TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Paul Biba’ Category

By Paul Biba

If students become accustomed to e-books, then they will demand them in the future—when they have the economic clout to make a difference. Get them young!

So perhaps CourseSmart might do some good. Founded by six high-ed textbook publishers, including giants like Wiley, McGraw-Hill and Pearson, it will bring together thousands of text books on the same e-book platform. Inram’s VitalSource, which offers shared annotations, among other features, is the software in use. News release follows.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

By Paul Biba

Best Buy has started selling the Windows XP version of the Eee PC and I’m afraid I fell for it. Unlike Ficbot I am not willing to fool around with Linux - I want something useful out of the box with no learning curve. An XP box is also useful as I have pretty much converted to a Mac shop but at times Windows is essential. For example, my bank and insurance company will only accept logins from Internet Explorer, not Firefox or Safari. I have been running Parallels on my MacBook and it works pretty well, but it’s nice to have an easily accessible Windows machine sitting nearby.

The machine comes with 512K RAM and 4GB of internal memory. I added an extra 8GB SD card to hold more programs. Much to my surprise it is pretty speedy, even with the underclocked processor and the limited RAM. I have it connected to a spare 19″ Samsung LCD monitor and the display is crisp and clean. For some further shots you can take a look at my posting at GPSPassion. Here’s the link. In that posting I discuss how I loaded up some GPS software on the machine and how you can use it for on-road navigation. You’ll also see a shot of it connected to the Samsung monitor. The touchpad has been the subject of criticism in a number of reviews for being difficult to use. I, however, seem to have no problems with it at all. I also added one of those mice with a retractable cord.

The keyboard is pretty tiny but I think you could end up typing fairly quickly if you had enough practice. The WiFi reception is incredible. I get better reception than my wife’s Toshiba or IBM and it is as good, if not a bit better, than my MacBook. The Windows connection proceedure, however, makes you want to scream and tear your hair out after you have gotten used to the simple, quick Mac procedure. As a matter of fact, dealing with Windows on the machine validates my decision to switch to the Mac platform. Boy is Windows clunky compared to OSX!

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Popularity: 4% [?]

By Paul Biba

I was in New York City today and took a shot of this iPhone sign with my iPhone. Stores like this are cropping up all over the city. It just testifies to the incredible demand for the iPhone. If you can’t read the sign it says, “Apple iPhones Unlocked In Stock.”

Such sights made me think about e-books and the relative lack of demand for them. Is it DRM, is it eBabel, is it expensive readers—just what is keeping the demand down? Clearly, as the iPhone shows, if consumers want something, they will demand it and get it. I see nothing like this demand for e-books. Is is just us techies who want them? Does the public even know about them? Do they really want them? I don’t have any answers, but I found the iPhone signs pretty depressing in that regard.

Just how do we get this thing rolling? If the iPhone shows anything it seems to me that this whole thing won’t take off until some really savvy marketing wiz takes it on - Sony and Amazon don’t seem to have cut the mustard in this regard. Why not? Or is it that e-books are only a niche product?

Moderator: See Making Social DRM work for e-books—with maximum privacy protection, as well as Library books you can KEEP forever—and other ideas to help public libraries survive the digital era. - D.R.

Popularity: 5% [?]

By Paul Biba

I was unaware of any of this ’till today. All Macs come with a free program called Preview, which can be used for a number of things. I mainly use it to quickly view and resize pictures. An article in today’s on-line Macworld entitled “Preview’s hidden powers” clues us in to certain PDF editing abilities in Preview. According to the article Preview can do the following things with PDFs:

1.  “… Leopard’s Preview lets you add notes, highlight and strike through text, or use ovals and rectangles to call attention to specific sections of the page. You can even add links to other pages in a document or to Web sites. Best of all, other PDF readers—including both Mac OS X and Windows versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader—can view all of these annotations.”

2.  Delete or rearrange PDF pages

3.  Merge two PDFs into one.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By David Rothman

Could your GPS gizmo not only display e-books on a nice LCD someday, but also let you shop for them, via a wireless connection?

And how about geo-tied pointers that would automatically come up to show local books of interest or highlight literary landmarks? What’s more, suppose you could even search for p-book stores in the area and, in some cases, even peruse their stocks from your car if the inventories were online?

Check out TeleBlog regular Paul Biba’s GPS Passion review of Dash Express (larger photo here), and tell us what you think. Hey, Paul, you gave me a softball question in challenging me to come up with an e-book angle. Thanks for the heads-up.

Another angle: The Kindle itself as a possible GPS gizmo.

Popularity: 5% [?]

By David Rothman

“For about $150 anyone can access the United States’ multi-billion dollar GPS program. GPS Outdoors: A Practical Guide for Outdoor Enthusiasts shows readers how to plug in and enhance most any outdoor experience.” - Wowio, an ad-supported company that offer the Guide for free.

More details: The Guide is for outdoor people ranging from hikers to “a climber pre-scouting the routes up Mount Shasta.” GPS just might save your life. Amazon reviews of the book are here. Paul Biba, a TeleBlog regular, is a GPS expert, and I’d welcome his thought on the guide. Alas, people outside the States can’t download Wowio books. But the company says that’ll change soon.

Other freebie spottings:

–David Drake’s fantasy novel Lord of the Isles, in PDF, HTML and Mobi from TOR’s weekly freebie program. Not sure if this is available to newcomers to the program, but sign up and give it a try.

–Wikipedia in Tome Raider format (found via MobileRead) and Scott Sigler’s novel Infected (MobileRead).

–Dictionary program for Sony E Ink machines (MobileRead).

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Paul Biba

Moderator’s note: This is a variant of a model written up here earlier. Thanks to Paul for the post and also to the sharp-eyed Hadrien and arit. - D.R. 

I don’t know what mailing list I’m on (probably something from CES), but I received the following email from Jason Shieh of Great Power International. The picture at the left is from the email.

“New, Slim e-Book. Distributor worldwide wanted

ONE CHARGE LASTS FOR 35 DAYS! (Condition: 2 minutes per page, 8 hours per day)
Specifications

1// OS: Linux
2// Format: Txt; Bitmap; Jpeg
3// Memory Card: SD Card
4//Language: English; Traditional/Simplified Chinese; Other language built by demand
5// Weight: Under 350g
6// Screen: 6 inch E-ink display
7// CPU: ARM compatible 32-bits RISC CPU Operated at 200Mhz”

This says a couple of things. First, that e-ink screens are available despite some speculation that production can’t keep up with demand. Second, that the Chinese don’t really understand the market as the formats supported aren’t exactly what we would call the most popular for ebooks.

If anyone wants to follow up with Jason his email is info@greatpower.hk.cn

Here is the second photo that came with the email:

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Paul Biba

In the last couple of years I have become more and more interested in ancient Rome and I recently came across this little gem of a book published by Walker & Company.

Vicki Leon is the author of the Uppity Women series of books and has changed pace for this one. According to the bibliography she has been collecting information about jobs in the Greek and Roman workplace for years. The book consists of a series of small articles, each covering a different profession. We see such things as: beekeeper, scribe, wine maker, slinger, tour guide, litter carrier, seller of purple, armpit plucker, gladiatrix, tattooer, tax farmer, funeral clown, orgy planner and many others. For the TeleRead crowd here is a little excerpt on Publisher-Bookseller:

“Publishing in those days meant copying by hand. The system was more like “print on demand,” with a roomful of scribes copying the same manuscript onto rolls of papyrus as it was read aloud. … By the time Augustus became Rome’s first emperor, the city had a community of publisher-booksellers, mostly freedmen …. Most of them published by category - poetry, history, salacious memoirs and so forth. Or concentrated on a few brand-name authors they were pushing. (more…)

Popularity: 7% [?]

By Paul Biba

Despite my sarcastic title, this is really good news for the ebook community. The availability of ebooks on more and more platforms can only be good for the medium. Here is part of the announcement from Mobipocket today:

Do you read emails on your Blackberry? Why not read ebooks and enews? Download the free Mobipocket eBook Reader on your Blackberry, and enjoy the reading experience. The online eBookstore is also integrated: find and start reading your favorite stories 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, straight from your Blackberry! Read on and discover how your Blackberry can become the ultimate ebook reader.

…

Forget your desktop computer: the Mobipocket Reader now gives you Over The Air (OTA) access to the entire eBook catalogue from your Blackberry. At any time, and you can be anywhere, you will find your favorite stories among more than 65.000 premium titles ! Download and try free samples, read other reader’s reviews, buy and download instantly the titles you like… all from your Blackberry.

And of course, all the titles in your library can be downloaded or redownloaded at any time from your account.

Popularity: 5% [?]

By Paul Biba

We have just recovered from three days without power after the huge windstorms that rocked New Jersey over the weekend. This meant no computer and I kept my iPhone use to a minimum as I had no easy way to recharge it. (Also meant no heat, lights, water, bathrooms, etc. - not a pleasant time).

When the power came back I booted up and went to Bloglines and found, of course, a huge number of RSS feeds to go through. I have 130 feeds in Bloglines and that’s a lot to check if I’ve been off the net for a while. I had the same problem when I came back from California after a 5 day vacation.

I found that in both instances I only ended up checking a few favorite feeds and then marked all the others as read. Without any prompting from a list I found that I checked the same feeds both times, so I thought I would share them with you as they seem to be my favorites. I hope you find some of them of interest:

Bookofjoe
Ars Technica
Laptop Mag
MobileRead
Mobile Tech Review
Palm-Mac
TeleRead
The Unofficial Apple Weblog
The Gadgeteer
Dans Data
Peter Watts’ Blog
How to Spot a Psychopath

Popularity: 6% [?]

By Paul Biba

The show just closed at the announcement of the iPhone SDK and here is the bottom line of the whole thing in 4 pieces:

1. Enterprise: Apple is putting on a real enterprise push and clearly wants to compete head on with RIM, Palm and Windows Mobile. They announced that the 2.0 version of their software (which will be a free update) will support Active Sync, and have Microsoft Exchange support, push email, calendar integration - pushed to the iPhone over the air all day long, push contacts, global address lists, aditional VPN types, including Cisco IPsec VPN, Two-factor authentication, certificates and identities, Enterprise-class Wi-Fi, with WPA2/802.1x, tools to enforce security policies, tools to help companies configure thousands of devices as they deploy iPhones and set them up automatically, and the ability to protect that data by remotely wiping it.

2. Developer support through the SDK: from my reading of the coverage it looks as if the SDK will open all aspects of the phone including the hardware interface. The SDK is free and can be downloaded from the Apple site and if you want to join the Developer Network the price is $99. The SDK must be run on a Mac, but is designed in such a way that you don’t have to know Mac programming to produce applications. They showed a number of applications designed by Windows programmers who had never used a Mac before.

3. Distribution of programs: This will be done through either iTunes or through a new program on the iPhone that will download programs directly, just like the current iPhone iTunes program does. All programs will have to be sold through Apple and the developer will get 70% off the top and Apple 30%. No credit card fees, hosting fees or marketing fees and the developer will be paid monthly. There will be no charge for free programs.

4. Future development: Apple announced a “partnership” with a venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, called the iFund which will make $100 million available to entrepreneurs who want to develop new Apple stuff.

The new software that will do all this will be a free update on the iPhone and a paid update on the iTouch.

All in all, pretty exciting and a clear bid to make the iPhone dominant in the marketplace. Given the troubles that so many Palm and Windows Mobile developers are having now with the poor distribution network, I wonder how many will switch over to Apple. Certainly they are giving the developer more of the take than the other guys currently are. It looks as if there is every incentive for developers to look at things such as an ebook reader, and the SDK seems designed in such a way as make it possible for Windows developers to have a decent shot at producing an iPhone program. I probably will download it myself.  Hey!  Let’s get Robert Nagle to write us a program!

Popularity: 6% [?]

By Paul Biba

I guess going to the O’Reilly conference got me on some new mailing lists because the following came in just a few minutes ago from Random House:

Building on the momentum created by the publication of Charles Bock’s debut novel BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN—a novel Newsweek recently called “the book of the moment”–the Random House Publishing Group will offer the entire book as a free PDF download from 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, February 27 until midnight on Friday, February 29.  The free download, which can be shared, emailed or printed, will be available on www.beautifulchildren.net/read.

In a unique collaboration, Random House has also invited both chain and independent online retailers to participate.  Thus far, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, Bordersstores.com; Booksamillion.com, Powells.com and Northshire.com have agreed to make the file available to their customers.

Actually the book is available now, I just downloaded it.  I then going to use pdflrfwin to convert the PDF to a lrf for my Sony Reader.  This great freeware utility works really well.  More on it later.

Does this mean that publishers are finally getting the message?

Popularity: 5% [?]