03:49 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

So over in the land of the rising sun, where reading novels on your cell might already be so passé, there is a new way to pass the time while you're bored on the subway or waiting for the movie to start: flip through picture books on your cell phone. According to Tokyo Mango:

The picture book will be read page by page, like a kamishibai—no scrolling, just clicking from page to page. It will include both popular children's titles and original content. You can buy them online for 100-200 yen each. The company hopes to have 50 titles and 10,000 downloads by September.

The official press release can be found here (in Japanese).

[via Textually]

10:58 PM by wallcraft in More E-Book Readers | iRex

I originally saw this mentioned on mobipocket's forums, but Karel (iRex Community Manager) in the iRex forum thread When will iRex's version of Mobipocket add features? said:

There will be no new features introduced in the current Mobipocket viewer. The reason for this is because we are working on a viewer frame work. This viewer frame work will make it possible to easily add additional format support by both the community and iRex. In addition each feature developed for the viewer framework will be available to all supported formats.

This is bad news in the short term, since the iLiad MobiPocket reader is very feature poor, but iRex is probably right in the long term to ditch the entire thing and start again.

Is iRex really capable of generating a viewer framework from scratch? I think it would actually be easier, and technically superior, to start over using FBReader as the basis for all viewers. It already meets the "easy to add new formats" and "new features" applies to "all supported formats" criteria. Note that FBReader can now in principle support (licensed) MOBI DRM by distributing a binary only version with this included.

01:55 PM by TadW in E-Book General | News

Imagine computers that adjust their shape according to some computational outcome, or through interactions with users. It's called Kinetic Organic Interface (KOI) and professor Roel Vertegaal is working on this in his Human Media Laboratory at Queens University.

Professor Vertegaal forsees drinks cans with RSS feeds or movie trailers, and touch-sensitive computers that change shape when you need them for different purposes. It's a combination of three-dimensional multi-touch, flexible display technology and smart materials like e-ink. Vertegaal even compares our use of current "flat" computer technology to life in the novel Flatland, and argues that the future is going to be about 3D computing and displays.

Gizmodo

And here is a video demonstrating how crazy this could be...

10:51 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Stanford is one of the universities collaborating with Google on the ambitious plan to digitize large numbers of books from the university's libraries. But little has been said yet how this digitized material will be used. The Stanford Daily reports that members of Stanford faculty are not sure about this either and that they disagree to some extent.

Proponent of the project have always argued that the project will provide well-indexed digital books for researchers and "mitigate the need to move books off campus". Neither claim is undisputed, though.

Some faculty members, however, worry that the digitization of books may lead to even more texts being removed from campus. History Prof. Philippe Buc argued that reading and assimilating the content in books on a computer screen is significantly different from having the book physically present. He cited the difficulty of annotating texts on the screen, which he felt was key to reflection on contents and preparation for discussion. ...

Buc admitted that digitization could have some benefits, but stood by his support for hard copies of texts.

“Digitization should be a servant of traditional scholarship, not a goal in itself,” he said. “We can be intelligent about this, but we cannot be mindlessly utopian. One thing I would advocate is a new undergraduate and graduate library containing the best books for teaching and paper research, on the model of Yale’s new Cross-Campus library. We would just need to duplicate Yale’s shelf-list and add in the areas we teach in that Yale does not teach in.”

I admit, when it comes to research, I am still a paper magnet. Nothing is more satisfying than going through a stack of books and flipping through pages to find relevant information. Others may disagree, but I hope that Google Books and all other related projects will never lead to a decrease in available paper books in libraries.

10:20 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Last week, Borders jumped back into online retailing with the official launch of their new Borders.com online store, which has been under development for the past 18 months. Previously, the bookseller redirected their online customers to Amazon as a partner site.

Perhaps one of the most unique features is the flash-based Magic Shelf, which is supposed to enable you to browse and discover titles much the same way you would look for books in a neighborhood brick-and-mortar store.

But is this enough to compete with Amazon, the dominating player in the online book-selling market?

A question for you: When you consider buying a book today, does your mind work in the "bookshelf mode", guided by serendipity where you grab for a book whose title or cover you find most intriguing? Or do you work in the newer "Amazon mode", where you think in categories and browse by ranking and recommendations?

[via AP and Techdirt]

03:14 AM by TeamCA in E-Book General | News

The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 30, 2008) reports that almost 70% of research libraries plan to increase spending on ebooks, with non-US libraries more likely to adopt ebooks. The problem is not complex charts and color photos but copyright issues holding back publishers, according to the comments.

Excerpt from "Library Use of E-books":

More than half of all patrons reported either extensive or significant use of e-reference books, and nearly a quarter of the college libraries in the sample reported that their patrons used e-books quite extensively. ... Fiction e-books were not used extensively and close to 71% of libraries said that they were used little. Less than 10% reported extensive or significant use of fiction e-books.

09:35 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

I wanted to make sure everyone saw this.

The Kindle, like any other Mobipocket device, does not support folders in the menu. One thing it can do that's close to a folder is group various issues of a magazine or newspaper under a single title. If you select it, you will see all the issues of that periodical. This is very similar to "Collections" on the Sony Reader.

You might not know about MobiPerl. It's a pretty good Mobi ebook publisher, written in Perl. If you use it to change several Mobi ebooks to the same title (say "Honorverse") and change the booktype to "NEWS", the changed ebooks will appear to be in a folder titled Honorverse. The exact command is discussed here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...672#post192672

Here's why I wanted everyone to know about this: Does your Mobipocket device support this feature? I want everyone to try it. I would, but I'm still learning how to run MobiPerl. Could someone post a set of modified ebooks for those who don't know how to use MobiPerl?

Does MobiDesktop support this? How about the Blackberry? Cybook?

03:20 PM by chrissy in E-Book General | News

The article Electronic Device Stirs Unease at Book Fair in the New York Times today covers the growth in consumer awareness around electronic book reading devices, some publishers' reactions to this being a possible tipping point for the electronic book, and the fears of some booksellers who view this as a threat to their businesses.

Some interesting paragraphs from the article:

Much of the talk was focused on the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reader, which has gained widespread acclaim for its ease of use. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, spent much of a packed session on Friday evangelizing about the Kindle, which he said already accounts for 6 percent of his company’s unit sales of books that are available in both paper and electronic formats.

But excitement about the Kindle, which was introduced in November, also worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller. Those executives note that Amazon currently sells most of its Kindle books to customers for a price well below what it pays publishers, and they anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices.

Booksellers, who make up the other major group attending the publishing convention, are also concerned that electronic books could become more than a passing fancy for an electronically savvy subset of customers. "It certainly does feel like a threat," said Charles Stillwagon, the events manager at the Tattered Cover Book Store, a large independent bookseller in Denver.

Nearly all publishers say their sales of electronic books are growing exponentially. Carolyn K. Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, said its sales of electronic books will more than double this year compared to last year, after growing 40 percent in 2007 from 2006. David Shanks, the chief executive of Penguin Group USA, said his company sold more electronic books in the first four months of 2008 than in all of last year.

Much of the expected growth in electronic books can be tied to the Kindle. When Amazon introduced the product, it sold out of the machines on the first day. The company needed months to adjust its manufacturing capacity and supply chain to be able to keep Kindles in stock, which Mr. Bezos said it has now accomplished.

The chief competitor to the Kindle is the Sony Reader, which has been on the market since 2006 and has also helped boost sales of electronic books. Some technology critics have given the early advantage to the Kindle, however, which downloads books, daily newspapers and magazines wirelessly; the Sony Reader downloads content via a wired connection.

The reluctance of Amazon and Sony to release sales figures continues to make the claims of various parties difficult to substantiate, resulting in contradictory statements such as the following --

But he also claimed that Kindle users are buying more books, not simply exchanging one format for another. He said that after buying a Kindle, Amazon customers purchase just as many physical books and two and a half times as many books overall, or three electronic books for every two physical copies.

Some publishing executives dispute that claim. "We don’t see people buying both versions," Mr. Shanks said. "I think there is almost a one-to-one cannibalization."

But neither Amazon nor Sony will say how many of their products they have sold, making it impossible for publishers to assess the size of the market or for bookstore owners to evaluate the threat.

One publisher estimated that Amazon had sold roughly 10,000 Kindles, while another estimated that as many as 50,000 electronic-book readers of all types are in general circulation. But both publishers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that those figures were little more than educated guesses.