01:45 PM by xendula in E-Book General | News

The Icarus Illumina HD e-reader with front light is a new, Dutch 6 inch eink reader with page turn buttons, frontlight, MP3 playback with 3.5 headphone jack, and gyroscope (it auto rotates)

EURO 110 including taxes or for 129 on amazon.de (see more pics there)

The product pictures are a bit bizarre, with gigantic font on them, so maybe they are targetting seniors who often have worse eyesight?

Image and article found on lesen.net

01:42 PM by Ravensknight in E-Book General | News

Goodreads Will Now Censor Reviews, Shelves and Groups

Starting today, we will now delete these entirely from the site. We will also delete shelves and lists of books on Goodreads that are focused on author behavior

I wasn't ruffled by the Amazon takeover of Goodreads, but since it seems to have led to this, I think I'm done.

I've already joined Booklikes.com and will be creating a wordpress book blog.

Blast it!!!! I've got YEARS invested in Goodreads and now it is going down the drain.

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

Ok kids, time for the weekly roundup of what we've covered this week:

E-Book General - News

• Rainbow eBooks web store closing
• Apple Offering 'Last Compatible Version' of iOS Apps for Older Hardware
• Ebooks help dyslexics to read

E-Book General - General Discussions

• Professor blasts e-books over unfulfilled promise

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• Book Club October 2013 Book Club Nominations

06:26 AM by WT Sharpe in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

MobileRead Book Club
October 2013 Nominations

Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for October, 2013.

The nominations will run through midnight EST September 30 or until 10 books have made the list. The poll will then be posted and will remain open for five days.

Book selection category for October is:

The Patricia Clark Memorial Library

This month's selection will be a public domain selection from our own MobileRead Library, AKA The Patricia Clark Memorial Library. For newer members who never had the joy of knowing her, Patricia Clark was one of the most helpful and beloved member/moderators ever to grace MobileRead, and many of the books in our Library were carefully crafted, proofread, and uploaded by her.

In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).

How Does This Work?
The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.

How Does a Book Get Selected?
Each book that is nominated will be listed in a poll at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.

How Many Nominations Can I Make?
Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.

How Do I Nominate a Book?
Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.

How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?
Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.

When is the Poll?
The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the initial poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.

The floor is open to nominations. Please comment if you discover a nomination is not available as an ebook in your area.

Official choices with three nominations each:

(1) Solomon Kane by Robert E. Howard
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: ePub

(2) Dr. Izard by Anna Katharine Green
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: Kindle

(3) The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: ePub / Kindle

(4) Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: ePub (Illustrated) / German ePub / Kindle / PDF / more.

(5) Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Montgomery
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: Kindle

(6) The Case of the Golden Coprolite by Ralph Sir Edward
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: Kindle

(7) Le Morte Darthur by Thomas Malory
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: ePub / Kindle

(8) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: Kindle

(9) The Shepherd of the Hills by Harold Bell Wright
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: ePub

(10) The Martyrs of Science by David Brewster
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: Kindle

The nominations are now closed.

08:21 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

From Today by NBC News:

http://www.today.com/health/e-reader...ily-4B11187917

An e-reader may make reading less of a struggle for some kids with dyslexia, a new study shows.

Researchers found that high-school students with dyslexia had an easier time reading sentences broken up into short segments — two to three words per line — displayed on an iPod than the same text printed in standard format on paper, according to the study published in PLOS ONE.

The researchers, from Harvard and the University of Massachusetts, suspect that in dyslexic people, the visual centers of the brain suffer from a kind of attention deficit disorder. When there are fewer words per line, the brain is less distracted and better able to focus.

“The brain should be paying attention to what the person is looking at straight ahead,” explains Matthew Schneps, the lead author of the new study and director of the laboratory for visual learning at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. But in kids with dyslexia, “the eyes are looking at the right part of the text, but the brain is distracted by the rest of the text."

06:25 AM by tubemonkey in E-Book General | News

This is good news for owners of older hardware. A few weeks ago, I was trying to download some music apps to a friends iPod touch 2 and was met with rejection after rejection because of the older firmware. It wouldn't take Pandora, iHeartRadio, AOL Radio, etc. Hopefully, this new feature will breath some new life into that aging iPod.

[Mod: Indeed it does. Accessing the Apple App store from an iPod with iOS version 4.2.1 and trying to download the Kindle app now downloadsthe last compatible version of the Kindle App, version 3.1.1.]

With iOS 7 arriving tomorrow, Apple is extending some love to the owners of older iOS devices that have been left behind. New compatibility features, first spotted on Reddit, will now kick into action if you attempt to download an app that is not supported by your current firmware. Instead, the company now asks if you'd like to install the last compatible version, which, for some apps, can be over a year old.

08:08 AM by caleb72 in E-Book General | News

Just received this email:

Effective September 30, 2013 the Rainbow eBooks web store will be closing.

So that we may serve our existing users, the web store will remain active for purchases through September 30, 2013 and will remain active for customer downloads through December 31, 2013.

After December 31, 2013 Rainbow eBooks will provide direct links to publishers, who request that we do so, so that you'll still be able to find all of the great GLBT eBooks that you've come to enjoy.

It has been our joy to serve you and we are very grateful for your support over the years.

Thanks for thinking Rainbow eBooks!

Tammy May, CEO

Gift Card Balances

Please plan to use any existing gift card balances by September 30, 2013 or contact the office at admin@rainbowebooks.com to make other arrangements.

This is a fairly specialised store, so possibly won't affect many. But if you have purchased from here, I guess the time has come to do the needful.

11:05 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | General Discussions

For many if not most of us, e-books are digital versions of printed books. And they are just that. Others, on the other hand, believe that e-books should offer additional content and multimedia enrichment. Meet Bill Adair, Knight Professor for the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University, who recently described his disappointing experience with e-books in an article published on Poynter's.

I spent my vacation reading from pixels instead of paper.

I read e-book versions of “Bruce,” a Springsteen biography by Peter Ames Carlin, and Dan Brown’s bestselling novel “Inferno.” Both had great potential for extra audio and video that could have created a much richer experience. But the e-books offered no more than the ink-on-paper versions.

My disappointing experience offers a lesson for news organizations that are considering selling e-books because its shows how legacy media is still thinking like … legacy media. Book publishers still have an old-school mentality — like many newspaper editors.

Do you think e-books need to be "enhanced" with multimedia features for a richer experience? Or do you prefer the single-dimensional aspect of text, where any kind of enhancement could potentially be intrusive and get in the way with the story?