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?

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

There's been a whole heck of a lot of stuff happening this week. Purvey the below for your pleasure.

E-Book General - News

• Prestigio MultiReader 3664 entry reader to enter Russian market
• Anti-piracy watermark in e-books gets disassembled, it's a tiny barcode!
• The college textbook ripoff charted by Bloomberg
• Sony PRS-T3 video review for the undecided
• CNET AU thumbs up the Kobo Aura
• B&N Chairman talks to shareholders, no outlook for Nook Media
• Rumor: Photos of next-gen Kindle Fire HD emerge, goes angular retro
• Marvin 2.0 lands in iTunes App Store, now also for iPhone and iPod touch
• calibre V1.3 released, brings its magic to Oppo and PocketBook Mini

E-Book General - General Discussions

• On vacation: 71 percent prefer paper over e-books, survey claims
• DIY Kindle scanner and DRM cracker
• The morality of circumventing geographical restrictions only to buy cheaper ebooks
• E-paper: Cure for insomnia?

E-Book General - Deals, Freebies, and Resources (No Self-Promotion)

• iAnnotate PDF on sale for just $1.99 until September 13 (iPad)
• O'Reilly has 50% sale on select programming e-books for today only

E-Book Readers - Apple Devices

• Mandatory Kindle for iOS 3.9.2 released ahead of iOS 7

E-Book Readers - Kobo Reader

• Turn your Kobo into a Debian Linux tablet

E-Book Readers - Sony Reader

• Sony PRS-T3 and lighted case impressions

E-Book Software - Calibre

• Calibre Companion V3.1.1 released
• Calibre Companion prerelease 3.1.1b (Android)

E-Book Software - Reading and Management

• EPUB3Reader open-source Android App released

06:53 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

calibre 1.0 was revealed less than a month ago, and already Kovid has pushed out the third point release for his most popular e-book library software. Yes, dear e-book aficionados, that means you've got a new calibre download that fixes various issues and adds a few improvements as well.

Detailed changelog for calibre 1.3:

New Features

• When doing searches or switching between virtual libraries in the main book list, preserve the current book. The currently selected book will remain visible if it is present in the results of the search or the selected virtual library
• Drivers for Oppo Find 5 and PocketBook Mini 515

Bug Fixes

• DOCX Input: Handle numbered paragraphs where the numbering is specified in the paragraph style, instead of on the paragraph directly. Also support the use of arbitrary, styled text for bullets
• DOCX Input: Fix a single line break at the end of a paragraph not being rendered as a blank line
• DOCX Input: Fix extra top/bottom margins around headings when the heading style in word does not specify any top/bottom margins
• DOCX Input: Handle images in footnotes and endnotes
• ODT Input: Only treat the first image as a cover if it is of suitable size, instead of any image in the document
• Book polishing: Do not leave behind the old comments when updating metadata if the comments have been deleted in calibre
• PDF Output: Fix non-breaking space characters incorrectly rendered in PDF outline
• Content server: Fix error in opds feed after using virtual libraries in the main server
• Do not scroll the book list horizontally after editing metadata
• New database backend: Handle databases that contain multiple tags/series/publishers/etc. that differ only in case

New and improved news sources

• Caravan Magazine by Kovid Goyal
• Phys Org by Krittika Goyal
• Harvard Business Review
• Jakarta Post
• Jakarta Globe
• Dilema Veche
• Daily Express
• Anandtech
• High Country News

calibre is a powerful tool which can be a bit intimidating in the beginning. If you need any assistance or have any suggestions, join our dedicated calibre forums where a crew of calibre users will welcome you dearly.

04:40 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

We were just wondering how long it would take before Apple determined the fate of the latest version of Marvin for iOS, and we've got some great news -- it's been approved! Congrats to MobileReader kguil, and thank you for making this fantastic reading app possible.

So what's new in Marvin 2.0? Plenty, plenty, plenty. Among the most prominent changes and new features are: location sync, support for the Marvin XD calibre driver (more about it in a moment), compatibility improvements, a refreshed UI, edge-to-edge screen scrolling, faster page rendering, an improved battery life, and various bug fixes. You can find more details on the Marvin blog.

The Marvin XD calibre driver is something special, and I am sure you will love it. Developed by MobileReader GRiker, the driver provides native access to your Marvin library from within calibre. Things you can do with it include the syncing of metadata between Marvin and calibre, adding books from Marvin to calibre, deleting books from Marvin, managing your collections, viewing annotations, vocabulary words, and much more. You can find the latest version of the driver and more details in this thread.

Excited? Join our Marvin forum and find out more about this reading app.

App Store links:

• Marvin for iPad
• Marvin for iPhone and iPod touch

12:00 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

In celebration of today's Programmer's Day, tech book specialist O'Reilly is running a one-day-only 50 percent sale on select programming e-books, including such bestsellers as JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and The Linux Programming Interface.

Use the discount code DEAL to take 50% off the regular price. The deal expires September 14, 2013 (5:00am PT) and does not apply to print books.

Link: O'Reilly Programmer's Day sale