05:54 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Audiobooks that you check-out from a US library will automatically go dead after the lending period, thanks to Microsoft Media DRM.

A patron with a valid library card visits a library Web site to borrow a title for, say, three weeks. When the audiobook is due, the patron must renew it or find it automatically "returned" in a virtual sense: The file still sits on the patron's computer, but encryption makes it unplayable beyond the borrowing period.

21 million iPod users will stay empty-handed for as long as there is no official support for encrypted MS Media files.

[via CNN via Slashdot]

05:20 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

Just when we had hoped to celebrate the success of e-books this year, we are confronted by David's dismal discovery that the number of e-book titles published actually has declined by 39% in 2004:

I ran across the numbers tucked away in the just-mentioned Arizona article in the Book Standard, and similar numbers appear in Inside Higher Ed News, which says: "the 23 publishers that responded to a survey made $9.62 million in revenues in 2004, a 31 percent increase over 2003, even while they chose to publish 4,351 titles, down from 7,138 in 2003."

04:39 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

The Guardian has a fun quiz which classifies mobile user profiles as types of birds (apparently that's from a serious Motorola study).

According to the quiz results, I am a pigeon, a "common, garden-variety user," who "still can't quite work out how to download ringtones." How true. That's why I usually transfer them directly via Bluetooth to my handset.

[via Textually]

04:24 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

It hasn't been easy for dedicated Palm fans lately. Although it's true that Palm company is still healthy with strong quarterly earning, many critics argue that Palm fell out of its place of dominance in the market and lost its innovative edge. Yes, we should not forget how revolutionary they were in their heyday; though if you scan recent gadget news, whether at Mobileread or Engadget or Gizmodo, you'll notice a disturbing trend towards Windows Mobile-oriented news. Coincidence?

Related: Check out Sammy's forum thread over at PalmAddicts, where he asks the same question: What keeps you using a Palm device?

03:49 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

While we're all desperately waiting to ditch Pocket Internet Explorer now and forever, Minimo slowly evolves toward becoming our favorite mobile browser. Project leaders Doug Turner has just posted the impressive roadmap on his blog:

• 009 -- Sep 21 (bug fix for Axim X50v; nightly builds; Linux and WinCE)
• 010 -- Oct 26 (WinCE installer; Smartphone 2003 version; panning + zooming)
• 011 -- Nov 23 (PPC 2002 support, WebFontsWinCE 5.0)
• 012 -- Dec 22 (WinCE Web Accelerator)

03:24 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Sunrise

Laurens released a small upgrade for Sunrise fixing an issue with images obtained using redirected HTTP requests. Before the fix, if an image was redirected from its original URL, the image data would be included in the Plucker document, but the image itself would not be shown in the Plucker viewer.

Download the Windows version from Palmgear or the Linux/GTK test version from Laurens' blog.

If you are new to Sunrise, click here to find out more about its top-notch features for website offline conversion.

03:03 AM by TadW in Miscellaneous | Lounge

I know most of you prefer Firefox nowadays, but in case you get tired of buggy extensions, check out this deal: Download.com is offering the full (ad-free) version of Opera for free, but only today!

For one day only, you can get an ad-free version of Opera. Simply e-mail registerme@opera.com to obtain a registration code. This offer is valid from 12 a.m. Tuesday, August 30 to 12 a.m. Wednesday, August 31 2005 (PDT).

http://www.download.com/Opera/3000-2....html?tag=excl

03:50 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The guys over at the xda-developers forum have posted a download link to a leaked version of Opera Mini for Pocket PC. The build is from August 10th and is labeled V1.0.1479. The download includes both the larger 'HiFi' (MIDP 2.0) and smaller 'LoFi' (MIDP 1.0) version. If you have a chance to test this browser (speed, stability, html capabilities), please report your findings here.