03:31 PM by Stuart Young in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Attention Librié owners. A very useful tool has recently been released over at 'hyperstruct's Librie Tools: "LibrieFox provides one-click capture/format/save of web pages from Mozilla Firefox to the Sony Librié."

I don't own one of these myself, so I'm unable to let you know how well this tool works. However it looks pretty useful especially if you'd like some web content on your device. - If any of you own a Librié, maybe you could provide us with some feedback on this app. Please note this is an early release and should be considered "work in progress."

News via the Yahoo Librié Group.

01:28 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | Reading Recommendations

There's an interesting e-book being offered free under Creative Commons licensing. It can be downloaded here in .pdf, MS Word, and plain text formats.

Other formats have been requested, so if you create an iSilo, Plucker, eReader or other format be sure to provide it back to the author as a thank you.

"Blood, Sweat & Tea - real-life stories from the London Ambulance Service is the acclaimed book based-on Tom Reynold's award-winning blog, Random Acts of Reality.

The paperback edition is available through Amazon and Amazon and all good bookshops. Also, in the first move of its type from a mainstream European publisher, the full text of the book is available as a free download, under a Creative Commons licence."

From Telegraph Blogs.

07:43 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

PalmSource seems to have a jump on the competition for a robust mobile device Linux platform, and has shown it off to developers at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. David Beers reports that "While other mobile Linux vendors like TrollTech and a la Mobile had announcements about upcoming reference handsets for developers or new Linux phone platforms, PalmSource was the only one to demonstrate their new operating system on real handsets. They were also the only one to give developers a full day of hands-on tutorials in which they built and debugged native applications for mobile Linux."

There is a developer tool suite now available, based on the popular Eclipse platform. The OS supports applications based on Palm OS Garnet, GTK (Gnome Toolkit ) and the Access MAX framework (Mobile Application eXperience).

Typical target devices for the operating system are "QVGA (240 x 320) screen resolution, a standard phone keypad, and preferably a touchscreen."

Goodies include a familiar PalmOS feel, multitasking, and similar PIM applications.

Check out the full article at PalmInfocenter for more complete information on this encouraging development.

07:31 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

No too long ago, we brought you a story about some neat things you can do with Pocket Tunes on a PalmOS handheld. Number one was listening to audiobooks borrowed online from your public library. Even before that, TeleRead had a story about the Pittsburgh library offering e-books and audiobooks online.

Well, since then I've listened to a few audiobooks from the Pittsburgh library using Pocket Tunes on my Treo. It's an awesome combination, and it works great. You do have to do the download and get your licensing via Windows Media Player, but basically it's very simple. Once you're signed up, you pick your audiobook, download it, and then transfer it to your mobile device. Play it on Pocket Tunes. But I'm not sure if you need the Deluxe version or not. Full instructions are provided in the links here.

And if you aren't in the city of Pittsburgh (as I'm not), you just need to be in the state and sign up for a Carnegie library card. I did that with ease. I may not get the full selection that way, because I'm out of Allegheny county, but it's still a great and free service. You may find that your own local libraries across the country have some similar sort of service. It's definitely worth checking it out, and I wouldn't be surprised if you can even do something similar with a Windows Mobile device.

If nothing else, it's one way to ease the wait until your favorite new e-ink device comes out!

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

Here it is again, our weekly roundup! Enjoy!

Announcements
MobileRead is now Anti-Spam filtered

Elsewhere on the Net
Google Book Search to search full-text books online
PVI readies e-paper volume shipments

Hacks and Development
iLiad Firmware 2.6 files ready to be disassembled

In the News
Lions Gate hints at Apple movie download plans
Rocky road for mobile Linux? Nah!
TV screen on your Corn Flakes by 2020

Lounge
Gadgets Books and Planes = A bad cocktail
Ye olde texty scarfy trick

Others
PowerBook literally turned into an e-book machine

Sony Reader
Happenings over at Sony's ebooks.connect.com

08:38 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Since we've recently been attacked by a bunch of hopeless individuals spamming our lovely community, we decided to stop them from torturing us with our brand-new, self-learning spam protection.

Should your post be accidently marked as spam (which I hope will never happen!), it gets moved into the moderation queue and from there will be approved by one of our editors.

11:06 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Did you know that you can search for books using Google? Yes, there is the standard method of finding anything... just go to www.Google.com and type in what you want to find.

Targeted specifically at books, and searching the full text within them, you can also use Google Book Search. In fact, some books can even be viewed in full online.

The books come from two sources: The first is publishers who are willing to show a limited number of pages online to publicize their books.

The second is by scanning libraries. Google says it is "[o]ur project to include the collections of a few libraries in Google Book Search and, like a card catalog, show you information about the book and in some cases a few snippets – a few sentences of your search term in context. We will show the full book when it is out of copyright."

As many books as Google is scanning, there are still many more not included, so it's not a perfect system in many ways. But if you are searching for a book with your favorite passage, it might just be another handy tool in your book hunt toolbox.

04:23 AM by Stuart Young in E-Book Readers | Sony Reader

Agreed it's not much to look at. I've been keeping an eye on http://ebooks.connect.com/ - aka the URL which will be the home of the new Sony Reader (PRS-500). Normally you'd get either a 404 or a time-out error. Occasionally, if your lucky, you might get a glimpse of what the e-book connect interface will look like (complete with a Da Vinci Code book cover). Today you see what's in the screen capture to the left. As I said not much to look at, however it's nice to see something going on there an maybe we'll see something by way of an official site very soon.