06:31 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

The Telegraph has a concise summary of current trends and challenges in the e-publishing industry. Summing it up:

• Sony faces competition from iRex
• Some argue that e-books fall short when compared to the sensory pleasures of a hardback ("velvety feel of their gently flickering pages beneath your fingertips")
• Revolution in publishing could turn upcoming readers into "iPods for book-lovers"
• Sony Reader is a "physical let-down" when compared to real paper
• Color, moving images, annotations will come in the next development, says Sony
• High price of the reader, plus the price of buying e-books, and DRM restrictions could lead e-publishing into another flop
• Mobile phones used successfully in Japan to market electronic manga literature
• Tachistoscopic reading: single words are flashed at a time which is supposed to improve human memory (I tried that once on my PDA and it gave me a splitting headache).

06:02 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Haali Reader is an e-book reader most of you have probably never heard of before. It's available for Windows Mobile devices and supports the FictionBook XML standard (which is quite common in Russian-speaking areas; Roger posted some more details on the FictionBook format). Other neat features include ClearType support, fullscreen and landscape mode, dictionary support, automatic hyphenation (Russian language only), and PRC/PDB files support.

The latest version can be downloaded from here.

04:49 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

In December 2004 Cambridge UK-based Plastic Logic signed an agreement with E Ink to co-operate on the design and fabrication of flexible paper-like electronic displays. While E Ink provides the imaging film, Plastic Logic is developing the new backplane technology that "sprays" electronic paper on the electronics, like an inkjet printer. This week, about a year and half later, a non-executive director of the company, Hermann Hauser, announced that their technology was "ready for prime time."

Hauser told his audience said that Plastic Logic is performing a detailed investigation of the costs of volume manufacturing of such active backplanes and that it seemed likely that the factory would cost between $50 million and $100 million and would be able to turn out millions of displays a year. "We can build our first fab starting now for completion in about 18 months," Hauser said. He said that after selection of a location, construction would begin in 2007 with a view to volume manufacturing in 2008.

[via EE Times UK and TeleRead]

04:27 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Mobile Sites

Video-sharing site YouTube has a new feature which allows you to directly upload clips taken by mobile phones or PDAs with built-in video capabilities. For this to work, you need to have Internet access or a wireless service plan with Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile or Verizon.

To get started, click on "Create Mobile Profile." Login, or create an account if you don't already have one. Once you're logged in, you'll create a mobile profile to set up the default information for your videos, and then our system will generate the email address where you should send them. This address will be unique to you and your profile, and you can have up to two profiles.

[jkOnTheRun]

06:11 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

We've all progressed this century past the blind claims that women and men are the same. And, fortunately, we've also passed the naive claims that one gender is better than the other. We each bring our own strengths and weaknesses, but none can successfully claim superiority.

Now suppose we shine the light on differences between the sexes with regard to book reading? We pick up some more interesting results from a recent survey that asks various educated people what book had changed their lives. Top-20 lists were produced as well as some very interesting facts presented in By The Numbers:

• No male authors made the women's top five, and no female authors made the men's top five.
• Only four books made both top 20 lists.
• Six male authors broke the women's top 20, but only one book by a female author made the men's top 20: "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee.
• Older men were more likely to cite female authors as influential.
• Men were most likely to have read their formative books as adolescents.
• Women were more likely to read books to cope with difficult times.
• Men were more likely to cite particular authors as "mentors," particularly, among these British residents, George Orwell.
• Women liked shared, hand-me-down books; men liked new books and hardbacks.
• Women had a more diverse list of favorites — 400 women named 200 books.
• Men answered the question of what book marked a watershed moment more reluctantly than women.

Unfortunately, there's no word yet about which sex likes e-books better... any ideas?

Via LisNews.

03:01 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

I'm happy to report spectacular success so far. After months of putting up with the bad connector, I finally submitted the claim to the Assurian insurance company that covers my Verizon Treo 650 for theft, loss or damage. (See previous article.)

Less than 24 hours later I had a replacement Treo 650 in my hands. I don't know if it's new or refurbished, but it's in great shape and as far as I can tell by looking at it, it's new. I guess I'll know more when I get a good look at the screen to see if it is pristine.

There are two changes I've found... First of all, when I go to the phone application and phone info menu item, it says "Hardware: B" whereas the original phone said "Hardward: A". Sounds like a good thing to me, but I don't have any way to judge that. Secondly, from the same screen, I can tell that the firmware is upgraded to 1.04 for Verizon, so it's up to date. No firmware updates for me to do. My previous phone was still running 1.01.

I haven't really used it or even turned on the phone. Haven't checked for dead pixels (anyone know a good way to test that?) But so far so good. In fact, so far so spectacular!

I used my favorite Backup program, BackupBuddyVFS by BlueNomad to create a backup on SD card from my old device. Then I restored it to my new device. Took only seconds and so far it looks like there's not a hitch. Beautiful. I'm sure there are some other great backup programs out there, including the new free program from Alexander Pruss tailored for NVFS devices. But when you have one that you are used to and it is tried and true, you want to stick with it. I like the ability to schedule backups, and I can easily copy the backup files to my desktop using an SD card reader for an additional copy of the backup. (Watch for their new product that does wireless backups to a server. It's currently in beta!) Also, my thanks to Alexis from Blue Nomad Software, who saw my post and took the time to write me a nice note and provide some tips.

At any rate, it basically shocked me because I didn't really have to do anything except the backup and restore and of course switch the SD card to the new Treo. I don't think I can do that if and when I get a Sprint Treo 700p because of the model change, but I don't mind starting fresh when moving to a new model anyway.

In fact, in a somewhat reckless move, I did my first hotsync (desktop -> Treo unidirectional) on my work computer in order to install ShadowPlan. I wanted to have the Shadow desktop at work because it's going to be dedicated to project info for work. Like everything else so far, it worked like a charm.

So if everything continues without problem, all I have to do is pack up the old Treo and hope that they process it correctly so I don't have to fight any extra credit card charges (my Toshiba warranty repair required a little extra persistence there, but the Toshiba people were very nice and it was resolved.)

Almost too good to be true, so let's see what happens over the next few days!

10:25 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The long awaited Treo 700p from Sprint is coming May 28. The release date is confirmed by both rumor and "The Sprint Retail Sales Playbook," according to TreoCentral Forums and GadgetsOnTheGo.

According to our previous article this model is rumored to have:

* EVDO (high speed data connectivity)
* Pocket Tunes (as opposed to Real Player on the 650)
* Sprint TV
* Documents to Go version 8
* Blazer 4.5 in ROM
* 62.8M of free space for programs
* 320x320 display
* PalmOS Garnet 5.4.9
* Camera with 1280x1024 resolution
* A much faster user interface than on the Treo 650

I'm hoping to have one of these in my pocket soon with a nice high speed data plan if every thing pans out. With the money that I'll be removing for the purchase, there should be plenty of room!

Related thread: Sprint Palm Treo 700p sighted again.

Thanks to Jimmie Geddes for the tip!

06:52 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

Okay, I'll admit it. I don't really have any idea what this is about. Neither the publisher nor the Red Herring award mean anything to me, and I don't have the time to figure it out right now. But you might want to check it out, so here's the story...

"Red Herring today announced that London-Based publisher of books-on-mobile, I-Cue (http://www.i-cue.co.uk), has been awarded The Red Herring 100 Europe award which acknowledges the year's top 100 new companies for innovation and technology.I-Cue, which joins previous winners such as Google, Yahoo and Skype, allows mobile phone users to store and read entire book collections on their handsets. The system works by flashing one word at a time on the screen at a speed controlled by the user who can pause, rewind or fast forward words either one at a time or by sentence, paragraph or chapter."

Like I said, I don't know what that means, but maybe one of our readers can put it into English for us so I don't have to come back and read the actual press release? (You know how boring those things can be!)