04:26 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

The title is a pretty innocuous phrasing of a potentially great big bombshell. Quoting NYTimes:

Also Thursday, Amazon said that it was working on making the titles for its popular e-book reader, the Kindle, available on a variety of mobile phones. The company, which is expected to unveil a new version of the Kindle next week, did not say when Kindle titles would be available on mobile phones.

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.”

Full article: Link

03:51 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

So believes Bernstein Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay. Reuters reports:

Lindsay said backlogs were likely due to Amazon's desire to control Kindle's deployment, adding that Flextronics International Ltd, which many believe manufactures the Kindle for Amazon, could produce them faster and cheaper.

Keeping the Kindle scarce keeps the level of excitement high, and keeps people talking about Amazon, Lindsay added.

Amazon's desire to preserve its success with physical book sales is why it will not sharply lower Kindle's price, he said.

Related: Amazon Kindle 2.0 rumors - price increase

05:11 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Matthew just sent us in this fantastic news: The mobile version of Google Books has gone live. The site seems primarily aimed at mobile phones, but I'd be interested to see if the Kindle and other wireless E Ink readers could use it. If so, this would offer a mobile library that would certainly merit a special announcement (perhaps on February 9).

Information about the mobile version of Google Books can be found on the Google Books blog.

09:06 AM by Adam B. in More E-Book Readers | iRex

This is the most recent version of FBReader compiled for the DR1000. The most notable changes since the previous version are improvements to ePub and Mobipocket support along with CSS support for ePub. You can view the full change log at fbreader.org.

If you previously have FBReader installed on your DR1000, delete the _fbreader folder in the Programs directory before copying this over.

If you do not have FBReader installed, you'll need to simply copy the Programs folder to the root of your SD card. You can then browse to Programs on your DR1000, and launch FBReader from there.

I also recommend downloading the updated contentbrowser, so that you can launch books directly from the contentbrowser without having to use FBReader library function.

03:24 PM by desertgrandma in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Okay, most of us list which device we have under our avatar. With so many new members, I thought it would be interesting to see, in one poll, whats out there.

Let me stress, this is not a popularity contest. (Are you listening, Ravenne? )

I will make it so that you can choose more than one, and try to list all makes including those that are no longer being made.

Info gotten from our own Wiki........lets see how I do on this one.

Wait for the poll......

10:08 AM by Adam B. in More E-Book Readers | iRex

iRex has released software update 1.5 for the DR1000.

This software update includes many of the features that have been lacking.

• Sleep mode: This puts the device to sleep after a specified period to conserve power. A button press or stylus touch will wake it up in a matter of seconds to be ready again.
• Automatic Power Off: The system can power off after a period of unuse. This can be turned off completely, or can be specified to only happen when on battery power
• Configurable Task Bar: You can drag commonly used icons from the pop up menu to the task bar. This can provide quick access to annotation tools, zoom, rotate, etc.
• Speed improvements: Irex didn't specify, but it appears that reading PDF's is significantly faster.

These are the improvements that I've seen. There may well be others. This is definitely a major improvement for the DR1000. I highly recommend all users to upgrade asap.

People have noted that the companion software isn't automatically finding the update. If this is the case, it can be manually downloaded from here.

07:35 AM by Adam B. in More E-Book Readers | iRex

I have created a VMWare image of Ubuntu setup with what you need to get started porting/developing on the iRex DR1000.

You can download the image from one of the mirrors below:

Filename: DR1000DevImage.tar.bz2
Filesize: 1.350.759.956 bytes
MD5: 67aaee460ad668644575581fbac2aab0

• Mirror #1: http://www.openiliad.com/DR1000DevImage.tar.bz2
• Mirror #2: http://down.4dots.com/projects/DR1000DevImage.tar.bz2
• Mirror #3: http://projects.mobileread.com/iliad...vImage.tar.bz2

Username: user
Password: password

How to use:
Download VMWare Player or Server: http://www.vmware.com/download/player/

Install player, and open virtual machine. It should start and run without problems.

You'll use Anjuta to compile applications and you can deploy and test them in the qemu emulator. Hello_World is already on there, so you can use that for testing.

05:52 PM by Stuart Young in E-Book General | News

Arstechnica.com has a very in depth 7 page article written by John Siracusa (ex Peanut Press)

The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age

A veteran of a former turning of the e-book wheel looks at the past, present, and future of reading books on things that are not books.

Thanks to all those who twittered this link to me.