06:00 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

• Demi Recipe Reader = eBook Reader?
• CES 2010: Astak bets on bigger E Ink displays and color
• Horror Mall now offers DRM free Ebooks
• Detroit Newspapers to test Plastic Logic Readers this year
• Amazon Kindle coming to Walmart by the end of the month [April Fools]
• Sony, Google and Barnes & Noble To Partner For Sales of Google Books [April Fools]
• Commercial ePubs in Germany disappoint
• Who Do You Suppose Is Talking To Verizon?
• E-book sales up 68.4% to $113 million in 2008
• Savory - a calibre port running on the Amazon K2

E-Book General - Deals, Freebies, and Resources

• Dr. Horrible and the Chaotic Imperative - free ebook [April Fools]

E-Book Devices - Amazon Kindle

• Kindle 1 Font Mod Tool v0.1

09:24 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

That headline is not a joke or an exaggeration. The foremost K2 hacker, Jesse, has released software for the K2 that lets you download and convert Epub and PDF documents. You can find out more on his blog. The discussion of this is already started over here.

06:07 PM by AnemicOak in E-Book General | News

According to the Association of American Publishers sales reached $113 million in 2008, up 68.4%.

The PDF they posted uses 2002 as a base year and includes additional data for 2003-2008.

The report shows an overall compounded 57.8% growth for ebooks from 2002-2008 while other categories either lost or grew very little.

In 2002 ebook sales were $7,337,000.00

In 2003 ebook sales were $19,772,000.00 up 169.5%

In 2004 ebook sales were $30,271,000.00 up 53.1%

In 2005 ebook sales were $43,832,000.00 up 44.8%

In 2006 ebook sales were $54,396,000.00 up 24.1%

In 2007 ebook sales were $67,233,000.00 up 23.6%

in 2008 ebook sales were $113,220,000.00 up 68.4%

Thought this info would interest some of you. I know it's still nothing compared to pbook sales dollars wise, but it's encouraging just the same.

The original posting of the report...
http://www.publishers.org/main/Indus...2008_Stats.htm

The PDF showing the stats...
http://www.publishers.org/documents/S12008Final.pdf

Related : IDPF Reports Wholesale US Ebook Revenues up 173%

11:25 PM by NatCh in E-Book General | News

The folks over at Yahoo Tech are reporting that as many as five different e-reading device makers have approached them about providing wireless service for their devices -- presumably, they're looking for something like Amazon has set up with Sprint.

Tony Lewis, who heads an initiative within Verizon Wireless to provide access to non-phone devices, said Wednesday that five companies have approached Verizon about wireless connections for e-readers.

"You're going to see a lot of e-readers out there," Lewis said. "The interest level is tremendous."

Lewis wouldn't say which manufacturers Verizon has been talking to. But he hinted that they are looking at entering parts of the e-book market that the Kindle doesn't focus on, like college textbooks.

Buried in the third-to-last paragraph is this tidbit: AT&T is eying the game as well:

AT&T Inc., the second largest wireless carrier after Verizon Wireless, has also been talking to e-reader manufacturers, said Ralph de la Vega, the company's head of consumer services. Since AT&T's network is more similar to ones used overseas, it could support international e-book readers, he noted. The Kindle can download books only in the U.S.

It doesn't take much thought to guess that Sony's probably in there somewhere -- not only have they committed to releasing a wireless Reader at some, as yet unspecified, future time, they're actually mentioned in the article, but only by way of neither confirming nor denying that they're one of the mysterious five.

Of course, those keeping count know that any group of five e-reading device manufacturers would almost have to include Sony, especially if Amazon can't also be in the group. The pool has been expanding lately, but it's still a pretty small puddle.

So, assuming Sony is most likely in there, who do you think the other four might be?

Via Electronista.com

EDIT: D'oh! I just realized that wallcraft had already posted this over here. Sorry 'bout that, I wasn't trying to ignore you.

04:59 PM by lovebeta in Amazon Kindle | Kindle Developer's Corner

This tool helps you to modify the fonts Kindle 1 used to render the ebooks. It is especially useful if you want to use Kindle 1 to read books in non-european languages, such as Chinese. This mod is applicable to Kindle 1 firmware 1.2 only. (I actually don't know how to do it in firmware 1.0.8 or lower.) This mod, however, does not apply to the NetFront browser.

DISCLAIMER: The author makes no guarantees and holds no responsibility for any damage, injury or loss of property that may result from the use of this mod! PLEASE PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!

USAGE:
1. Make sure that you have firmware 1.2 for your Kindle 1.

2. Unzip the enclosed package to the root of your SD card. That is, "update_font_mod.v1.bin" and "\custom" should be in the root directory.

3. Put the SD card into your Kindle 1. Navigate the menu: "Home" -> "Settings" -> "Menu" -> "Update your Kindle" -> "OK".

4. Wait for the update to complete. Kindle should automatically reboot and you will be done after that.

CAVEATS:

1. Due to the usage of symlink, you will loose the usb access to your Kindle memory. You can however still access that space using Kindle itself.

2. There appears be a bug in the java mobipocket reader, that it cannot correctly make line breaks in CJK (because they don't have spaces between words). The link breaks were only correct for the smallest font size. This however can be somewhat remedied by inserting non-visible blank spaces between CJK characters.

RESTORE:

1. If the Kindle can still boot into the normal screen, use the enclosed "update_font_restore.v1.bin" to restore to the factory setting.

2. If the Kindle cannot boot normally, pinch the reset hole on the back of your Kindle while hold down the "home" key. When the Kindle boots into the recovery mode, select 2 to "reset firmware". You will be back to factory setting this way, but you will also loose everything on the kindle memory.

Overall I think because of the second restore methods, this mod is fairly safe.

CUSTOMIZE:

The included \custom folder is just for illustation purpose. Currently I only changed the default serif font to "DroidSansFallback" because DroidSansFallback contains fairly complete unicode characters and is free. Feel free to modify it to your needs. Remember that you have to bring your own font, as well as modify "font.properties" for this to work.

ACKNOWEDGEMENT:

Special thanks to igor for his great effort on ebook hacking. I also took cues from similar hacks for the K2 by clarknova and superzhou.

01:46 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

I've already done my April Fool's joke, so it's safe to share this.

Joss Whedon, the creator of tv series, movies, a musical, and a comic book, has announced a new book. It's a sequel to last summer's Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog.

I haven't read it yet. Frankly, I'm surprised he had time to writer it. Here is the download link:
http://whedonesque.com/drhorrible

01:08 PM by mtravellerh in E-Book General | News

Thanks to the recent launch of the Sony Reader in Germany, e-book shoppers can now observe a surge in commercial German e-book titles. Two key players in the local market are Thalia and Libri that both offer e-books in the open-standard Epub format. And while getting ePub files onto your Reader may not be easy at first, on the whole, it seems to work quite well.

So everything is milk and honey? Not quite.

Ignored hardware limitations

We're a bit heavy-hearted to report of plenty of unhappy German-speaking users complaining about the sub-optimal quality of ePub titles they've purchased. One cannot help but believe that those book editors in charge were lacking important technical information regarding the current limitations of the Sony Reader. For instance, some simply ignored the size limitation of 300Kb per XML/HTML chunk. Without splitting large files into these smaller chunks, the converted e-book won't work properly on the Sony Reader. We've heard of at least one e-book that has been sold like this.

Flawed cover designs

E-book covers cause plenty of problems, too. Some titles are sold entirely coverless, while others may have a cover, but one that cannot be displayed (hint: the Sony Reader doesn't know Scalable Vector Graphics). (EDIT: It does, actually. This makes the failure to display the cover even more baffling.) This is by no means an exception: Almost half of the reviewed e-books didn't have a cover. Notice that on the vendor's website, titles are prominently displayed with a cover, without any indication that a purchased ePub book would be missing this feature.

Missing Table of Contents

Quite a few ePub editors seem to ignore the importance of a well-done Table of Contents (TOC). Properly working, hierarchical structured TOCs are a rare thing indeed. Some of the (full-priced) e-book titles we checked didn't have a TOC at all.

Overlapping text

Adobe's DE viewer (which is used by Sony to render ePubs) has a fixed setting to display page numbers on the right margin. Most ePub editors seem to ignore this fact by forgetting to create sufficient margins for the page number. As a result, page numbers overlap with actual text content - not a pretty picture.

Basic OCR errors

Many of the titles our members checked had too many basic OCR errors, obviously due to a bad scanning process (proofreading, anyone?). Other ePub titles seem to be based on ostensibly bad PDF conversions (spaces within words, for example).

Meaningless CSS rules

A closer look at the underlying (CSS) styling of ePub files reveals the disappointing fact that some editor "experts" in charge did obviously not know what style rules were supported by the Sony Reader. Outdated "Font" tags were used and old-fashioned inline tag definitions instead of outline style sheets with classes.

Vendors blame publishers

Neither Thalia nor Libri were able to provide satisfying answers to the complaints by our disgruntled members. On the one hand, they admitted that quality may be suffering due to the lacking experience of the editors with ePub. On the other hand, they bluntly stated that they could not grant a right to return defective e-books. Oh, did we mention that in Germany, publishers have even gone to court to enforce the same price for e-books as for printed books?

A glimmer of light

Things aren't exactly rosy for the German e-book market, to say the least. But there is reason to hope. At least in the past few days, we could observe some e-book titles being sold at a marginally lower price than the paper equivalent. Nevertheless, if publishers are sincerely interested in the future and evolution of a functioning e-book market, they must get their act together now and focus on improving the quality of their offerings. It goes without saying that they must quickly fix the existing faulty books and offer them free of charge to affected customers.

12:00 AM by NatCh in E-Book General | News

Dateline: San Diego, CA 9:00 PM PDT, March 31, 2009

In an astonishing move today, Sony, Google and Barnes & Noble announced that they are entering into a joint venture to make millions of first run titles available on the Sony PRS line of electronic reading devices.

This agreement is an extension of the recently announced partnership between Sony and Google to bring Google Books' public domain collection to the Sony Reader. Where it gets really exciting is that the addition of bookseller giant Barnes & Noble to the partnership brings along all of Barnes & Nobles' existing distribution agreements with publishers for still in-copyright works.

"It's been a sort of open secret that for years we've been scanning pretty much everything we can get our hands on," said Jonathan Ipswitch, director of Content Management for Google, "we just couldn't legally share it in any form. Partnering with Barnes & Noble has given us the legal avenue to do so, and Sony's Reader is the perfect device to distribute on because it supports the open ePub format -- open is very important to us."

It's not all sunshine and roses, however: as the price of its participation, Barnes & Noble insisted that the content distributed by this new partnership would carry DRM.

"We were somewhat skeptical of this whole idea initially, I mean we only just bought Fictionwise, after all," said Jordan Andwine, recently appointed Vice President for Electronic Content Marketing at Barnes & Noble, "but with Google offering such a huge leg up on salable content and Sony providing such an excellent vehicle in their PRS devices, we really couldn't pass it up. Once it was agreed that copyrighted works would be sold with copy prevention measures in place, it was pretty much a slam dunk for us."

Another surprise in this announcement is that the partnership will not be using any existing DRM schema.

"Epub is pretty much a blank slate as far copy prevention measures go," said Nicholas Fritz, Sony's Director of Digital Security for Content, "yes, the format allows for DRM as part of the standard, but there's no specific DRM scheme specified. We decided to take the opportunity to develop a new approach to DRM that would address most of the usual objections to it. Specifically, we want users to not have to worry about whether they'll be able to read their books again later down the road. Obviously I can't go into any details at this point -- there are still patents to be filed -- but we're all really excited about the strategy we've developed here."

All concerned are being very mysterious about what sort of "new" DRM strategy they might be exploring, but now that they've mentioned it, details will surely follow before too long. If they really have come up with something that addresses the main consumer concerns about DRM, it could really be a game-changer for e-books in general.

The giant, glaringly obvious question on all this is when will this take place? Well this is apparently only a very recently reached agreement, so it will be some time before customers can purchase electronic books as a result of it. Currently, the predicted go-live date for sales will be April 1st of next year.

Whatever comes of this partnership I think it's safe to predict that it will fundamentally rock the e-reading world.

You can check here for additional details when the press release becomes available.