TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘smartphones’ Category

By Chris Meadows

Charlie Stross has posted a couple of entries of interest to TeleReaders in his journal this month.

On December 8th, he talked about the launch of the Sony PRS-505 in the United Kingdom, and how it seems to be finding a niche with editors.

Anyway, manuscript format gets you about 300 words to the page, so a 300 page novel ends up running to the thick end of 450-500 sheets of paper — a ream or so. My editors work in London or New York and aren’t mad enough to drive to and from the office: like everyone else, they catch the tube (or subway). It’s dead time for any other purpose, so they’re always reading on the commute, and hauling multi-kilogram chunks of dead tree across the landscape.

But these days, if they want to read a manuscript (which means it’s already passed the first cut) they can ask for an electronic copy by email. And a Sony Reader can hold about 150-200 manuscripts, before you add a £10 memory card and boost the shelf space to something approximating a medium-sized branch library.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

Analysts asked by Wired believe Palm’s new OS, Nova, and handsets based on it will make their premiere at the Consumer Electronics Show, January in Las Vegas.

As previously reported here on TeleRead, Palm has not been doing so well in the competition for smartphone market share. The Treo Pro, which Palm boosters had hoped would hold onto users until they could bring out Nova, has not sold well (perhaps because it was sold unlocked without any cellphone service provider subsidies, unlike competing smartphones).

Now Palm is in much the same position against Apple that Sony was in the portable-audio-player market fight. Both Palm and Sony more or less created their respective markets (with the Pilot and the Walkman), but both have ended up allowing Apple to steal a march on them with their iPods. Nova could be Palm’s last chance to stay in the smartphone market at all.

It will be nice if Nova allows Palm to make a comeback, but I am not holding my breath. There are so many competing operating systems for smartphones already that it is hard to imagine yet another new one being able to unseat the most popular ones from their thrones.

By Paul Biba

AT&T, speaking at the Symbian Partner Event in San Francisco, said that it intended to standardize on the OS for AT&T branded smartphones, reported Macworld today.

This could be an excellent move for the proliferation of e-books, as, in my opinion, they suffer just as much from OS babel as from format babel. As a matter of fact, OS babel is one of the major causes of format babel. Just think—we have Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Apple and Android, all mutually exclusive as to software

According to the article, this AT&T consolidation would not affect units such as the iPhone (and I suspect the Blackberry) because they are just stand-alone devices that take advantage of AT&T services. There is no question, however, that it would affect Windows Mobile devices, now primarily made by HTC.

This is a great move by AT&T and will certainly reduce, probably dramatically, their support costs. So what will they choose? My own prediction would be Symbian. It’s the most used smartphone OS in the world and is extremely mature. Additionally, Nokia has completed its acquisition of Symbian and will shortly make it an open source OS under the Symbian Foundation.

Java just isn’t robust enough, especially down at the hardware level. Windows Mobile is pretty much a nightmare, unless it gets a complete GUI redesign, and generation 7 keeps getting put off. It also has pretty extreme hardware requirements. The Palm OS is, even Palm admits, a dead issue, and there is still no sight of Palm’s replacement. Also, Palm has become pretty small bananas in the industry nowadays.

Finally there is Android, an unproven system with few applications available and no formal structure for its future development. It’s also controlled by Google, and if I were still in the corporate world I can tell you that I would very reluctant to put my future in the hands of someone who could hold me to ransom (and the same could be said for Windows Mobile).

In any event, it’s an exciting time, and I firmly believe that a reduction in OS babel will help the e-book market tremendously. Kudos to AT&T.

It is worth noting that, of the mobile OS platforms mentioned, Fictionwise currently has an eReader application for all except Blackberry, which it will add in 1Q 2009, and Android, which it will presumably add along with other Linux-based systems in 1H 2009. —C.M.

By Chris Meadows

There were several bits of smartphone news today that didn’t merit a full story by themselves, but are interesting when taken together.

Wal-Mart and the $99 iPhone

The Boy Genius Report and MacRumors are suggesting that when the iPhone hits Wal-Mart, there may be a $99, 4-gigabyte model available. Though Apple has discontinued the 4 gigabyte model for its own sales, a low-tier device that could compete with other $99 devices such as the Palm Centro could fit right in with Wal-Mart’s desire to be the “low-price leader” in everything.

A 4-gig iPhone would make a handy device for people who don’t care about (or have another iPod for) music or movies, but would like access to Safari and other iPhone-specific applications. It could make a great e-book reader, as well. But read the fine print—a two-year phone service commitment is required, and apparently six months on a high-tier plan.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

I am starting to suspect that some people may not have read past the opening blurb of my story yesterday that scooped eReader’s licensing of the eReader format to Stanza. If so, that is probably my own fault for not being clearer in the headline.

Here is a recap of the salient, non-Stanza-related points in the article. For more detail, click the link.

• eReader unencrypted format may now be used commercially by any publisher without having to pay eReader (Fictionwise) a cut of the proceeds. (i.e. Baen would now be free to release its titles in eReader format in addition to all the others.)
• eReader apps are coming for Blackberry in 1Q 2009, Linux in 1H2009.
• eReader will be updated to use ePub with an eReader DRM wrapper sometime in 2009.
• eReader has “fired” its prior transcription service, and has set up an internal department to translate publishers’ source files into eReader books. Most if not all titles on Fictionwise that are currently Mobipocket-only will have Secure eReader versions added.
  • However, those who have already downloaded the Secure Mobipocket version would have to purchase the eReader version separately. This is a contract issue with the publishers and not something Fictionwise currently has any power to change.
• Some Fictionwise titles (such as the Kitty Norville books) erroneously show up in Mobipocket only on Fictionwise when there are in fact eReader files for them on eReader.com. Steve said that if a book is available on Fictionwise at all and on eReader.com as an eReader file, it should be available in eReader on Fictionwise as well—so if you spot any other such titles, let Steve know.

By Chris Meadows

Moderator’s note: I’ve changed the time on Chris’s post from this morning so that it’s closer to the top of today’s blog, given the post’s importance. The related press release is here. - D.R.

This morning I received an email from Steve Pendergrast telling me he had a scoop for me. And what a scoop it turned out to be!

Today at noon eastern, Fictionwise will issue a press release stating that Fictionwise has officially licensed the eReader format—both unencrypted and encrypted—to Lexcycle for use in Stanza, and will be opening and running a Stanza store. This feature was incorporated into the new version of Stanza that was released on Friday.

Fictionwise is interested in getting its format out there to be used by as many people and as many readers as possible—they realize that the books are where their money is to be made. Or, as the old saying goes, “give away the razor, sell the blades.”

I also took the opportunity to ask Steve about some other matters that had puzzled me, and elicited a few other newsworthy items over the course of the conversation.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

Every so often when browsing Techmeme, I will come across a pair of stories that, though they may not be next to each other on the page, are nonetheless made to be juxtaposed with each other.

That was the case for this pair of stories. On the one hand, “iPhone soars to 16.6% of smartphone market.” On the other, “Palm revenue craters as Treos fall out of favor.”

According to the first article, Apple is now second only to Nokia in the worldwide smartphone market, and second only to RIM (the makers of the BlackBerry) in the US market. Not only has Apple reached these lofty heights, the article claims, but it has in fact “saved the smartphone industry from a decline this past summer.”

In the US, Apple is now also second only to RIM, earning about 30 percent of the country’s smartphone sales through the iPhone versus the BlackBerry lineup’s 40 percent. Windows Mobile and Palm OS are continuing to decline with Microsoft’s platform holding 17 percent and Palm less than 10 percent.

This leads into the second article, which notes that Palm’s revenue for the quarter that just ended was only about $190 million, instead of the $331 million that Wall Street analysts had predicted. Palm assigns blame for this shortfall to “reduced demand for maturing smartphone and handheld products,” according to their press release—which seems a bit odd given how well Apple and RIM are doing.

The Treo Pro, which Palm boosters had hoped would help Palm’s market share, is not even mentioned in the article; instead it notes that the $99 Palm Centro is probably the only thing keeping Palm afloat right now. Palm’s hopes rest with the new Nova operating system set to arrive in the first half of 2009.

The term “game-changing” has been thrown around entirely too much for comfort in recent months. But nonetheless, the iPhone represents a new paradigm of smartphone, and is clearly gaining in popularity—and with its Treo line, Palm is still clinging to the same one that it has been using ever since it ditched PalmOS.

By Chris Meadows

Remember that “worst bug ever” in the Android G1, which echoed anything typed into the phone into a root-enabled command shell? Enterprising hackers have found a use for that after all. One of them was able to parlay it into a complete installation of Debian Linux on his G1. (It actually took fairly little hacking, as there is already a version of Debian compiled to run on the G1’s ARM-based architecture.)

This only works if your Android is still on the RC29 or prior firmware versions; the RC30 patch removes the phantom root shell and thus the ability to install alternate software.

Other Android hackers have since come up with modified versions of RC30 that incorporate command-line access, but as with the Debian hack, they require that your phone not already have been updated to the official version of RC30.

Needless to say, adding Debian to your Android phone is probably not something everyone will want to do. For those who do, however, it will provide access to a wider variety of Linux applications than those available to Android—including, perhaps, compiling the original FBReader rather than using the Android Java port.