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

There's been a whole heck of a lot of stuff happening this week. Purvey the below for your pleasure.

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Ads for Adobe PDF discontinued by March 31th
• Mossberg on e-books for the iPhone, iPod Touch
• Zinio adds textbooks to its e-magazines offering
• American Adults Reading More Literature

E-Book Software - Reading Software

• FBReader 0.10.0 out now

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• MobileRead Free E-Book Section Reaches 8,000
• Server maintenance 01/18@4am EST

10:02 PM by Gaurnim in E-Book General | News

I've received yesterday an email from the Read Green Initiative (http://goreadgreen.com/) which announces that Zinio is now offering textbooks along with the digital magazines subscriptions.

Excerpt from the mail :

Zinio Offers College Students a Digital Alternative to Traditional Textbooks
As colleges and universities nationwide begin their spring semesters, students preparing to spend hundreds on textbooks for their spring classes now have a cost-effective and sustainable digital alternative with Zinio. Available at www.textbooks.zinio.com.
Digital textbooks give you:
• 50% off the same printed book prices with $0 shipping!
• Immediate access, buy it late and still have it on time.
• Archive/store on your laptop - no need to lug heavy books around campus.
• Read online or offline and click through to hyperlinks referenced inside.
• Highlight and take virtual notes to mark important information.
• Search inside your book - save time by searching for specific content.

Here is the URL of this service :
http://www.textbooks.zinio.com/

Zinio is offering the magazines in a proprietary format, you can either read them online or download them and view them through a proprietary viewer.
Their reader software is available for Windows and Mac, I haven't see it yet for Linux (which doesn't mean it isn't available).

12:52 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

For the first time in 25 years, Americans are reading more! The adults are, anyway. When including novels, short stories, plays and poems there was an increase of about 7% over the last six years. The results come from he National Endowment for the Arts' (NEA) 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.

At a time of immense cultural pessimism, the NEA is pleased to announce some important good news. Literary reading has risen in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter century," says NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. "This dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working. Cultural decline is not inevitable

I wonder if this fits the pattern in our own MobileRead community?

* Are you reading more than you did in 2002?
* Do you read more because of e-books?
* Do you read more because of MobileRead.com?

Personally, I can say an emphatic yes to all three!

Check out the full article for a full scoop, including a summary of other key findings Book Business Magazine.

02:03 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Yeah... It's that time of the year again where we're planning a quick maintenance window for our servers and software. The maintenance will be performed on Sunday, Jan 18th at 4:00am Eastern Time and I don't expect any downtime for longer than five minutes.

Cheers,
Alex

06:19 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

In yesterday's edition of his weekly column, the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg comments on two new e-book apps, Shortcovers and Iceberg, for the Apple iPhone and iTouch aimed at providing popular titles from major publishers.

One, called Shortcovers, is from the large Canadian bookseller Indigo Books & Music. Due to show up in the App Store in the next few weeks, Shortcovers is a portal to sampling, buying and reading books, and will have a companion Web site. It will allow readers to get free samples of blogs, magazines and books -- say, the first chapter -- and then buy either the entire work or other individual chapters or sections, which the company calls "shortcovers."

The second, called Iceberg, is from an iPhone application developer called ScrollMotion. Already available, Iceberg offers each book packaged as an individual stand-alone app, with rich navigation features.

Sure, Mossberg has a thing for Apple's gear, and he welcomes these two new apps, but ultimately, Walt says that dedicated e-book readers such as the Kindle provide a more "satisfying" reading experience.

Link: Shortcovers, Iceberg Put Latest e-Books On Your Cellphone (WSJ)

Related: Walt Mossberg reviews the Kindle

09:54 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Remember Ads for Adobe PDF, which was launched a little over one year ago? This will come as a surprise to exactly, well, no one, but the program has been discontinued. In a letter to PDF publishers Adobe wrote:

Unfortunately, due to a reassessment of priorities in the current economic environment, Adobe is discontinuing the program effective March 31, 2009.

They further noted that,

The decision to discontinue the Ads for Adobe PDF Beta was based on the current economic climate, which led Adobe to focus on other products and services for the publishing industry such as Acrobat Professional, Creative Suite, Adobe Digital Editions, etc.

Ad-enabled PDF documents previously published will either continue to work, without displaying any ads, or their content won't be displayed any longer - depending upon the restriction behavior the publisher has elected. Thanks to the wonderful world of DRM.

[via digital inspiration]

02:36 PM by wallcraft in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

FBReader 0.10.0 was released today for Desktop/Netbook computers only (for both Linux and Windows platforms), with other platforms to be released soon. From FBReader Google Group:

• Network libraries integration has been added. FBReader can search and download books from Feedbooks.com and LitRes libraries. We plan to add more libraries in future releases.
• Partial CSS support for epub files has been added. CSS support in html and fb2 is coming soon.
• Epub and Mobipocket book formats support has been substantially improved.
• Library view usability has been improved: you can now organize the tree either by author or by tag.
• You can now select a word by double-click and a paragraph by triple-click.
• Right-to-left languages and bidirectional texts support has been added.
• Support for Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Turkish has been added.
• Czech localization has been added.
• FBReader now has a new set of icons.
• It's now possible to use OS scrollbar for navigating through the text.
• Partial CSS support for epub files has been added. CSS support in html and fb2 is coming soon.
• Epub and Mobipocket book formats support has been substantially improved.

FBReader is commonly used on the Nokia Internet Tablets, on the iRex iLiad and Digital Reader, and is the basis for the ebook reader in OpenInkPot.

The attached screenshots are from the 0.8.17 and 0.10.0 versions of Windows FBReader on an ePub. The 0.10.0 version reads the TOC, which was a major shortcoming of the previous version.

05:30 PM by RWood in Miscellaneous | Announcements

From the first upload on March 27, 2007 until yesterday, MobileRead members have posted over 8,000 free, well crafted e-books in multiple formats.

The milestones (as compiled by Zelda) are:

• March 27, 2007: First upload
• September 04, 2007: 1,000 uploads
• November 02, 2007: 2,000 uploads
• January 08, 2008: 3,000 uploads
• February 19, 2008: 4,000 uploads
• May 16, 2008: 5,000 uploads
• December 10, 2008: 7,000 uploads
• January 09, 2009: 8,000 uploads

Most of the e-books are in the "big 3" e-book formats of Sony BBeB, Mobipocket PRC, and eBookwise IMP; there is a growing collection of ePub books available. There is also a light assortment of other thinly used e-book formats including:

• FB (Fiction Book)
• RB2 (Rocket Book)
• PDF (A4, Letter, and 6" e-ink screen formats)
• Psion
• IMP (for the REB 1200)
• Hiebook
• MS Lit

I have been fortunate enough to be part of the members posting e-books that also include (in no particular order):

• Patricia
• HarryT
• Madam Broshkina
• nrapallo
• vivaldirules
• Dr. Drib
• mtravellerh
• Jellby
• crutledge
• Roy White
• tsgreer
• ravenne
• ProDigit
• mjh215

There are many more and I am sorry that AI cannot recall all of the names at the moment. On behalf of the rest of the MobileRead community I say, "Thank You."

Let the celebration begin, download a new e-book today.