10:44 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

Well-known New York Time personal technology writer, David Pogue, is doing some interviews in advance of a CBS News Sunday Morning show about how people are losing important personal data. The reason? Always changing data formats and storage media issues. While he doesn't specifically mention DRM issues, I'm sure it will be deserving of a prime spot in his story.

Most likely, there are readers here with legitimate collections of personal files, pictures, music, home movies and of course e-books that have been lost because of various problems associated with storage and formats.

In fact, I've recently done what I could to try (unsuccessfully) to recover some lost photos and a memorial tribute video for a family member. He recently served overseas and lost someone he served with, and these are the surviving memories, as well as the tribute he had created. Unfortunately, the hard drive didn't survive the harsh conditions and professional recovery services run something like $1,000 even with military discounts. It's especially sad because I'm sure this sort of scenario happens to multitudes of people, and we're only on the "front end" of the danger curve. The average person doesn't go to the trouble to do backups of their files, and even those that try to do backups are still bitten by data loss.

Assuming he is still collecting stories, be sure to contact David if you have a significant loss that would be of interest for a news show. Every bit of publicity for this topic is a step forward. Here's the full blog entry "Casting Call!" from July 30...

So, I’m preparing a story for CBS News Sunday Morning about data rot/format loss: how the never-ending succession of recording and data formats can leave important memories and documents unplayable.

I’m looking for someone we can interview. Someone who has recordings or data files that are COMPLETELY unplayable/unopenable. Maybe the data files are fine, but the software that can open them is no longer available. Maybe you’ve got films or tapes in some oddball format that you can’t play anymore because the playback machines don’t exist anymore. (16-millimeter film reels, Betamax tapes, 3.5 or 5-inch floppy disks and 8-track tapes don’t count; those aren’t made anymore, but they’re still findable if you’re determined.)

Also let me know if you have recordings that have completely deteriorated with time. VHS tapes of a wedding, maybe. Or important audiotape recordings.

If you’re up for it, and you live in NY, LA, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., or Dallas, drop me an e-mail at pogue@nytimes.com!

02:21 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Don't place your bets just yet, but rumors are beginning to swirl about Amazon's Kindle going overseas - to Germany! Georg Meck of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung reports:

Im Herbst soll es so weit sein, ist in der Verlagsszene zu hören. Ein großer Auftritt Amazons zur Frankfurter Buchmesse Anfang Oktober wird vermutet. Der Geschäftsführer von Amazon in Deutschland, Ralf Kleber, blockt ab: „Wir wissen, dass viele Kunden auch außerhalb Amerikas daran interessiert sind, den Kindle zu kaufen, und dementsprechend wollen wir den Reader auch in anderen Ländern zur Verfügung stellen.“ Zum Preis, den er für den Kindle hierzulande verlangen wird, sagt er natürlich kein Wort.

Article: Amazon kopiert Apple

For those whose German is a bit rusty, insiders in the publishing scene expect the Kindle to be introduced during the Frankfurt Book Fair (October 15-19). Amazon Germany doesn't directly comment other than to acknowledge that there is high demand for the Kindle outside the US and that therefore the company is participating a launch in other countries as well (without naming a price).

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

• News4Me: Readius goes on trial with Deutsche Telekom?
• Stanza Desktop available for Windows
• Libraries step into the age of ...iPod?
• Textbook Torrent is back - more headache for publishers
• The Guardian: A Newspaper in 2015 (concept)
• Feedbooks release a sync tool for RSS feeds

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• The 2008 World Fantasy Award Nominees

E-Book Devices - Sony Portable Reader

• No ePub for PRS-500, but Sony offers $100 trade-in credit to upgraders

E-Book Devices - Amazon Kindle

• Kindle ... Or Is It Just Kindling?

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• MobileRead goes Mobile (beta)

04:26 AM by Hadrien in E-Book General | News

The News section of Feedbooks offer an easy way to transform RSS feeds into a format supported by your reading device. But we're all lazy: that's the reason why we created a software to auto-sync those feeds to your device.
Available for Windows, News Stand use our API to synchronize all of your subscriptions as soon as you plug in your device (any UMS device should be supported).

Download the latest version of News Stand.

URL: Feedbooks
Blog: Auto-Sync your subscriptions

06:03 AM by TadW in E-Book General | News

Polymer Vision's Readius goes in the right direction, but the following concept looks like so much more. Designer Mayo Nissen created the newspaper for 2015:

The product uses a fexible e-ink display which dynamically displays content based on the physical form of the scroll. Being controlled by the reader, this is likely to depend on current needs, context, and available time, as well as the content on offer at any one time.

Find more about the Guardian in Mayo's selected works here (PDF).

[via The Design blog]

05:48 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

In a completely unsurprising move, Textbook Torrent, a textbook-sharing BitTorrent site, went dark after receiving sudden mainstream popularity. A group of publishers had contacted the hoster of the site, Dreamhost, claiming they have facilitated the P2P transfers of copyrighted textbooks, which you know, is true. Now, only a month later, the site is back and hosted at a more BitTorrent-friendly location, as the TorrentFreak blog reports.

To make matters worse for publishers, the textbook tracker has become public, meaning there will be no more ratio tracking and anyone with a BitTorrent client can download at free will. But before starting a download frenzy, remember, if you get caught illegally downloading copyrighted material, your e-book reader may not do you any good anymore, because not every prison cell provides AC power plugs...

Related: Is ebook piracy on the rise?

04:46 AM by Donnageddon in E-Book General | News

It is impossible to fight. It seems every new portable technology is measured in terms of the iPod.

It may be about time to dig out that old library card. Hoping to draw back readers, libraries have vastly expanded their lists of digital books, music, and movies that can be downloaded by their patrons to a computer or MP3 player -- and it doesn't cost a cent, unlike, say, media from Apple Inc's iTunes or Amazon.com Inc.

...

"People like the portability of it," Jim McCluskey, collection development assistant manager for Washington State's Sno-Isle Libraries, which will soon be offering iPod compatible downloads.

Now I have and enjoy reading books on my iPod Touch, and the new apps for the "media player" make reading most anything relatively easy. And I will be interested to hear what Sno-Isle Libraries will be using for iPod compatible downloads.

And the E Ink devices do get some love, or at least the Sony Reader does get a mention. In a list of devices.

But it is the name "iPod" that seems to drive the article. What you gonna do...?

Good to see the article, and hope it gets more people aware of digital reading.

Reuters article here

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]