06:19 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

We know you've been waiting patiently to find out who's taking home a brand new Kindle 2 reader -- congratulations to catsittingstill, who's now the luckiest e-book aficionado on her block! To everyone else who gave it a shot, thanks for entering. Oh, and stick close, we'll have another giveaway shortly.

04:56 PM by kovidgoyal in E-Book Software | Calibre

Hi all,

calibre 0.5 was released today. It's been a year and a half since calibre 0.4.0 and here have been a lot of new developments in the world of e-reading.

Here's an (incomplete) list of the new features calibre has gained in the last 18 months

1. Support for new e-book reader devices: PRS-505/700, iPhone, Kindle 1 and 2, Cybook Gen 3
   
2. Conversion to the following formats: EPUB, MOBI and LIT. (LIT command line only)
   
3. Conversion from the following formats: ODF (OpenOffice documents), MOBI, LIT, RTF, EPUB, PRC, CBR, CBZ, FB2, PDF
   
4. The scheduled download of complete news articles from over a 150 news sources. The downloaded news can be created in any of the supported output formats.
   
5. E-book viewers for all the major ebook formats
   
6. Support for getting book metadata/covers from the internet
   
7. A built in web server to give you access to your book collection from anywhere in the world
   
8. New browsing modes: You can now browse your book collection by tags or by covers.
   
9. Translations into half a dozen languages.
   
10. A name change from libprs500 to calibre

All these developments would not have been possible without the efforts of many people. Some of the major code contributions came from:

• llasram for LIT input/out and MOBI output
• user_none for all the non SONY device drivers
• kiklop74 for the majority of the new news sources
• Falstaff for pylrs
• FangornUK for the initial implementation of comic2lrf
• Anatoly Shipitsin for FB2 input
• Caleb Avery for the calibre logo and diaboNL for the ebook device icon

A special thank you to all the translators of calibre for making it available to people that aren't comfortable in English. In particular I'd like to thank Stdo and iacchi for doing the first two translations: German and Italian and keeping them up to date all this time.

In addition there were many contributions of patches/bug reports/news recipes too numerous to mention individually.

And last but not least, I'd like to thank the Mobileread community for all the feedback/donations/thank you notes that have kept me motivated to keep developing calibre. Keep them coming!

Finally, a note for people planning to upgrade from very old versions of calibre. Locate and save a copy of the file library1.db on your computer. If after the upgrade you find that the books are missing from your library, use the following command (in a Terminal) to import them from library1.db

calibre-debug --migrate library1.db path_to_your_new_library_folder

You can download calibre for free from here.

10:52 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

With the imminent launch of the Sony Reader in Germany (March 11th), it is not a big surprise that it would also be available in other neighboring countries any time soon. As I just learned, the Sony Reader (PRS-505 model) is going to be available in Switzerland starting April 3rd, 2009. It will be priced at 449 Swiss Francs, and comes pre-installed with a couple of reading samples and two full novels.

05:52 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

We know, there's hardly a chance you'd forget to toss your name in the hat for a brand new Kindle 2 to be given away, but in case it slipped your mind momentarily, the contest is only open until tomorrow 11:59pm EDT. Full rules are listed in the link below.

Link: MobileRead Giveaway - Win a Kindle 2!

09:29 AM by OsakaTom in E-Book Readers | Amazon Kindle

Editor's Note: While this was written for the Kindle, it will likely be useful for other eink devices.

In gearing up for my Kindle 2, I decided to create an a script/action set in Photoshop to easily convert manga (and any other image) to a Kindle optimized version. This Photoshop action/script set will automatically convert your image to greyscale, flip it to portrait mode (if it isn't already), apply a few contrast, sharpening, and smoothing filters, resize and center to 600x800 and finally, export as an optimized .gif file (using 22 colors, just to give the Kindle a bit more to work with -- outputs to c:\Kindle Manga). You may still want to run Mangle to rename and create a book for your files, but UNCHECK any image optimizations in that program if you convert images with this action/script first.

This will work with any image you throw at, but I mostly optimized for manga images with the applied filters! To install, put the two script files in your photoshop/presets/scripts folder and install the action via the action menu. If you have any problems getting it to work, post here!

Rapid share link: XXXXX (see attached)

(I have tested it on my Kindle 2, seems to work great, however, my Kindle suffers from pretty terrible contrast, so it'll be going back to Amazon! ...rather annoying given that I live in Osaka, Japan!)

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

Feast your eyes on some of the discussions from this week at MobileRead...

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Apple entrance into e-book market rumors
• Kindle app for iPhone and iPod Touch in iTunes Store
• Barnes & Noble buys Fictionwise for $15.7 million
• Pixelar E-Reader reviewed by SlashGear
• Packt Pub does it right: kills DRM restrictions
• Exclusive: BeBook 2 unveiled

E-Book General - Deals, Freebies, and Resources

• Now Released: The Lens, by Steve Jordan

E-Book Devices - Amazon Kindle

• Web Browsing on the K2 over USB
• Technical Books aren't worthwhile on the Kindle

04:08 AM by pilotbob in E-Book General | News

The guys over at SlashGear have done an excellent hands-on review of the Pixelar E-Reader. Their verdict:

We like the Pixelar E-Reader, especially as we use both PCs and Macs(the latter unsupported by the Sony eBook), but we’re not sure it offers enough to sway us from the Sony brand. It seems to be a popular design, though: we’ve seen the same OEM hardware, under different names, in various countries, all priced roughly the same. If Pixelar can bring the price down to under £200 they’ll have a far better chance of convincing buyers; there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the E-Reader experience.

Looks like another Jinke V3 rebrand for the UK.

I'm pretty sure the little screws are extra battery cover screws in case you lose one trying to change the battery.

BOb

[via Engadget]

04:01 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

We've just gotten our hands on a picture showing off the upcoming BeBook 2 e-reader. The reader - which features WiFi and/or 3G connectivity, touchscreen navigation, and ePub support - will be showcased to the world at the CeBIT fair today. If you happen to be there, make sure to snap some juicy photos for us (Berlin room, ground floor of the exhibition center, opposite of hall 6). We'll much appreciated it.