05:04 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

How many E Ink display panels did Prime View International ship this year? How many of them went to Amazon (Kindle) and Sony (Reader)? In the words of a wise man: Seal up your lips and give no words but mum. Which is pretty much what PVI has been told:

With a 90% share of the EPD market, PVI nevertheless has been asked by its major clients, such as Sony and Amazon, not to reveal its EPD shipment figures, industry sources claimed.

Sony's e-Reader and Amazon's Kindle account for more than half of EPD shipments, the sources said.

Source: Digitimes

Does anyone care to speculate why our friends from Amazon and Sony would be so desperate to keep hints of actual sales figures hidden? It makes you wonder... anyways, according to the same report, PVI is going to single out revenues from their e-paper business starting next year. Then we'll know more.

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

A lot of people on the forum have been asking for Terry Goodkind's books to be available as eBooks. Wizard's First Rule is now available at BooksOnBoard (in Mobipocket only at the moment) for only $6.88; it's also available at Amazon for $7.18.

This is only the first book in his epic series, but I for one hope the rest do come out and soon.

05:53 AM by Steven Lyle Jordan in E-Book General | News

At Denvention 3, a yearly SF convention, it seems e-books were the subject of the year, according to the article by Peter Glaskowsky. He reports that e-book panels were in most time slots, and that there is a lot of disagreement in pro circles as to what will work in the e-book arena, and what is working now.

He also has some interesting personal observations. For instance, he points to estimates of Amazon Kindle sales to refute the claim by some panelists that DRM is unworkable, impractical and unpopular.

Unfortunately, I don't see any transcripts or podcasts available from the panels, but there is more info on the convention goings-on at the web news page.

05:46 AM by Falbe Publishing in E-Book General | News

I have run across the concept of promoting ebooks as a green alternative to paper books. This makes sense because:

1. No paper is used to produce the copies, which includes the massive water and power usage needed for paper production and then for the printing.
2. No physical shipping is necessary, which means no gas/diesel use.

However, ebooks and their readers do all need a computer (mostly) and a reading device. Also the ebook distribution takes place on the internet (mostly) and the infrastructure of the internet uses vast amounts of power, which for the most part comes from fossil fuels.

I think that ebooks use less resources and cause less pollution than paper books. At the very least trees are not being cut down and pulped into celebrity memoirs (a great affront to Mother Nature).

I was wondering what other people thought on this subject.

Thanks.

05:40 AM by mdibella in E-Book General | News

So many of my favorite authors have blogs now, and it's such a wonderful experience to leave a question and have that author actually answer it!

Something does bother me though. So often an author is asked some variation on 'Why did you stop writing that series? It was so good, why not write more?'

And the answer is always something like 'The publisher refused to pay me enough money to live on, and they owned the series, so I had to stop writing them'

So what is the deal here? It's so easy to imagine that a professional writer makes at least a living salary...writing a book is certainly not a fast or trivial task, and not everyone is capable of it. Sure, someone like Stepen King can probably name his price for his new books, but what does Joe Average Author get for his work? Are they really getting ripped off by the publishers?

05:38 AM by grimo1re in E-Book General | News

Taiwanese manufacturer of network products and multimedia peripherals Netronix is boosting their shipments of ebook readers. The company shipped 2,000 to 3,000 ebook devices a month in the third quarter, compared with 1,000 to 2,000 a month in the first half, Digitimes writes, citing unnamed company sources.

By Q4, the company is expected to ship around 5,000 devices per month with revenues accounting for 10 percent of the company’s total revenues.

Mod added: PVI holds substantial shares in Netronix. PVI is the main producer of E Ink display panels, and supplies Sony and Amazon among others.

05:22 PM by NatCh in E-Book Readers | Alternative Devices

Apparently Palm has been busy over there in Sunnyvale. A little birdie just dropped a notice in my mailbox of a new Trēo model.

Since this one is so close behind the Trēo 800W, I'll just hit the differences between the two.

Now this is a quick-comparison, so I'm likely to miss something, but I'm confident that others will help me out.

Differences between the Trēo Pro and the Trēo 800W

• Less user accessible RAM -- 100 MB to 170 MB
• Maybe a different display, but I'm thinking probably not
• Its camera has 8X digital zoom, to the 800W's 2X
• Bigger battery 1500 mAh to 1150 mAh
• Supports up to 32 GB microSD card
• .08" wider, .08" taller, .2" thinner, and .31 oz lighter
• Only comes in "Obsidian" -- presumably "Black" in man-colors

Here's the software that's on the device, I notice something called "Adobe Reader LE" in the list, anyone know what that refers to?

ActiveSync®; Adobe Reader LE; Bluetooth®; Bubble Breaker; Calculator; Calendar; Communications Manager; Contacts; File Explorer; Get WorldMate; GoogleMaps; Internet Explorer® Mobile; Messaging; Microsoft® Office Mobile including Excel® Mobile, OneNote Mobile, PowerPoint® Mobile, and Word Mobile; My Treo; Notes; Pics & Videos; QuickGPS; Quick Tour; SIM Manager; Solitaire; Sprite Backup; Streaming Media; Tasks; Telenav; Voice Command; Windows Live™; Windows Live™ Messenger; Windows Media® Player Mobile

All in all, no big surprises there, just another pro/am variation such as they've done before.

Here's a link to the product page.

12:27 PM by CommanderROR in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Hello dear mobilereaders,

I think it is time to tell a story, a story about ebooks and how they change the world...for every one of us.
I'd like to collect your stories here, how you found out about ebooks, when you started reading more and more digital content and whether you made the switchover to ebooks completely or still read pbooks on a regular basis.

I'll start with my story:

I was always a heavy reader, eating through loads of books, some from the library, but many from my local bookstore and later from amazon. When I started studying and move away from my parent's place I soon found out that my shelf-space could never keep up with my book-supply. I tried to get more books from the library, but most of the time I could not find what I wanted (it's not easy to get English books in a German library, especially relatively new ones) and so eventually gave up on the library completely.
I also tried to sell many of the books I had already finished, but found that nobody really wanted them (they are mainly paperbacks) and the fes I could sell went for a price that was probably far below the "heating value" of the paper they contained (no, I never burned books, don't worry).

About 6 years ago I started hearing about ebooks more and more, but the books I wanted were never available in digital form and so I did not take the plunge but kept watching the development.
Approximately four and a half years ago I bought a cheap PDA in a closing sale that I wanted to use for ebooks. The supply of legal ebooks was still dismal, but the Darknet and PG offered enough reading material. During that time I still read many pbooks but gradually started reading more and more on the little PDA. The low battery life and small (320x240) screen frustrated me from the start, but it was all I had. While I was searching the web for alternatives, I stumbled on mention of the "Librié" and when I searched for more information on that device I discovered mobileread.com
That was somewhere between 3.5 and 4 years ago.
At first I browsed the forums passively, searching for information on the Libiré at first which I discounted quickly because of the fact that it was hard to get in Germany, expensive and not really very user-friendly.
Not much later however, the first rumours of the iRex Iliad and the Sony Reader (Librié 2 bascially) started to surface.
Fired by my curiosity about eink and the possibilities it held for the ebook market I decided to join mobileread.com and actively take part in discussions to find out more about this upcoming technology.
About half a year later I owned my first eink device, the iRex Iliad and could finally get rid of my crappy little PDA reading machine and enjoy the benefits of a large, nicely contrasted and eye-friendly reading machine.

The Iliad was rather expensive, 650€ plus shipping, and that heavy price was part of the reason for a vow I toot there and then...a vow to never buy a paper book again. To be entirely honest, I have broken that vow a few times over the last few years, mainly for books from a series that I had started and could not get the next volume as ebook, but paper books moved from nearly 100% of my reading material to nearly 0.
I wrote that the purchase of the Iliad was the big turning point, and in a way it was, however, in those early days there was still a lot of hassle associated with ebooks, you had to convert everything to PDF because that was the only working format on the Iliad back then and that was manual work, no predefined templates, no helpful tools from iRex.
Saying that I spent as much time preparing books than I did grading them would be overdoing it, but it sure sometimes felt that way...
Also, back int hose days a good amount of my reading materials came from the darknet since the Iliad could not read any of the popular DRM format and the supply of books in these formats was also still rather weak.

Along the way I got the STAReBOOK as a review device (having risen to Editor status on mobileread.com by then) and was very fascinated by that device because it was a lot faster and slimmer (in both shape and function) than the feature-rich but also slow,battery-weak and cumbersome Iliad, however, the company vanished without a trace shortly after launching the STAReBOOK and the promised firmware update for the device which should have fixed many of the bugs and intruded new features and support for more ebook formats never happened. So I soon returned to my trusty old Iliad...

The biggest step (in my opinion) happened later that year, when iRex offered a firmware update that added mobipocket support to the Iliad! Thanks to this move, I was finally able to get almost al my books in ebook format...and I could get them legally. This was the biggest step forward...

Many things have happened since, the Cybook Gen3 was launched, the Kindle flickered it's way into existence and brought ebooks even closer to mainstream, my STAReBOOK found a new function as a Cybook Gen3 (same hardware, different firmware...nice...^^) and I can now comfortably browse online stores like booksonboard, choose what I want to read and have it on either of my reading devices in a few minutes, faster and easier than going to the bookstore and buying it there..and cheaper too most of the time...

I have not pirated an ebook for a long time, there is no need anymore, I have not bought a pbook for a long time either (if it's not available as ebook I don't read it...that'll teach the narrow-minded publishers...) and I'm a happy, fully-converted ebook lover.
Of course there are things that could still do with some improvement, many books are still not available as ebooks, the eink devices still have their shortcomings, but all in all I think ebooks are finally (after amyn fals tries) ready for prime-time and the mass market!

THE END!

Please excuse my lengthy ramble, if you are still awake then now would be the right moment to sit back, think back to your first encounter with ebooks and tell us all about it!
Thanks!