TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

National Library of Malaysia to Provide Online Borrowing; National Library of India to offer ebooks

By Paul Biba

Not quite digital yet, but getting there. Books can now be ordered on line and the library will deliver them by mail. Actually, it’s a great idea for any library, although it seems to me that the logistics must be a bit complicated. You can find more at Resource Shelf.

The National Library of India will be offering an ebtire catalog of 24 lakh books on line in digital format. These books go back to the 17th and 18th centuries. As part of the library’s modernisation, the library has digitised 3,200,00 pages from 9,141 books published before 1900 in English and Indian languages. More info at Resource Shelf.

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Newspaper reading behavior different in Canada than the US

By Paul Biba

While not comparing the countries directly, it seems that print newspapers may be more popular in Canada than they are here.

In a survey of 53 media markets served by 81 Canadian daily newspapers, representing 72% of the Canadian population, the NADbank survey found tat 78% of Canadian adults read a print or online edition of their daily newspaper at least once a week. However, the print editions are overwhelmingly more popular, with 73% reading them as opposed to 22% reading the online editions, and only 4% of Canadian adults read online exclusively.

More information at Resource Shelf

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Dear Jeff Bezos: What the World Needs is an Open Ereader by John Mediema

By Paul Biba

Editor’s Note: This is part 8 of 8 of John’s Kindle Shakedown series, and you can also find it on his blog here. Thanks, much, John for allowing TeleRead to reprint your series and I, for one, hope to hear more from you in the future. PB

An invitation for feedback is included with the Kindle. As a conclusion to my Kindle shakedown series, I am sending this open letter to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com. The letter is also being emailed to kindle-feedback@amazon.com and jeffb@amazon.com.

Dear Jeff Bezos,

Thank you for making the Amazon Kindle available in Canada. I received one for Christmas. This lover of print was a bit skeptical, but after a three-month shakedown I am impressed. The Kindle is bookish, as you promised. The device disappears behind the story. Since the Kindle is new in Canada, it gets attention from others and I feel like an ambassador for the product. I would like to give you the feedback I have been sharing with others. [Read rest of post]

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Overdrive adds new services including DRM free ebooks

By Paul Biba

Received an press release from Overdrive about a whole bunch of new services that they are adding for libraries. The one that interested me most was this:

“Open eBooks”: DRM-free eBooks in both EPUB and PDF formats are being added to OverDrive’s catalog for libraries. These OverDrive “Open eBooks” will be compatible with nearly any eBook reader or software that can display EPUB and PDF files. Titles from Harlequin’s Carina Press, Saddleback Educational Publishing, and Rourke Publishing will be among the first DRM-free eBooks available to libraries.

More info here.

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New book price comparison site – BookAse

By Paul Biba

One of the interesting things about the site is that it not only gives you prices for books to buy, it will also give you pricing for books you want to sell. The site is out of India and here is what they say about themselves:

When we developed BookAse.com, we dedicated ourselves to a company that makes education more affordable for students. The idea behind BookAse.com came from the frustration associated with buying textbooks when we were students. We utilize state-of-the-art technology and superior customer service to provide students with a better value and a hassle-free process. Students can avoid long lines, out-of-stock titles, and save $$ for books by buying through BookAse.com

The site will price compare ebooks, but it is not immediately obvious that this is so. In an email exchange with them they agreed this was a problem and said that they will be putting up an explicit ebook comparison soon. You can find them here.

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Baby boomers leading the ebook assault

By Paul Biba

From ABC News Australia:

Middle-aged women have astonished the publishing industry by leading the demand in the rapidly expanding e-book market.

Sydney theatre nurse Candace Gray, 48, was among the first to get an Amazon e-book reader, the Kindle, when it was released in Australia last year.

It was a gift from her husband in the hope it might drag her into the digital age.

“I have a phone with a camera – I never even use it,” she said.

“I don’t know how to Skype, I don’t know how to blog … but once I found out what I could do with this Kindle, I just couldn’t put it down.” [Read rest of post]

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Why nobody’s been buying tablets but everybody wants an iPad

By Chris Meadows

The iPad has been drawing a litany of complaints from people who complain that it’s nothing new, it’s underpowered, and is an all-around imperfect device. Tuan Nguyen at Tom’s Hardware addresses some of these complaints, pointing out that “better” tablets exist and have existed for years, but have entirely failed to take off.

Nguyen gives five reasons tablets have failed to sell, at the same time explaining why the iPad is by and large an exception to these reasons:

1. Tablets are niche devices.
2. Full OSes were always there, yet those who complained that the iPad doesn’t have one still never bought one.
3. High-end hardware specs sometimes don’t matter.
4. Interface, interface, interface.
5. Lack of tablet apps.

[Read rest of post]

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T-Minus two weeks

By Joe Wikert

If everything goes as planned, two weeks from now I should have a new iPad. I ordered a 32-Gig wifi-only model last Friday morning and I requested in-store pickup. Why 32-Gig and no 3G?

I figured it best to go with the middle-of-the-road memory option. After all, half the 32-Gig on my iPhone 3GS remains unused almost a year after buying it. I also didn’t want to go “all in” on the first generation device; I’m sure I’ll get hooked on this platform and will buy a new model every time Apple produces one.

Why the wifi-only option? Two reasons. First, between my home and places like Panera, I figure I’m in a free hotspot 90-95% of the time. As a result, my iPhone always has wifi turned on. Second, and perhaps most importantly, I can’t justify paying AT&T even more every month for a data plan. I already pay them way too much for my work iPhone and a family plan of four other devices for my wife and kids. Way too much. So if this forces me to work smarter with wifi, so be it.

[Read rest of post]

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(Robot (I) Cop) by Matt Hayler

By a TeleRead Contributor

- just as in the brain are devils, in the world are bees: bees are angels,angels bees. each person has his or her bee, and his or her angel, not ‘guardian angel,’ not either one of those with ‘…drawn swords…’ who ‘…inflict chastisement…’ but as angels of presence, the presence that flares in the conscience not as philosophers’ fire, but bees’ - c k williams – from ‘either / or’ -

Recently I’ve been thinking about the places where humans and machines/technology meet and combine (I’m loving the Robot/Cop Venn diagram Amber Case uses to kick off her ‘Prosthetic Culture’ talk). The more I’ve been exposed to the discourses surrounding our various, polyphonous, multi- (and pulchri-)tudinous interactions with the world around us, recently in work from Merlin Donald and Andy Clark, the more I’ve realised how essential these discussions are. Extended Mind Theory, and the concept of Distributed Cognition, have become an integral part of the way I view how our minds work, of how much we externalise aspects of ourselves in order to deal with, and provide for, the processes we are capable of. I’m starting to think that our ability to offload parts of ourselves onto our surroundings sits at a fundamental level of our being, only slightly lower, perhaps, than our ability for abstract symbolic representation, truly a species defining trait. I’ll reserve a post in the future for talking about these theories more, I can’t do them any justice yet, but I thought I’d discuss how I see them already starting to fit into my research. Because it’s the focus of this blog, and also my thesis, I always think about how such notions might shed light on the digital reading debate – and they do, I think, very productively -, but I hope that it’s also fairly obvious how such vantage points might be pushed out to other disciplines, and, indeed, to other ways of being and living in the world.

[Read rest of post]

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iPad news: The Kindle app, educational discounts, and Foxtrot

By Chris Meadows

There’s a piece on some recently-announced iPad apps in the New York Times, mentioning a number of companies who have dared defy Apple’s edict to remain silent about their apps until launch time—including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Still no word on whether Apple will be bumping competing e-book apps out of the store, but Amazon doesn’t seem to be worried.

The Kindle app for the iPad, which Amazon demonstrated to a reporter last week, allows readers to slowly turn pages with their fingers. It also presents two new ways for people to view their entire e-book collection, including one view where large images of book covers are set against a backdrop of a silhouetted figure reading under a tree. The sun’s position in that image varies with the time of day.

Engadget also has a piece mentioning the Kindle app (which is where the above screenshot came from). Gizmodo covers it, too, as well as the worry over how much Apple will allow them to do with it.

Barnes & Noble has 14 developers redesigning its iPhone app for the iPad, with similar user-interface updates. The article does not say whether the Fictionwise version of the eReader app will be getting the same treatment.

[Read rest of post]

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Correction: Dr. Peter Watts not guilty of assault but felony obstruction

By Chris Meadows

Since the original news reports on Dr. Peter Watts’s conviction for “assault”, it has come out that the charge actually was not assault, and that charge was never offered to the jury. In a comment on a Port Huron Times-Herald’s article’s comment thread, one of the actual jurors writes:

Assault was never one of the charges. We were given one option… felony obstruction/resisting. I don’t know if the prosecutor dropped the assault prior to the jury convening, but it was never presented to us. [Read rest of post]

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Tim Carmody: E-books may have bright future on iPad

By Chris Meadows

Where the iPhone conquered your pocket, the iPad will conquer your backpack.

So says Tim Carmody on the Snarkmarket blog, where he puts down his thoughts about why e-books on the iPad will be more successful than some people think.

Carmody starts with five common reasons skeptics give that e-books won’t take off on the iPad, and notes that most of them aren’t all that new. (Though he does not address the oft-heard complaint that people will not want to read from LCD screens.)

He points out that those who buy the least expensive, 16-gig wifi-only iPad model will, unless they are somewhere with wifi, be limited to what they can carry on the device to read or watch—and 16 gigs will not hold a lot of movies but will hold plenty of e-books. He adds:

(This is actually why I suspect plain-jane, text-only books are going to have a long life as the de facto default for a while. Dedicated reading machines like the Kindle or Nook can’t support anything else, and more versatile portables like the iPad don’t have the built-in memory or everywhere-internet to support a whole library of these things. Add our inertial devotion to document formats like PDF and it may be a very long time before multimedia books or magazines become main­stream items.)

Carmody uses video games as another example of why people might try e-books. He writes that he had never been a mobile video gamer before he bought the iPhone, and indeed bought it mainly as a phone and portable Internet device. But since he already had the device and they were available, he eventually went ahead and bought some iPhone games, too.

[Read rest of post]

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