06:42 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book Readers | Alternative Devices

Remember the budget phone with an E Ink display? Well, Shaun McGill of PDA247 has picked up one, and done an excellent review that's worth looking at even if just for the picture of the popcorn box"!

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

Ok kids, time for the weekly roundup of what we've covered this week:

E-book Devices, iRex iLiad
iRex iLiad on steroids: How to enable 3G
iRex iLiad hits Japan
iLiad Firmware with long-awaited Mobipocket Reader (almost)
Proposed iLiad Packaging/Installation Standard

E-book Devices, Sony Portable Reader
New Sony Reader Ads: "Fit 80 books in your carry-on"
Sony Reader hack: clock in status bar
html2lrf released - HTML to LRF converter
Docudesk (Sony Reader) PRS Browser for OS X
pielrf beta - Text to LRF with Easy TOC, autoflow, etc.

E-books, Content
PDFRead 1.6 released

E-books, News
Let's face it: DRM didn't help anyone
E-books are "bound to fail"
Fujitsu to release colour e-book reader
Adobe InDesign CS3 adds support for OPS content

Miscellaneous, Announcements
Wiki server move - read-only mode

Mobile Devices, General Talk
Dell introduces flash-based laptop drives

Mobile Devices, Handhelds and Smartphones
Jeff Hawkins on Palm Addicts Videocast #82
Crackberries for the Nations

Web to Mobile, General Talk
Bloglines versus Google Reader

02:38 AM by EatingPie in Sony Reader | Sony Reader Dev Corner

Out of beta, now officially released on the Reader Content forum. All new versions will be posted there, as well as questions answered and whatnot.

Announcing pielrf, a Python command line tool to convert text to Reader lrf format, utilizing Fallstaff's pylrs.

I've only tested this using Python 2.5 on Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Intel). The main features are easy Table of Content creation, curly quotes, top-of-page header and paragraph autoflow.

Please feel free to give this a run. I've been using it primarily for Guteberg and OCR books. I've included a few short examples with the executable.

Chapters.

To create chapters, simply add "<chapter>" before the chapter name.

This will add "Chapter One" to the main Table of Contents, along with a button on the Table of Contents page at the beginning of the book.

Paragraphs

There's several ways to delimit paragraphs. Gutenberg uses vertical whitespace (CRs), while other files use tabs on the first line of the paragraph, while still others use spaces. By default, the program automatically the actual method used. You can also force it using the "-b" flag: "-b tab" or "-b cr" for example.

Features.

+ Curly (typographic) quotes.
+ Top-of-page header like those in books from the Sony Connect Store.
+ Paragraph auto-flow.
+ Table of Contents and Chapterization if you use the <chapter> tag.
+ Understands HTML tags <i></i>, <b></b>, <center></center>, , , <p></p>.
+ Understands ALL HTML Ampersand tags - &amp;, &pound, &uumlat, etc.
+ Paragraphs can be delimited by tabs, spaces, vertical whitespace.
+ Font size / weight (bold) can be controlled from command line.
+ Ability to control almost everything else from the command line too!

Requirements

Requires install of Python 2.5 from the Developer Tools / Tiger Install CD. Also requires pylrs-1.0.0, along with ElementTree 1.2.6.

-Pie

Versions provided here, see subsequent posts for discussion of changes.

10:15 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Earlier this month Adobe launched the fifth incarnation of their desktop publishing tool Adobe InDesign C3, worshiped by publishing companies all over the globe. And one of the most interesting new features (at least for us) is the ability to export of content into the same XHTML-based e-book format that is supported by the Adobe Digital Editions reader software.

During the export, InDesign creates a single .epub file containing the XHTML-based content. The exported file can also include a JPEG thumbnail image from the first page in the specified document. This thumbnail is used to depict the book in the Digital Editions Reader library view. Click here for a sample file generated from InDesign.

Nick Bogaty from IDPF has more information in the IDPF forums.

06:09 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Readers | Sony Reader

Thanks to Scotty for pointing us to this little gem:

The Docudesk PRS Browser allows Macintosh users to easily manage content on the Sony Reader using a native OS X interface.

Both internal and card memory locations are supported, and all natively-supported file types can be added and removed from the Reader (txt, lrf, pdf, rtf, bmp, gif, jpg, png, mp3, and aac) with simple drag and drop operations. You can even copy files from your Reader to a local drive.

This project is based on the ReaderFS file system for OSX. Special thanks to the author, Scott Turner, for his contributions. The PRS Browser is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Link to download and sources: Docudesk Labs

01:18 PM by Chaos in E-Book General | News

Sorry, this was posted already, here. Sorry for any confusion - I'm still getting back into things...

Fujitsu issued a press release (useless unless you can read Japanese - and I can't), stating that they're going to release a colour e-ink reader, first discussed in another news post. The hardware looks quite nice, including the standard XScale ARM processor, an SD card slot, 802.11b/g, and a battery somehow 'rated' at 50 hours. Some of the less common hardware includes a stereo headpone jack, and the ability to play music from the SD card slot. Oh, and the screen is touch-sensitive!

So, of course, all this is too good to be perfect. The price, for one, is over $1000 per-reader (for ten readers, for testing purposes - presumably the final product will be slightly less expensive), for the small size. The large size more-than-doubles that price. It's also running "Japanese Windows CE 5.0" (apparently something different from Windows Mobile), and will only be available in Japan.

While the price and software may not be what everyone's looking for it, does at least mean the industry is beginning to show an interest in colour e-ink, meaning the e-book reader will become more and more useful for magazines, textbooks (with diagrams - like anatomy), and anything else that requires, or is enhanced by, colourful pictures.

[Found through PC Word, pointing to Digital World Tokyo, pointing to the actual release.]

01:22 AM by Chaos in E-Book General | News

According to an interesting article on ComputerWorld, e-books are apparently bound to fail. It's a thought-provoking article, that does bring up some interesting, but not terribly uncommon points. For example, a fair number of people do just like the feel of a paper book. To be honest, I'm one of them. But I disagree with them being headed towards mainstream failure...

While they may not be able to replace paper novels completely, they can almost certainly replace newspapers, many magazines, and even some internet use, once the hardware and software systems develop a little more. Instead of the paper delivered to your door, it's automatically sent to your e-book reader. Instead of your magazine getting half-shredded and read by the mail workers, it's sent directly to your (preferably colour, for a magazine) e-book reader. And of course there's also the obvious applications for reference libraries. You wouldn't want to curl up with a 10-pound medical reference text book anyway.

While no, an e-book reader may never be able to truly replace a paperback novel for many, it can almost certainly replace other sorts of less permanent documents, such as newspapers and magazines, and is absolutely perfect for replacing large reference volumes, making them easy to search without a 200-page index.

Perhaps 'e-book reader' is just too misleading a name, as these are at least as well suited - if not better - to non-book written material. I highly doubt the e-book reader will ever disappear, and I honestly believe these could replace everything I noted. References, like encyclopedias, probably in only 5-10 years, and completely replacing newspapers and magazines in, perhaps, 10-15 years.

Of course such predictions of time frames are wildly inaccurate. Don't yell at me if it happens next year, or fifty years from now.

(Edit: I just ran into this interesting thread, which definitely touches on how e-readers could replace the hard-copy newspaper and magazines.)

09:56 PM by Chaos in E-Book Readers | Alternative Devices

After having been talked about on the internet and among 'techies' for quite some time (a year or more) major manufacturers are finally looking at flash memory based drives as an alternative to traditional platter-and-magnet hard drives. Dell announced that they are introducing a solid-state flash drive as a $550 (!!) option on their Latitude D420 and D620 notebooks.

According to Dell's statistics, it offers up to 23% increase in performance, and can take more punishment than the notebook case itself can take. Personally I'm interested in battery consumption numbers, and if this really makes as huge a difference as it's been theorised. Batteries still end up being the bottleneck on computer hardware improvements - there hasn't really been a huge jump in battery capacity in years, just in lowering the consumption of the components, so every little bit does help.

This makes Dell the second manufacturer, behind Sony, to do this, and the first to offer it in North America (and South America). For once Dell's ahead of the curve, instead of imitating the curve! (Laugh, it's a joke - I use a Dell laptop.)

Certainly this is a little less common a news item than things about the ebook readers (nice, but expensive! - ok, this is expensive too...), but it's important to remember some of us still use laptops.

[Found via Slashdot.]