02:42 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Publishing giant HarperCollins may feel the heat over Google's plans to digitize a large body of literature for future online access. As a consequence, the publisher announced last week that it anticipates completing the digitization of more than 10,000 book titles by the end of June 2006. To succeed in this mammoth project, they picked NewsStand as their exclusive vendor and developer of a global "digital warehouse." NewsStand is also known as a distributor of digital daily newspapers and magazine in more than 120 countries.

"NewsStand's existing platform for digitization, hosting and distribution of leading newspapers and magazines around the world makes them a natural partner to get this project up and running quickly," said Jane Friedman, President and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. "We look forward to working with them to digitize our books and build our digital warehouse."

"We are excited to partner with HarperCollins Publishers to help transform how knowledge is stored, distributed and consumed in the future. Digital warehousing on this scale-- with this flexibility-- is a significant leap forward in the information industry," commented Kit Webster, NewsStand's President and Chief Executive Officer. "Our company's experience in managing digital information including content rights control, electronic publication enabled websites and Internet distribution has made this large project possible, both in terms of processing and timelines. The NewsStand team is dedicated to enabling HarperCollins to become a first mover in digital technology applications."

Clearly this enterprise cannot be in the interest of Sony. HarperCollins has previously agreed to sell digital e-books via Sony's Connect online store, and it remains to be seen how that fits into the publisher's latest plans to pick NewsStand as the exclusive distributor of forthcoming e-book content. One thing's for sure, though: The market for e-books is heating up!

Related: CEO of a top 10 book publisher writes about e-books

06:02 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

We are not sure this is going to win any hearts and minds, but there is a guy who discovered that you can circumvent Adobe PDF documents with printing and copy restrictions through Gmail's "View as HTML" functionality. To make his point, he downloaded a DRM-protected PDF sample from Adobe's site, e-mailed it to himself, and then used Gmail to cut & paste content from the original PDF.

05:29 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Readers | Sony Reader

Keen readers may have noticed that Sony is slowly working on wrapping up its CONNECT e-book webstore. Although their site is still up and down like a yoyo here, our reader TaKir was able to make the following pleasant discovery through one of Sony's FAQ pages:

The Sony Reader will be in Sony's BBeB format; however, the Reader will support PDF, TXT, RTF, MP3 and JPG as native formats with no conversions needed. The Sony Reader software will also be able to convert Microsoft Word documents into RTF files to be read.

That's great news especially for Mac users who may or may not be able to use Sony's conversion tool to convert other e-book formats into the proprietary BBeB format.

According to the same FAQ, the Sony Reader is slated to be available in summer 2006 (and not in spring 2006 as previously mentioned).

Related: Adobe blogger on Sony's BBeB format, Sony's new e-book reader officially announced

06:33 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

One reason we love Palm Addicts so much is because they always have inspiring threads going on. If you've ever been interested in how others use their Palm or Treo device, and if you ever wanted to share stories of your own daily use, jump to this forum thread for more. Best of all, by posting you can automatically participate in the contest to win a Tungsten X.

For a starter, read about the multiple ways Sammy uses his Palm Treo 650.

05:40 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

It's a bit odd that we've never heard about them before, but here's a company that basically claims to have found the holy grail of the consumer electronics industry. Under the leadership of Dr. William J. Ray (the person to the right of the photo), Quantum Paper Inc produced an electronic paper that would put the company hundreds of light years ahead of its competition (read: E Ink). A quote from the CTO:

"It is one of the most important developments in printing in more than 10 years. The paper is a unique marriage between the relative simplicity and low cost of printing and the high technology of pixel-based electronic displays." He claimed it had the potential to replace mobile phone and computer screens, interactive billboards and high-definition TVs at a "fraction of today's cost".

This sounds sketchy as hell, but it doesn't end here. Quantum's paper technology offers full color capability, high resolution the equivalent of HDTV, flexibility (can be rolled), can display written text, pictures and television-type animations, can be scaled to billboard size and larger, has a low power consumption and long lifespan, with wide viewing angle, and is environmentally and electrically safe. OK, stop - we'll believe that when we see it.

[via PrintWeek and packagePrinting]

03:55 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Personally I believe the price/performance ratio is way out of whack, but if you happen to be a style connoisseur with too much money in your pocket, you may just as well spend $3200 on the Seiko "Spectrum" SVRD001 watch currently offered by a Japanese guy on eBay. The Spectrum is the world's first E Ink wristwatch and it's available in a very limited edition of 500 units only.

The 500 units were previously sold by Seiko with proceeds going to benefit the Help A London Child Charity.

Some specs smooth enough to make the technophile in you drool:

• Ultra high contrast: The display is made up of pure black and pure white particles which allow the same contrast as on a printed page; twice the contrast, in fact, of a LCD panel.
• Ultra thin: The display is much thinner than is possible with any conventional watch technology, analog or digital. The display is also flexible, so the 'wrist bracelet' design is possible.
• Low power consumption: The display is readable under very low light conditions, so no backlighting is required. The display also has an inherently stable 'memory effect' that requires no power to retain and sustain the image. For these reasons, battery life is extended.
• Touch Sensitive Buttons: This model features "touch-sensitive" buttons, which require no physical force to push the button in. Simply touching the area around the button with the tip of your finger can activate the sensor to carry out any operation of the watch. Having no projection on the surface, this device has been adopted so as not to spoil the whole slimness and elegant shape of this model.
• Display: The display reverses the black and white particles of the graphic background between daytime (from 6:00 am and 5:59 pm) and nighttime (6:00 pm to 5:59 am). Additionally, by changing the mode, the user can enjoy viewing animation on the display.

03:33 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Edit: Find some more comparisons further down this thread.

Details are sketchy at this point, but "librie guy" from the Yahoo! Librie list managed to take a peak at the forthcoming Sony Connect Store (host currently unavailable), and it appears - well, we didn't expect anything else - that Sony's proprietary e-books will cost you extra.

Example: Alan Dean Foster's The Light Years Beneath My Feet

• Retail hardcover: $23.95
• Amazon hardcover: $16.16
• Amazon Mobipocket e-book: $17.95
• Amazon Adobe Reader e-book: $11.67
• Amazon Microsoft e-book: $11.67
• Sony Connect e-book: $16.16 (includes a 10% "CONNECT discount")

Bottom line, Sony Connect charges for the e-book the same price as Amazon charges for the hardcover paper book. Worse, you can get the same e-book in Adobe Reader or Microsoft format for almost 40 percent less if purchased through Amazon.

02:32 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

A few days ago I was approached by kostix, who is one of the Vade Mecum developers, and he asked me if we wanted to become the official support forum for Vade Mecum. Since Vade Mecum is the Windows Mobile port of Plucker, for which we have extensive support (with hacker as one of the main Plucker guys already in our team), it seemed only natural to me to agree and to heartly welcome kostix and the whole Vade Mecum scene here on board.

Kostix will moderate both the user forum and the developer forum of Vade Mecum.

If you like reading e-books and if you call a Windows Mobile device your own, feel free to jump in and start contributing! First step: download and install Vade Mecum.