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

There's been a whole heck of a lot of stuff happening this week. Purvey the below for your pleasure.

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Lexcycle has been acquired by Amazon
• Cybook Gen 3 with Epub support on Thursday
• New BeBook Mini - 5" Eink Reader
• Palm to offer free Treo or Pre for some

E-Book Devices - Fictionwise eBookwise

• Surf the Internet (Revisited) - sort of!

09:58 AM by pshrynk in E-Book General | News

Palm the makers of Treo and Pre are offering a free Treo or Pre to some lucky individuals who are willing to blog for it. Details are here.

Palm is looking for recruits to become "Real Reviewers" of Palm phones including the Palm Pre. If you're selected as a reviewer, Palm will give you a free, current model Palm phone to try out and an accompanying data plan for six months. The only requirement is that you regularly post your thoughts about the Palm phone you're using on any blogs and social networks you frequent. Palm may also ask "Real Reviewers" to guest blog for Palm or host a discussion board on Palm's Facebook page.

The article recommends signing up quickly, since they will be announcing their reviewers on May 8th.

11:40 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

The BeBook blog has posted the first picture of the BeBook Mini. It's the rebranded Hanlin V5 that MobileRead showed you over here. BTW, at least one detail on that page is wrong. The Bebook Mini will have a faster CPU. Also, the hints dropped on Twitter are true. The price will be €/$200 on release.

I've asked for a copy of the press release.

02:34 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

The German publisher and web retailer Weltbild (Wikipedia) has announced that it will carry the Cybook and that the Cybook will have support for "DRM enabled Epub". Having looked at the product page, it appears that Mobipocket support has been dropped from the new firmware.

Weltbild also announced that 30,000 ebooks in Epub will be available Thursday, with a goal of 100,000 ebooks to be offered by the end of the year. You can find the press release here.

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

Lexcycle, the developer of Stanza (an ebook reader program), has been acquired by Amazon. Announcement here. This should be interesting...

02:53 PM by nrapallo in More E-Book Readers | Fictionwise eBookwise

Without much fanfare and with absolutely no warning, the eBook Technologies' (ETI) servers now appear to allow any ebook being read on the reader (eBookwise 1150 or REB1200) to retrieve webpages directly from within.

This tidbit was recently added to the REB 1200 by Wiki member Rune B. He discovered that after accessing his Online Bookshelf, his Baen ebooks (that were converted by him to .imp format) allowed him to access the Baen Webscriptions.net webpage. Now, while it might retrieve the page, it is not a pretty sight (and unfortunately crashes frequently). Try experimenting with the attached ebook (basically my Index.html page for Impserve) which allows many common weblinks or this previously posted ebook ( Cousins, Adrienne: Kindle Bookmarks v0.11, Sep 3,2008 .imp ebook with PDA-friendly links... ). Actually, using mobile site weblinks, like www.mobileread.mobi, might be preferable.

This type of web access, following internet hyperlinks from within ebooks, is exactly what Impserve allows, although, the Impserve browsing/converting experience is much more satisfying.

But at least now we can access the internet without any additional software as now that ability has been "turned on" by ETI. (Perhaps after being "inspired" or "revealed" by Impserve!)

Thanks Guys (I think)!

p.s. For this to work, you need to access your Online Bookshelf first, then the ebook with the web hyperlinks. If this type of internet access is intriguing for you, please do try Impserve and install its plugins, for a more satisfying experience!!!

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

What was going on this week at MobileRead? Here's your chance to catch-up if you missed something!

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Braille E-book Concept Design
• Why I want a big screen ereader
• Endless Ideas announces 5" mini-BeBook
• February ebook sales figures announced
• Madame Bovary original manuscripts available online
• Is this Hanlin V5 real?
• Only 53% of publishers have ebook plans

E-Book Formats - Workshop

• A Comparison of format limitations based on The Hobbit

E-Book Devices - Amazon Kindle

• Lord of the Rings Now Available! KINDLE, EPUB, PDF, LIT, and MOBI

09:36 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

IBS Bookmaster surveyed 158 publishers at the London Book Fair. You can find the source here. The survey had 7 questions on ebooks. I'm not going to quote the last 3 becuase the poll respondents are asked to make guesses about the future.

Here is the data:

Have you put arrangements in place to sell your book titles in digital form?
Yes – 53% / No – 43% / DK - 4%

If so, how:
40% Directly through your web site?
21% Via a digital library managed by a third party?
6% Other?
33% Don't Know

Have you made any plans to digitise your backlist titles?
Yes – 40% / No 45% / DK - 15%

Where do you store your digital content?
36% In your own digital repository?
28% In a third party digital store?
7% Via Google Book Search?
29% Don't Know

If you look at the data, you'll see that only 84 out 158 respondents have plans for ebooks. The number is disappointing, I agree. But there is a silver lining, and that is the 68 respondents who answered no. These are publishers whom we don't have to convince to drop DRM. With luck, we might get them to go directly into DRM free distribution.