05:19 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Suprina Frazier, self-publishing author, recently discovered that she became the victim of piracy. One of her books got uploaded on the text hosting site Scribd.com, from where anyone with Internet access could download it without the author's consent.

And what did Suprina do? Rather than contacting Scribd with a takedown notice, she turned to the uploader (aka the pirate) himself.

Instead of contacting the site’s copyright agent, I directly contacted the person who pirated my work. Not to take down my e-book. No, to keep it up (after all, it was a freebie anyway), but with certain considerations. I even went so far as to post my requests/considerations in the comment section of her Scribd page so that everyone that links to that book will see that I’ve given this person my permission to leave that e-book up.

I also posted a statement on my main blog giving all my readers permission to post that particular e-book along with another freebie on their sites (with certain considerations, of course).

I decided that if that site can be used to pirate my books, why not use that same site to PROMOTE my books.

So, instead of freaking out about her discovey, Suprina actually felt the piracy in this particular case was a good point ("it was a freebie anyway") and is now looking into an alternative business model. What do you think - could it work to her advantage?

05:26 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Update: We have postponed the maintenance to next Sunday @ 12:00pm EST.

Today our warning system alerted us of a degraded hard disk on the server that powers our web frontend. We have a tech personal currently investigating the situation; I am just giving you the head-ups in case we need to reboot the system unexpectedly.

Alex

07:05 PM by wallcraft in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Mobipocket Reader 6.0 for BlackBerry - Beta build 80 has just been released. It adds support for BlackBerry Storm and Bold. Explicit support for the Storm, in particular, has been often requested on the MobiPocket Forums.

January 19th, 2009: release of Build 80 beta version

New features:

• Support of BlackBerry Storm - 9500 phone series.
• Support of BlackBerry Bold - 9000 phone series.

Bug fixes:

• Fix of a crash during over the air eBook download.
• Fix of some sub-menus which were not displayed on some BlackBerry devices (e.g. annotations sub-menu).

Known issues:

• Annotations are not synchronized when eBooks are sent from the desktop reader to BlackBerry devices. We suggest you download eBooks from the Over The Air store.
• Search feature doesn't highlight results in the text.

03:57 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

I wish I had anything to add to this, but I don't. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

From the trailer: "In this Philips Design Probe, we explore the body as a platform for electronics and interactive skin technology. Stimulated by touch, an Electronic Tattoo traverses across the landscape of the body, navigated by desire."

03:19 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Joshua Bilmes made the unfortunate experience of his Amazon Kindle reader to die in the ghastly frigid weather that has plagued many of us these days. It's not that he didn't know that electronic devices were sensitive to the cold; it's the discovery of how very sensitive E Ink devices apparently are that made him write a letter to no one else but Mr. Bezos himself. And so Josh describes the last moments of his failing Kindle:

And then last Thursday I took the Kindle with me on a family trip to Hartford on the coldest day of the year. I tried very hard to tend to the Kindle’s needs. I didn’t read it outdoors. I tried to keep it in the warm part of my backpack while waiting for a bus from downtown to my hotel or walking a bit to the hotel. I believe I may have had it in a pants pocket for a 5-minute walk each way from my hotel to an old-fashioned book store when the temperature may have been near the 14 degree storage temperature. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I went to turn on my Kindle that night in the hotel and could tell even before I turned it on that something was wrong. It wasn’t dust in the pointer window on the right of the Kindle but rather the dead remnants of the pointer, and the Kindle screen was no longer usable or functioning.

Find his full letter over here.

Question: How many of you, including yours truly, take your e-book reader everywhere you go, without even considering that a 10-minutes walk in the cold may cause permanent damage to its batteries, its internals or its E Ink display?

02:14 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

With Mozilla soon to release the first beta of its mobile Firefox browser dubbed Fennec, what better way to spend your time than to make it work on an actual E Ink development kit? Jaya Kumar did just this, and although lack of memory seems to be a constraining factor, the browser looks surprisingly usable, definitely good enough to induce uncontrollable drooling.

[via ars technica] (thanks Mycropht for the tip!)

06:38 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

David of TeleRead sent me the following note this morning:

Congrats to MobileRead on the new wrinkles! MR gets (even) better and better. Meanwhile at TeleRead we've changed servers and moved the blog to the main address of http://www.teleread.org. The goal is a faster, easier-to-find TeleBlog for e-book-lovers.

But for now, you may have trouble bringing up the TeleRead site or reading us via RSS--I myself can't access it. The move is a major task, due to all the thousands of posts involved, as well as other complexities. Bear with us. We lack a firm ETA, but right now I doubt we're talking more than another day or two. Major thanks, meanwhile, to Brett Fielo and Robert Nagle for their efforts.

Switching a provider can be a major hassle and often doesn't go as planned. But I am confident that David and his team have it under control and that everything will be up and running soon again.

12:09 PM by Kris777 in E-Book General | News

CLEVELAND, OH - Cleveland Public Library (http://emedia.clevnet.org) today became the first public library to offer eBook downloads in the industry standard EPUB format. Readers at both Cleveland Public Library and CLEVNET member libraries can check out and download EPUB eBooks from the library's download website.

The EPUB files are optimized for the Sony® Reader and can also be read on a PC or Mac® with free Adobe® Digital Editions software.

Details:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28675619/
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2009...ong_first.html