferring books to the Cool-ER is REALLY fast. A shame that ADE only transfers books to the Adobe Digital Editions folder (no sub folder or other folders). You have to move the books manually if you want to keep order! Transferring books directly per drag and drop doesn't take long at all. Even some music was swiftly transferred. Folders can only be added on your PC, not on the reader itself. Same is true for deleting a book.

Thanks to the folders, moving through the library goes very fast, too! The navigation wheel is quite responsive and holding the button gets you through the menu rather quickly as well. The central button is a bit too small for my big hands, so that pushing that middle button is quite difficult for me!

The book formats:

ePub: This device was made for ePubs. They are fully justified and the book is rendered very fast. Page turning is faster than on the 505 and Cybook, nearly as fast as on the 700. The display seems to have a lot of contrast. Calling up the TOC takes two clicks, though. Direct access would be far better. I think the Cool-ER is not subject to the 300 kb-limit anymore. I will check that out later today and keep you posted.

PDF: It's Adobe, so PDFs show up quite nicely. PDFs can be zoomed, but they lose formatting in the process and are quite ugly and reading them is hard. Reading PDFs in landscape mode or specially formatted PDFs is an okay experience, I guess! Look at the 505 and you see about the same quality here!

Mobi: Mobis work. That's the good news. They look like text files (no illustrations, no headings) but are fully justified and you can still use the TOC. Great plus: Aportis Doc (palm) files work without a hitch! Of course, DRM is not supported for Mobis.

FB2: Hey, good looking! Retains all the bells and whistles! Maybe the NTX reader in the splash screen is some kind of Cool Reader or FB-Reader clone?

RTF, HTML,TXT: HTML and RTF are looking like unformatted texts (indented and fully justified). Most of the original formatting is lost. If you're too lazy to transfer those to ePub, you can still easily read them, but the pleasure is rather basic!

Finally: The Cool-ER is still a little rough around the edges, but the ePub engine is just great and the good speed is quite nice, too. Maybe the page turning could be done with the volume control if ya don't listen to music (hint!) I am still playing with the device, so I will keep you updated!

Notes: Trying to load nonworking ePubs will crash your system (you'll need a reset) As a general rule, all the ePubs opening with ADE will open on the Cool-ER (hint: PG ePubs work but they are really not well made) Other files that can't be opened (i.e. wrongly labelled or wrongly formatted) will drop you back to the last book that you have read (much like ADE on desktop)

There doesn't seem to be a sleep mode that brings you right back to the book you were reading. You have to go through the boot sequence and the library navigation first, even if you haven't turned off your Cool-ER (major bummer). I hope there's some way to get this working as I hate starting up all over again every time! UPDATE: There is actually a way for the reader to not turn off automatically: In the library menu (of all places), is a menu where you can switch off the automatical shutdown! No real standby mode, still, but as long as it stays alive, everything is fine (doesn't need any energy when I'm not reading, anyway)

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

Ok kids, time for the weekly roundup of what we've covered this week:

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Vodafone Germany with new eBook-Reader
• MobileRead exclusive : sneak preview of the Bookeen Opus
• Sony eBook Library Software finally compatible with Mac!
• Kindle 2 Price Cut to $299
• Wired (or someone) altered this EZReader picture
• Chinese Kindle clone: Meet WeFound

08:33 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

China's ability to produce indistinguishable replicas of any moment’s must-have gadget is legendary. Hence it was only a matter of time before we would see the first Kindle look-alike coming from the Far East country. Tech-On is reporting that Founder Group, a major Chinese technology conglomerate, has demonstrated an e-book reader that looks very much like our beloved Kindle 2.

At the first glance, the terminal looked very much like the Kindle 2. But, after carefully examining it, I found some differences, for example, in the shapes of the buttons on the right and left sides of the terminal, the width of the upper frame and, of course, the logo.

It will be interesting to see how Amazon is going to react to this development. Remember, the company has been awarded a patent that protects the look and feel of the Kindle shell.

The Chinese e-book reader, which name we assume is WeFound, is said to be released in China by the end of this year at a price of around $210. It will also come with a SIM card allowing the user to directly download e-books from an e-book portal.

Thanks to eagle-eyed MobileReader lee1234 for the tip!

12:04 PM by purl4peace in E-Book General | News

So I was checking out Gideon's reference to the Wired review of Cooler and thought I would see what they had to say about the "native son" of RobertB -- EZReader.

I was looking at the image, and though the article specifically states there is no wireless connectivity, if you look at the top status bar, it sure looks a lot like the Kindle status bar where you have the vertical bars to represent wireless signal strength and a battery to show the charge... Even the bottom looks identical to the Kindle's status line. It is like they superimpopsed a Kindle "page" into an EZReader.

Does the EZReader really have that? If so, why? and If not, why put that into the image?

http://www.wired.com/reviews/product/pr_astak_ez_reader