03:49 AM by TadW in E-Book General | Reading Recommendations

The World Fantasy Award is always a good place to find new interesting reads, in particular if you into the fantasy genre. This year's nominees are:

Novel

Territory Emma Bull [Tor]
Ysabel Guy Gavriel Kay [Viking Canada/Penguin Roc]
Fangland John Marks [Penguin Press]
Gospel of the Knife Will Shetterly [Tor]
The Servants Michael Marshall Smith [Earthling Publications]

Novella
The Mermaids Robert Edric [PS Publishing]
Illyria Elizabeth Hand [PS Publishing]
"The Master Miller’s Tale" Ian R. MacLeod [F&SF May 2007]
"Cold Snap" Kim Newman [The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, MonkeyBrain Books]
"Stars Seen through Stone" Lucius Shepard [F&SF July 2007]

Short Story
"The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics" Daniel Abraham [Logorrhea, Bantam Spectra]
"Singing of Mount Abora" Theodora Goss [Logorrhea, Bantam Spectra]
"The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" Kij Johnson [The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, Viking]
"Damned if you Don’t " Robert Shearman" [Tiny Deaths, Comma Press]
"The Church on the Island" Simon Kurt Unsworth [At Ease with the Dead, Ash-Tree Press]

Anthology
Five Strokes to Midnight Gary A. Braunbeck & Hank Schwaeble, Eds. [Haunted Pelican Press]
Wizards: Magical Tales From The Masters of Modern Fantasy
Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois, Eds. [Berkley]
Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural Ellen Datlow, Editor [Tor]
The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, Eds.[Viking]
Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories John Klima, Editor [Bantam Spectra]

06:00 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book Readers | Sony Reader

Update: This thread is now closed. At the end of 2009, Sony has made what appears to be a limited time trade-in or upgrade offer for PRS-500 owners. Either trade-in for cash when buying a new Pocket or Touch Edition Reader, or get a free firmware upgrade by sending your PRS-500 to Sony. The firmware upgrade adds ePub compatibility as well as some other features. For additional information, see the following...
* MobileRead announcement
* Sony site with new upgrade/trade-in offer
* MobileRead Wiki entry for PRS-500 (with upgrade info)

The Sony Reader team is announcing today a new upgrade offer for PRS-500 owners. Turn in your existing PRS-500 Sony Reader and get a $100 credit on the purchase of a new PRS-505, which can support reflowable display of text-based PDFs and ePub with Adobe Digital Editions DRM. The offer and full details are available at the SonyStyle offer page. It's Sony's way of addressing the needs of the original PRS-500 owners who desire the ePub support of the 505, but can't get it through a firmware upgrade. And it's a tip of the hat to those early customers that contributed to the early success of the Sony Reader product.

The offer is good news on several fronts. This is going to be a convenient upgrade option for many PRS-500 owners who are longing for the ePub feature of the PRS-505. It appears to be more evidence that Sony is in the e-book race long term. And, in addition, the offer is generous in some of the specifics. For example, you get to keep the A/C adapter when you turn in your PRS-500. You can even do the trade-in "on the spot" at SonyStyle brick and mortar stores for the most convenient way to upgrade.

A few more details:
* Customers doing the upgrade will buy the 505 first and then send in their old 500 to get the credit. This means you may have to wait a bit to get the credit, but it also means that you won't ever be without a Reader.
* There is a shipping cost to send back your old unit. But when buying the new unit, SonyStyle.com often offers free shipping.
* This is a Sony-only promotion, which means you can buy online at SonyStyle.com or in person at a SonyStyle store, not third party retailers.
* If you bring the old unit into the store and do the trade right then and there, the credit will be applied at purchase. If you do the trade later or purchase online, the credit comes back when Sony receives the 500.
* This is a US-only promotion. (Not good for UK 505 purchases.)
* Extended warranties do not appear to be transferrable to the new device
* The offer is good until January 31, 2009

On the other hand, if all you care about is the absolute lowest-cost way to upgrade, you may want to consider unloading your existing PRS-500 at eBay. Sale prices for the devices appear to be around $150-$250 these days, which ought to beat $100 even after eBay fees.

And now, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story...

As we know, Sony is watching MobileRead just like many other industry insiders do. Well, it looks like the enthusiastic email campaign of "Nate the Great" may have just been what turned the tide. The following note was addressed to the MobileRead community from the Sony Reader team and announces the upgrade offer:

We would like to thank you for your support of the Reader Digital Book by Sony® and digital reading in general. We’ve been monitoring the site and have been gratified to see the tremendous positive response to our recent firmware upgrade announcement. The ability to access EPUB books and reflow standard text-based PDF documents opens the device to a world of new content.

We’ve also seen the requests from PRS-500 users about making an upgrade available for that model. After lengthy discussion and investigation of different solutions, we determined that such an upgrade would not be technically feasible. Instead of leaving our early fans out in the cold, we’d like to thank them for being among the first to recognize the benefit of the Reader so we’re offering a special trade-up program.

When you trade-in your old PRS-500, we'll credit you $100 off a purchase of a new PRS-505. This program will run though January 2009 and you can find more details on the SonyStyle site: http://www.sonystyle.com/readertrade.

Please be assured that your PRS-500 will continue to work as before with the Sony eBook store and with your personal documents but if you would like to upgrade to a unit with EPUB compatibility, PDF reflow and other enhancements, we would like to make the transition as easy as possible.

Once again, we thank you for your continued support.

Keep on reading,

The Reader Team
Sony Electronics

04:46 AM by BKeeper in E-Book Readers | Amazon Kindle

Wired has an article questioning whether there is a market for the Kindle:

So, all things considered, how many Kindles does that work out to? Two million? One million? Five hundred thousand?
Jeff Bezos surely did a market-sizing exercise or two of his own before flying off the handle in excitement over e-readers, and he must have seen something more than a few hundred million in revenue (a mere rounding error to the company's $14.8 billion annual take) worth getting carried away over.

I think the author is totally missing the point:

Eventually the market for the Kindle (or any other ebook) is as big (or small) as the p-book market itself.

And for Amazon I think the Kindle is not so much about money and market potential, it is about vision, about (re)building the foundations of the publishing business.

Bezos cannot sit around waiting for the p-book market to stagnate; his choice is clearly to be an agent of change.

That is... to Kindle.

What do you think?

03:25 AM by Hadrien in E-Book General | News

We are happy to announce that the first beta of Stanza for Windows is now available for download at:

http://www.lexcycle.com/download-windows

As this is the first beta release for Windows, there will be some problems and issues, but the core functionality of reading, converting books between formats, and sharing with Stanza iPhone/iPod Touch is all there.

Please use the support forums to report problems, ask questions, or share user experiences.

Enjoy!

URL: Lexcycle

Thanks to this release, it should be very easy to read your collection of e-books in any format supported by Stanza, directly on your iPhone/iPod touch.

09:52 AM by LazyScot in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Moderator's Note: The date has been set. I copied the following info so it can be found easily by everyone:

Recap, to gather the information suggested.

Date: Monday 18th August
Time: 7pm onwards
Location: London Review of Books Signing Tent (Café Bar), Charlotte Square Gardens (possibly moving to Speigeltent, if we are still going after 9:30)
Transport: Charlotte square is close to numerous bus services, and about 15 mins walk from Edinburgh Waverly Train station. Fuller details are on the Book Festival website.

The gardens and venue are free to get in (I've checked this with the Festival staff!).

From the Festival website:
Beetroot Blue Café Bar in the London Review of Books Signing Tent
Fairtrade coffee, teas, whisky, wines and beer plus a range of light snacks, sandwiches and fresh salads. (From experience in previous year, Beetroot Blue is pretty good)

If you are bringing a device, could you either leave a reply with details of the devices, or drop me a message?

Current devices:
Iliad, Sony PRS-500, Kindle, Cybook

Would anyone be interested in meeting up during the festival in August, say on the 18th (though I've some flexibility here)?

I'd like to meet up at the Book Festival, in Charlotte Square, but I'm sure other locations would work if people have suggestions.

To give incentives, I'll bring along (assuming I haven't broken them!) an iLiad, PRS-500 and Kindle; I'd love to see some of the other types too..

Warning: given that it's festival-time, Edinburgh tends to hang up a "Sorry, No vacancies sign".

For those down south; I'll try and arrange something in London (or futher south!) in September.

12:16 PM by TadW in E-Book General | News

See the iLiad in action, all in Japanese.

From the description: "The contents are provided by 1) Hokkaido Newspaper (morning edition, evening edition) which was demonstrated during The Hokkaido Toyako G8 Summit 2008. 2) Kanagawa Newspaper (morning edition) which was demonstrated October 2007. 3) MyBooks.jp brog publishing 4) Comic by LEED Publishing Comic also shown on other epaper devices (Amazon Kindle, Sony READER, Fujitsu FLEPia) which content is converted by EAST Co., Ltd. Japan."

06:30 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

It's been a long time coming, but we're pretty excited to finally announce the beta launch of our mobile site. Note this is really still a beta project; not everything is functional yet (e.g. you cannot browse e-books, image down-sizing still disabled), and we're sure there are still some nasty bugs hidden somewhere. This is why we need you! Please report all bugs and suggestions you may have back to us and we try our best to solve all outstanding issues.

You can access our mobile site through any of the following URLs:

http://www.mobileread.mobi/
http://m.mobileread.com/
https://www.mobileread.com/mobile/

A final word to all iPhone users - we may implement an iPhone-specific mobile edition in the future. But for now, please accept our first mobile site as a new testing ground for your shiny toy.

04:56 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Dubbed News4Me, Deutsche Telekom is going to launch the trial of an e-news project in Germany this coming fall.

From Spiegel:

Die Telekom sieht sich offenbar unter Zugzwang, nach dem das Modell Kindle von Amazon in den USA bereits mit gewissem Erfolg auf dem Markt ist und auch France Telecom eine elektronische Zeitung namens "Read & Go" testet. Telekom-Forschungsleiter Peter Möckel sieht trotz immer leistungsstärkerer Handys für gut ablesbare Displays eine Lücke zwischen Mobiltelefonen und Laptops. Man werde selbst aber keine Geräte bauen und auch keine eigenen Inhalte anbieten, sagte Möckel dem SPIEGEL.

Participants will receive a "dedicated device" for receiving personalized news, but the article doesn't mention the brand of the device. Care for some bold predictions? How about the Polymer Vision Readius? Here is why:

• The trial begins in fall, just when the Readius is going to hit the market;
• Germany is among the first three countries (beside England and Italy) to receive the Readius;
• The News4Me device is supposed to have "Kindle-like" connectivity;
• Take a look at the News4Me presentation attached to this post.

Of course, this is complete unsubstantiated speculation, but it certainly isn't out of the realm of possibility.

Thanks to beachwanderer for the tip!

Related: Polymer Vision Readius to debut this fall, Mobileread Interview: Karl McGoldrick, CEO of Polymer Vision