11:04 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Nobody can question PVI's expertise when it comes to manufacturing E Ink-based display panels. And as the exclusive supplier to major companies like Amazon and Sony, it's not a surprise that they'd eventually reach the limits of their production capacity. Rebecca Kuo of DigiTimes quotes PVI chairman Scott Liu saying:

Special applications such as the electronic-paper (e-paper) display from PVI will still have two digit growth a year and the demand from the e-book market will see double growth this year, the chairman said. He added that the overall sales of e-book were below market expectations in 2007 since Amazon unveiled its Kindle, an electronic reading device, only in November.

PVI currently cannot meet demand from Amazon's Kindle reading device, Liu indicated. But he stressed there's no component shortage problem at present.

Despite production delays, the dudes from PVI have every right to be proud these days. Thanks to their favorable product mix they managed to increase their quarterly earnings by nearly 53% (USD 17.3m) while keeping revenues constant (USD 99m, I assume because of production constraints).

Related: PVI thinks big, also thanks to recent Kindle mania, PVI on its way to success thanks to E Ink

05:52 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Readers | Amazon Kindle

The guys from Seeking Alpha analyzed how the Amazon Kindle performed in terms of traffic received from referring parties. The result is nothing but impressive:

Joining the lofty ranks of Webkinz, Zune, Uggs and video game consoles, Kindle-related terms for November debuted in the top tier of brand terms most often referring to Amazon from search engines. That's quite a feat, considering the product released late in the month, and 683,000 people visited the Kindle product page during those last two weeks.

Also, in comparison to the Apple iPod, Seeking Alpha discovered that the Kindle attracts a more mature crowd ("30-something business professionals") with higher income.

For instance, the gadget standard that is the iPhone generates most interest with the young 20-something set, with a correlating peak in lower income brackets that defies high premiums. Alternatively, the Kindle skews more to the 30-something business professionals, with an audience peak at a higher income segment, that can more easily manage the asking price. Clearly, the new reader appeals particularly to this demographic. Perhaps its ‘80s throwback design reminds them of a simpler, clunkier time with bigger hair… or maybe they just read more books.

05:49 AM by grimo1re in E-Book General | News

Macmillan Publishing Solutions (MPS) has launched The Global Reader: a new service that gives consumers access to books, articles, newspapers and other print content on their mobile phone. Mobile internet applications developer Bango has provided its billing and digital fingerprint technologies to MPS for the service. The ability to authenticate users means consumers can assemble a library of free and paid books. Additionally, given some content is lengthy, the mobile site has a bookmark feature. "We never envisioned people would want to read War and Peace on their phones," said Bob Kasher, one of the developers and originators of The Global Reader. "What we responded to was the idea that millions of people have mobile phones in their pockets."

Press release here.

04:27 PM by Alexander Turcic in More E-Book Readers | Bookeen

This isn't exactly a secret being kept under lock and key, but now fresh and official into our tattle box Bookeen sent us word that the Cybook Gen3 is in stock again.

Due to this overwhelming demand, the Cybook has been two times out of stock. Today the Cybook is in stock, shipments have restarted and the current average delay between order and shipment is 5 business days. You can order it at the shop section of our website.

And in case you are still undecided about buying a Cybook reader, make sure to check out the new hands-on videos Bookeen has added to their site.

06:26 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Here is one last reminder before time's up, the MobileRead logo and tagline contests will end tonight! If you haven't voted yet for the best logo and the wittiest tagline, now is the time! All the details you need to know are there, but the most important bit is the cutoff time: tonight (Monday, 28th Jan) at 11:59pm EST. Best of luck to all entrants.

PS: Votes from fake users will be deducated after the contest. If you had something like this in mind, please don't. It only costs us extra time to find the winners.

10:01 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 27, 2008--Amazon.com today announced that in 2008 the company will begin an international rollout of Amazon MP3, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 digital music store. Amazon MP3 is the only retailer to offer customers DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels as well as over 33,000 independent labels.

Launched on Amazon.com in September 2007, Amazon MP3 offers Earth's Biggest Selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000 artists. Every song and album in the Amazon MP3 music download store is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software and is encoded at 256 kbps to deliver high audio quality. Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device; organize their music using any music management application, such as iTunes(R) or Windows Media Player(TM); and burn songs to CDs for personal use.

from here

So, does anyone want to guess how long until Amazon takes Kindle worldwide?

08:17 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Credits also to ricdiogo who reported the news first.

It's probably a safe bet to say that his publishers (one of them being HarperCollins) ain't going to be amused about this, but Paulo Coelho, author of the best-selling novel The Alchemist, decided to harness his talents as a pirate to spread his own books for free via BitTorrent. According to TorrentFreak, this "unusual" step helped him to radically increase hardcopy sales throughout the world:

In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. […]

I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. […]

So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.

Links:

• Video with Mr. Coelho on how the Net affects book business (highly recommended!)
• Official "Pirate Coelho" Blog (use Google to find the exact link as we don't want to encourage piracy here)

Thanks to "horseyride" for the tip!

11:51 PM by Nate the great in E-Book Readers | Amazon Kindle

UPDATE:The Amazon Kindle has been out for over a year. Now is a good time to update this beginner's guide to content.

1. First things first: Kindle Edition e-books are only slightly different from DRM'ed Mobipocket e-books. If not for the DRM, the Kindle would be just another Mobipocket e-reader. You need to know this, otherwise you might be puzzled by the following.

2. Mobipocket Desktop 6.0 will recognize the Kindle as a reading device, and synchronize your e-books and RSS feeds correctly. This is important because Mobipocket disabled this feature in next version of the Desktop software (6.1), where the Kindle is no longer recognized as a reader device but only as a USB drive. You can download Mobipocket Desktop 6.0 here. A note of caution: If you already have a later version of Mobipocket Desktop, you will need to uninstall it first. Be careful though. If you are using the current installation to support your existing DRM'ed Mobipocket e-books, you will need to re-download them after you reinstall the older Mobipocket software. If you can't download your e-books again for whatever reason, you perhaps shouldn't uninstall the existing software.

   EDIT: You can also use calibre to support your Kindle. Calibre runs natively on XP, OSX, and Linux. It is better than MobiDesktop in every way. You can download it here.

3. There are over 34k newsfeeds available through Mobipocket Desktop. The process is simple to set up; you select the feeds, and set them to be downloaded onto your device. Downloading the feeds to your Kindle is automatic. Click here for a partial list of feeds that have full articles attached.

   EDIT: Calibre can also download newsfeeds, as well as an entire day's content of a news website like the NY Times.

4. Because the Kindle and Mobipocket e-book formats are basically identical, it is possible to buy an e-book in Mobipocket and (with some work) load it onto your Kindle. However, I currently know of only two retailers where you can officially do this (if you want to know why, click here). These are Fictionwise and BooksOnBoard. It may also work at your local library, if it offers Mobipocket e-books.

   There are several steps required. The first is to tell the retailer the PID of your Kindle. If you have Mobipocket Desktop 6.0 installed, you can find the Kindle's PID under the reading devices menu. Next, you need to download igorsk's hack (<<direct download link removed>>, and a python interpreter. For more information, click here. If you have trouble, ask for help here.

5. One neat feature of the Kindle is its ability to download e-books from the Internet directly onto your device. Feedbooks has an e-book guide full of links to free e-books. Personally I think it's one of the best sites on the Internet. You can download the guide here and learn more here. Munsey's is another site with excellent quality content. They also have a mobile version of their site here.

   EDIT: At the beginning of February, Amazon added around 7k free public domain ebooks to the Kindle store.The ebooks you will find through the links I provided above are much better quality.
   

6. This last part is about my preferred e-book format, Microsoft .LIT (Microsoft Reader). I prefer this format because it lets me protect my e-book investment. While I certainly won't explain how to strip DRM, I will say that to convert your purchased .LIT e-books, you need to download and install two components: ConvertLIT and Mobipocket Creator. When you run ConvertLIT, it will explode the .LIT file into its single parts. After this you need to click on the OPF file; Mobipocket Creator should open automatically. Then all you have to do is click on "make the book". The output will be a nearly perfect conversion.

P.S. There are a few things I left out, like the Kindle Easter Eggs. But I think I included enough to get a beginner off to a good start!