07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Just in case you've missed anything, here is the list of our frontpage news this week.

E-book Devices, Future E-Book Devices
New e-reader device available in France soon - Walkbook
HP to present "e-book reader" featuring an intuitive interface
More E Ink: Ricavision eReader for Vista is introduced

E-book Devices, Sony Portable Reader
Sony Reader PRS-500 universal flasher

E-books, Elsewhere on the Net
Best Places to Get Free Books - The Ultimate Guide

E-books, News
LG Philips with first flexible 14.1" color E Ink
Science Friday segment on Digital Libraries
Roth's Complaint: "Age of books is at an end"
Interesting twist on Digital Rights Management
Nemoptic launches A4 flexible e-paper display
Samsung debuts even bigger color e-paper

E-books, Reading Software
Adobe Digital Editions 1.0 around the corner

Miscellaneous, Lounge
Application pop up dialogs are driving me crazy!

03:28 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Don't we love it when it turns into the primal "Mine is bigger than yours" kind of game? At this year's SID exhibit, Samsung is going to present the "concept" model of what they claim the biggest color e-paper display, which - with a 14.3-inch diagonal - is even topping the color e-paper from LG Philips announced last week by a spine-tingling 0.2 inch.

Samsung is also going to impress folks with a 40-inch (1366x768) black-and-white e-paper which is most likely going to be used for presentational purposes, consuming only 1/500 of the power of a conventional LCD display.

Btw, the display shown on the photo here is not actually from Samsung, but from Citizen and measures about 4.2 x 1.7 feet! So talking about size...

Related: LG Philips with first flexible 14.1" color E Ink

[via BusinessWire]

02:57 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

It's been very quiet of late on the Adobe front, but word has reached us (thanks Ari!) that Adobe Digital Editions will soon enter final stages. Among the new features we are very likely to see:

• Fixes & improvements in error handling for DRM
• Better error reporting
• Radically altered user interface
• More flexible management of e-books
• Other yet unnamed new features

Release date: June 2007

Link to the download: Adobe Digital Editions Beta 3

11:21 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

Did you think that LG Philips is the only one with a flexible e-paper display? Not at all. Philips has color, but a black and white 14.1" bistable display has now also been launched by Nemoptic.

Electronic News is reporting "Nemoptic announced today that it is launching a new A4-sized E-paper display. The France-based company, which began large volume production of E-paper last month after reaching a manufacturing agreement with Seiko Instruments, said it has already shipped samples of its 210-mm by 297-mm A4 BiNem displays to major office equipment clients."

Here are the specs:
* Black and white display
* 200 dpi
* A4 size
* 1650 x 2340 pixels
* <1 second screen refresh
* No power used except for image changes
* 2mm thick
* Display brightness is above 30%. (Some kind of reflective ratio?)

Thanks to Joe for the tip!

Related: Nemoptic worked in "stealth mode" on e-paper / initially no e-books

11:26 PM by vranghel in E-Book General | News

Another e-book reader goodness!

Although there've been lots of eBooks the past year, none of them have had this HP concept that was demoed at the HP Mobility Summit. Instead of pressing a button to turn the page (which you can presumably still do) there are touch strips on the top, bottom, and sides of the ebook that you can slide to virtually turn the page.

HP to present ‘ebook reader’ featuring intuitive interface

[via Gizmodo]

07:42 PM by igorsk in Sony Reader | Sony Reader Dev Corner

So here it is. From the readme:

This set of scripts allows to flash a custom image or replace any files inside
the /opt directory of the Reader filesystem using just a flash card. The /opt
directory contains the main Reader UI and supporting files.
Possible uses include:
1) rolling back to an older firmware version
2) customizing the UI look and behavior
3) replacing/adding built-in fonts

As an example, provided xml files add a configurable clock display in the
status bar of the navigation menus and book reader.

Version 1.2: support for firmware version 1.0.02.01300
Version 2.1 with support for firmware version 1.0.03.07170.

07:32 PM by realityloop in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Big list of free book sites here!

http://www.friedbeef.com/2007/04/09/...ltimate-guide/

Cheers

Editor's Note: Thanks to realityloop for the link. This is the second time I've seen this link pointed to, so I suppose it deserves front page visibility. I haven't checked out the links, so of course be considerate of copyright law and general safe computing practices as you look through the sources.

11:24 AM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

No, by pop up dialogs I don't mean pop up browser windows. Those are a pain also, but IE and Firefox offer us some protection. And yes, this is mainly a desktop issue which is about the environment that mobile devices live in. But pretty soon (especially with the new UMPCs) it will become an issue for mobile computing, if it's not already.

What I'm talking about are the dialog boxes that applications pop up out of nowhere, and which get immediate focus no matter what you happen to be doing at the time.

So what's the problem? Well, I tend to do many things at once on the computer. I have things running in the background while I am doing other things in the foreground. So suppose a program finishes in the background while I'm typing. What happens? It pops up a dialog box saying "I'm done." Unfortunately, I'm a fairly fast typer also, so odds are, I'm going to hit a key that takes action. Usually the space key to accept the default choice. I'm left wondering what the heck was that dialog box that just popped up, and what did I just instruct that program to do?!!!!

I'm getting pretty tired of interacting accidentally with popup dialog boxes or other GUI elements by accident, and I'm wondering:

1) When will something very bad happen as a result?
What happens if a dialog box with <commit changes> and <delete all> pops up and I happen to type TAB space space? Do I end up deleting everything and confirming the delete all before I even realize a dialog box popped up!?

2) Why doesn't Microsoft set something up as an option in Windows so that you can be notified, but that another background program can't grab focus unless you ask for it. All I want is to know another program wants to interact with me. But I want control of when I switch my focus to another application. Especially with programs that present a higher risk of inadvertant interaction. Shouldn't Windows support some sort of safer app switching?

3) Do Linux or other O/S's have any support for this kind of situation?

Has anyone even thought of this issue before? Anyone else wondering the same thing, or am I an irrelevant outlier as far as users are concerned?