10:24 AM by Brian in Miscellaneous | Lounge

The New York Times recently announced their list 100 Notable Books of the Year. I noticed that a few of my favorite titles and authors made the list, including Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, a book I am listening to on Audible.com, and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book I read back in 2000.

Which books and authors that you read in 2005 made the NYT's list, and what does your own notable books list for the year look like? As 2005 winds down, what's on your reading list for 2006?

Link

Related: What books are you reading?

05:58 AM by ballshooter in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

We don't usually put vendor posts on our front page, but this is a very nice exception from Ballshooter. Looks like a great Pocket PC game and one that I will enjoy trying, and you can't beat a free game offer!

Reminds me of another similar (and very addictive) plumbing game that requires you to rotate pipe parts faster than the water flow until you have a full pipe from one end of the screen to the other. But Xmas Pipes has a new twist that makes it even more interesting, because it has a Bejeweled flavor to it. When you close a system of pipes, they disappear. Sounds like a lot of fun. -- BobR

Xmas Pipes is a special limited edition of the fast-paced classic arcade where you are to construct a closed pipe system.

Available for download from ballshooter.com, only until Jan 5th, 2006.

06:55 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

microOLAP's CHM eBook Reader is the best way to view files in the common CHM Windows help format (like those huge Microsoft Press e-books) on your Pocket PC. New in 2.5:

• WM 5.0 support
• On-fly errors correction in images links and file names
• Key mapping function
• Fullscreen mode
• Drag mode
• Show/hide scrollbars
• View large images in new window
• Various bug fixes

If you buy before December 31st (I know that'd be tomorrow), you can get 20% off by using the coupon code "Christmas" on the order pages.

05:54 PM by Alexander Turcic in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Got word from Tad that Bookeen released a firmware upgrade for its Cybook e-book reader. Firmware build 155US includes:

• PDF viewer beta 3
• µBook Reader 0.9f
• Ability to browse the web from the Cybook with an USB cable connected to a connected PC
• Improved PCMCIA handling
• Improved USB transfer speeds
• Improved video display driver

For a full list of changes and download instruction click here. Update: Unfortunately it seems the upgrade got just pulled again due to instability issues. Sorry for the tease, folks, let's hope they'll get it back up again before New Years!

02:54 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

I can't tell you what a great pleasure it is for me to announce that Mobileread has won the Palm Addict Excellence Award as Sam McLoughlin's "Favorite Website". After a rather bumpy and shaky 11-hours flight I didn't believe anyone could cheer me up for the rest of the day - well, I was dead wrong, and I'd like to express my gratitude to Sammy and his entire team for this honor, which is without question as special an honor as anyone could receive. PalmAddicts is the authority in everything Palm-related and one of the very few important contributors to today's mobile community.

Of course, I'd also like to thank all of you here at Mobileread for making our site what it is today.

11:07 AM by Brian in E-Book General | News

According to Businessweek Online, at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on January 4, 2006, Sony will take a second swing at e-books by announcing a new e-book reader and online download service aimed at the U.S.

Sony (SNE), which would provide few details about the e-reader, also has agreements with at least three major publishers to sell digital book downloads on its Sony Connect online store -- much the way Apple (AAPL) sells music and video at its iTunes Music Store.Back in 2000, a bunch of e-book readers hit the market, only to tank because the technology didn't adequately duplicate the book-reading experience.

BusinessWeek also reports that the device will be similar to the Librie, retail for $300-$500 USD, and will utilized E Ink technology. This time around, Sony has partnered with Random House, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins to sell e-books through Sony's online e-book portal.

With the Hanlin and iRex Iliad also debuting soon, it looks like 2006 might be the year e-books and e-readers are reinvented and exposed to a much larger audience.

Read the full article here.

Related: iRex next-gen e-book reader based on e Ink, A Librie for the rest of us

08:31 AM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

MobileRead is all about, well, mobile computing and content. In the old days not too many years ago, content was e-books and various web pages extracted to be viewable on a mobile platform. Software like iSilo and Plucker and others are quite popular and like an old friend to the avid mobile device user. And at MobileRead you can find all kinds of site scooping definitions for your favorite software if you do just a little bit of searching.

But content has expanded from the simple things to all kinds of multimedia. And a fairly new rising mobile star is RSS. You may not have realized it, there are a number of great RSS feed readers available for a variety of mobile platforms, but mostly for PalmOS and Windows Mobile. That list will have to be the topic of another post someday, but you can probably Google a bunch or even just search in MobileRead. Most of the RSS news readers even come pre-stocked with a nice list of feeds to get you started.

So what do you do if all the news is getting boring, and you want to expand your list of feeds to some fun sites? Well, we've got just the thing for you. No one admits it very often, but you and I both know that everyone loves a good top 10 list. It seems like we can't get enough. We want the cream of the crop, and we want it fast and easy. So here it is... Matt's Top 10 Funniest RSS Feeds of 2005 (and Part 2 is here).

I have to admit that I haven't tried out this list, so I can't guarantee that they are all family-friendly, or even that Matt has a decent sense of humor, but this looks like a list worth a further look if you want some great new laughs for your RSS reader. Hey, we won't even complain if you read your feeds on the desktop instead of on your pocket device.

And as always, we'd love to hear from you in the comments. Let us know what you think about the good and the bad in this list, and your own favorite humor sites. Don't be shy!

09:21 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

Mike Rohde is an amazing artist. I love his sketches, and he has a lot of good ideas also. In a recent post, he shares his version of something I've been longing for over the years, and provides a clever twist or two on it.

The basic idea is to have a pda-like moleskine pad. He's been a big fan of those things to draw on, and now presents some neat ideas for making it electronic. The key innovations I noticed are the concept of using e-paper and generating an RSS feed out of the pages. You can find it all right here at Rohdesign. Pretty slick!

All this gets me thinking more about the whole idea of decent notepad functionality on a pda. I've been wanting to see a pda work reasonably well as a small notepad using the screen and digitizer. But it doesn't work well with current models. In fact, I've been compaining about the resolution of digitizers on PDAs for years. I don't think it even matches the display resolutions. That makes it MISERABLE to sketch or write freehand on a PDA screen, and that's why the sofware support for using a pda as a notepad is so bad.

If you could use your pda as effectively as a paper notepad that you stick in your pocket (or even just adequately), I think that alone could be a killer app that drives pda sales sky high. And put a phone and full fledged pda in it as well and it could be something that is as common as basic cell phones are today.

Earlier this year, I asked Michael Mace, CCO of PalmSource at the time, about this concept, and it turned out to be something he was big on also. But in typical Michael Mace fashion, he had already taken the idea a step further (see my interview here). He talks about partial OCR, that's doesn't have to be good enough to transcribe, but just has to be good enough to get "most" words. Then it can index all your handwritten notes. Pretty amazing and incredibly useful. Maybe finally something better than paper notepads!

And now that I've had some more time to think about it, I can add my own twist to the mix. Until handhelds are much more powerful, all you need for the OCR processing is to use desktop indexing that works overnight after you sync from the cradle. Then a morning sync gives you the indexing results, or you pick up the indexes when you sync the next night (you probably won't have much trouble finding things you wrote as recently as the previous day anyway). Surely a desktop PC can do a decent job of the necessary OCR already. Remember it just needs to catch most of the words, not all of them. The indexes may not be complete, but they will sure be helpful. And as long as you pick out just one of the words it does index properly, you have access to that page without having to know the date you wrote it.

I believe that done well, this is the killer app for pdas and smartphones that all the experts claim no longer exists! Even a device like the new Illiad ER 0100 e-book reader might be an excellent start along these lines with a decent digitizer and a bit more software.

However, it may only come after tablet pcs get popular and then shrink in size until they fit in a pocket. They generally have those active digitizers which I've heard work quite well. I've only used one for a second here and there for a quick scribble, but it does seem nice. For this idea to take off, we'll need something like that in a pocket sized version for handhelds. There are no signs of anything like this on the typical pda or smartphones currently being designed.

So when should we expect something like this? No for a while. But in my opinion, we're talking 5-10yrs, not 20-30yrs. I hope so anyway!