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

Welcome to another digest entry of MobileRead, where we transform the profound into the bite-sized.

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Should e-Books be Rated (like movies and video games)?
• Apex Books needs your help
• Microsoft Reader News
• Kindle is Amazon's top selling gadget for 2008

E-Book Formats - PDF

• How to Do Everything with PDF Files

E-Book Devices - iRex iLiad

• Improved ContentLister (with more items on a page)

04:13 PM by TadW in E-Book Formats | PDF

The following article gives a good overview over what you can do with PDF files (without using the expensive Adobe Acrobat):

http://www.labnol.org/software/adobe...tutorial/6296/

04:13 PM by wallcraft in E-Book General | News

Amazon has released its "Best of 2008" Lists.

The Kindle was Amazon.com's top selling gadget for 2008, beating out the likes of the Nintendo DS, PSP, and others. The device topped every list it was eligible for, except the most positive comments category, which was topped by the Samsung 46-inch LCD high-definition TV.

This is based on unit sales (not revenue), and no actual sales numbers were released.

11:56 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

There used to be site at the address www.mslit.com. It was owned by Microsoft and used to support Microsoft Reader ebook format. The site wasn't very pretty, but it had an excellent search function that covered all ebooks in MSReader format.

The ugly but functional site is gone. Sometime in the last two weeks Microsoft started redirecting the URL to www.microsoft.com/reader. It looks like Microsoft has noticed the growing ebook market, and has decided to take it seriously.

04:37 PM by wallcraft in E-Book General | News

I'm sure they are not the only small publishing house in trouble, but Apex Books is asking its readers to buy more books now from their store. See Brother, can you spare $15.95?, which I came across via MikeCane2008. They report a drop of 75% in revenue in December compared to the August. Apex sells "dark science fiction", which won't be for everyone, but they are almost all available DRM-free at FictionWise.

10:15 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

(Almost) no one wants censorship. In the US, we take pride in fighting censorship in the name of free speech. But like any freedom or right, there is always a balance required between that freedom and other rights or goals of society. In the case of free speech, there is a nice article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that points out some of the limits. I am not well enough read to be able to judge how balanced this article is, but it is at least well formatted and addresses topics like harm, offense and pornography.

At any rate, we have ratings systems for movies and for video games, which are probably both enforced to some extent in the U.S. I believe that some music has "adults only" type ratings. I don't know if adult magazines are still sold in stores, but they used to not be available to minors. Certain books are not considered appropriate for school libraries, classes and even bookstores.

Movie ratings are actually somewhat helpful in determining a viewers interest at times. Again in the U.S., a "G" rating is a revenue killer unless the movie is directly targeted at children. Anything worse than an "R" will also kill revenues, will not be welcome in most theaters and will be interpreted as porn or warped. I'd be interested to hear how this all works in other parts of the world.

But now Reuters is reporting that in the U.K.

The kind of ratings used for films could be applied to Web sites in a bid to better police the Internet and protect children from harmful and offensive material, Britain's minister for culture has said.

What about books and e-books? Would you like to see a rating system? What would be the benefit and how would the ratings be determined? Or is such an effort just a waste of time? How about those of you with children - do you feel differently?

03:57 PM by hansel in iRex | iRex Developer's Corner

Hi All,

UPDATED: SEE THE NEW THREAD!
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35374

====== DEPRECATED =====
I have modified contenLister to show more items on a page. I called it newLister so it can coexist with the existing one. It can display anything between 4 and 20 items on a page. I also increased the number of remembered 'recent documents' to 12...

This is a 'developer' version: no installer yet. To run it you have to do the following steps (using ssh):

1. copy newLister somewhere in the flash disk. It cannot be on CF or SD since those devices are not mounted yet when contentLister is started. Personally I use the directory /home/root/my_start/ for this kind of stuff...
2. copy newLister.rc and newcursor.png to /usr/share/contentLister
3. edit /home/root/start.sh to start newLister instead of contenLister:

   old: (/usr/bin/contentLister --sync ; reboot) &
   new: (/home/root/my_start/newLister --items 12 --sync ; reboot) &

4. edit: check that newLister and start.sh are executable (chmod +x)
5. reboot

Of course this is at your own risk I've used my improved Iliad without problems for a few days now. I think this is a stable version, but mistakes when editing start.sh can be 'fatal'. Let's be careful out there

Happy new 2009 preview,

Hansel.

Please give some feedback if you try this

PS:

1. you can set the number of items with "--items n". The amount of displayed information for each item depends on n: same as with the current contentLister (4-8), title + subtitle or description (9-12), only title (13-20)
2. A safer way to experiment with the start script is described here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33700
3. The attached file contains a file sources.tgz: after unpacking this can be compiled in the same way as the original Irex contentLister (build_from_scratch.sh...)
4. Comments and questions are welcome.

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

If you've been absent and are keen to find out what MobileRead was up to this week, check out the links below:

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• RIAA Abandons Song Sharing Lawsuits
• Salon Opened for Kindles in Maryland
• Sony promises Revolutionary Vaio Laptop

Miscellaneous - Lounge

• Good News Everyone...It's Christmas!