11:10 PM by europas_ice in E-Book General | News

I'm sufficiently content with my off the shelf reader, but If you can't find the reader with the perfect set of characteristics for you, here's your answer. Buy an eink screen and kit from eink for a mere $3K. Use it to build your own reader. Make your own case, include your own required features, and you're in business.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/0...&ie=ISO-8859-1

http://www.eink.com/kits/index.html

01:09 PM by NatCh in E-Book General | News

Editor's Note: MobileReader anurag brought this to us yesterday, but I felt like it deserved a front-page treatment.

O'Reilly Publishing is a familiar name around here. Its founder, Tim O'Reilly, has a very interesting commentary on the present and future state of Amazon's Kindle if they remain a closed system. I suppose you could call it O'Reilly's law of e-cono-dynamics, and it echos one of Newton's laws: A closed system will eventually fail.

You can find O'Reilly's commentary over at Forbes' site. What makes his thoughts so interesting to me is not just the simple fact that he's deeply involved in successful e-publishing, but that he talks about seeing this sort of thing play out once before. Specifically, he talks about how Microsoft tried to establish a closed e-cono-system with what became their MSN:

... I'd recently been approached by the folks at the Microsoft Network. They'd identified O'Reilly as an interesting specialty publisher, just the kind of target that they hoped would embrace the Microsoft Network (or MSN, as it came to be called). The offer was simple: Pay Microsoft a $50,000 fee plus a share of any revenue, and in return it would provide this great platform for publishing, with proprietary publishing tools and file formats that would restrict our content to users of the Microsoft platform.

The only problem was we'd already embraced the alternative: We had downloaded free Web server software and published documents using an open standards format. That meant anyone could read them using a free browser.

While MSN had better tools and interfaces than the primitive World Wide Web, it was clear to us that the Web's low barriers to entry would help it to evolve more quickly, would bring in more competition and innovation, and would eventually win the day.

In fact, the year before, we'd launched The Global Network Navigator, or GNN, the world's first Web portal and the first Web site supported by advertising. To jump-start GNN, we hosted and sponsored the further development of the free Viola web browser, as a kind of demonstration project. We weren't a software company, but we wanted to show what was possible.

Sure enough, the Mosaic Web browser was launched shortly thereafter. The Web took off, and MSN, which later abandoned its proprietary architecture, never quite caught up.

O'Reilly then goes on to draw a parallel between that situation and what's going on with Kindle and e-Pub, referencing Stanza and O'Reilly's own Bookworm reading application which we heard about last week.

The gist of it is that Amazon is in a similar position with e-books that MSN was in fifteen years ago with the web. MSN tried to fence folks into their version of the web, just as Amazon is trying to do with their version of e-reading. We know how well that particular gambit worked out for Microsoft, and O'Reilly sees the same thing happening to Amazon, if they sacrifice their product's usability to maintain control of how it's used.

O'Reilly already sees this pattern beginning to repeat for Amazon, with the advent of ePub format, and platforms that, unlike the Kindle, support it.

It's a very interesting read, and I encourage you to pop over and have a look at the full column (it's not all that long).

What he says makes a lot of sense to me, I'm interested in hearing others' perspectives on it as well. Please join the discussion already in-progress over here.

12:23 PM by Steven Lyle Jordan in E-Book General | News

Rita Toews passed on to me yesterday that Stanza, the iPhone e-book reading app, will feature a special catalog of books available for free during Read an E-Book Week, March 8-14.

Lexcycle, maker of Stanza, has been a strong supporter of Read an E-Book Week, and unlike certain computer moguls we know (cough-SteveJobs!-cough), sees a bright future for e-books read on the iPhone and iPod touch, and for many other devices in the future.

Additional note: As I had already announced the availability of my novel, Berserker, for free during REBW, Stanza will be including my novel in their catalog.

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

We covered the txtr about a month back. Thanks to an inquisitive MobileRead member, we now know that it will be demoed next week at the CeBIT in Hannover.

We don't know if MobileRead will be able to send someone, so I'm asking anyone who can go to stop by the Wizpac booth next week and have a look at the txtr. We'd like to hear your opinion. We'd love photos.

P.S. Tell them I sent you.

Update: Our friends over at Wizpac have updated their blog. The txtr demo at CeBIT will be on the 3rd & 4th of March. Wizpac will also demo the txtr at the Leipzig Book Fair on the 12th and 13th of March.

10:54 AM by RWood in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Late last week MobileRead membership topped 30,000. (30,071 as this is being written.)

This represents a tremendous surge in the past two and one-half years since the announcement of the Sony Reader. Since then we have gained membership with every new e-ink reader released.

The release of the Kindle and the Kindle2 by Amazon brought their own surges. We are just at the start of the Kindle2 surge. Alex's breaking of the Kindle2 pre-release photos, our expanded Kindle coverage through dedicated forums, and the win a Kindle contest have all contributed to this growth.

We welcome the new members and invite them to explore the rest of MobileRead including the Wiki, the free ebook download section, the other device sections, the historic archive, and the Lounge.

04:17 PM by TadW in E-Book General | News

Let the games begin! Here is a video clip demonstrating how Fujitsu's FLEPia compares to the two iRex e-book readers, iLiad and DR1000. The biggest difference is obviously that the FLEPia display is in color. Unfortunately, its screen refresh still leaves a lot to be desired. See for yourself...

The video was apparently taken at the Termina Kinshicho Fujiya restaurant which has WiFi installed to serve news content to the e-readers.

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

In case you've missed any MobileRead news from this week, here is our usual roundup:

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Bookworm Gives a Boost to Open-Source ePub E-Book Format
• Adobe Announces New eBook and PDF Support for Mobile Devices
• Will e-book readers make your library obsolete?
• Plastic Logic demo video from O'Reilley TOC Conference
• Adobe ePub DRM cracked?
• Adobe Reader 9 new exploit in the wild

E-Book General - Deals, Freebies, and Resources

• (Free PDF) No Fear: Growing up in a risk averse society
• Sony Sale - Books That Became Ocsar Nominated Movies

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• MR News: Team members / Writers' section

10:47 AM by doctorow in E-Book General | News

A new critical vulnerability has been discovered in Adobe Acrobat and Reader 9 (and earlier versions, too), which could allow attackers to cause a vulnerable application to crash or execute arbitrary code by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted PDF file.

According to Adobe's advisory a fix is scheduled for March 11th, 2009. If you don't want to wait that long, I suggest you go for one of the many (free) alternatives (like Foxit Reader or SumatraPDF) which are not affected.

Adobe is planning to release updates to Adobe Reader and Acrobat to resolve the relevant security issue. Adobe expects to make available an update for Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 by March 11th, 2009. Updates for Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 will follow soon after, with Adobe Reader 7 and Acrobat 7 updates to follow. In the meantime, Adobe is in contact with anti-virus vendors, including McAfee and Symantec, on this issue in order to ensure the security of our mutual customers. A security bulletin will be published on http://www.adobe.com/support/security as soon as product updates are available.

Link: Adobe advisory