TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘netbook’ Category

By Chris Meadows

You know the Pixel Qi screens that are one of the forthcoming “better-than-e-ink” display technologies? Gizmodo and the “What’s Happening at Pixel Qi” blog note that a DIY 10” screen replacement kit will be out in the second quarter of this year, bringing the ability to swap out your netbook’s 10” LCD screen for a transflective Pixel Qi model that can be read in direct sunlight.

Writes former OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen in the Pixel Qi blog:

It’s only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbuld [sic]: it’s basically 6 screws, pulling off a bezel, unconnecting the old screen and plugging this one in. That’s it. It’s a 5 minute operation.

In the same entry, Jepsen writes about a group of girls in Nigeria in the One Laptop Per Child program who opened a “laptop hospital” to do repairs and screen-swaps themselves. Interesting to see that young geeks and tinkerers are the same the world over.

There is no word on what the price of the display kit will be. But given that screens are traditionally the most expensive part of the gizmos that include them, I wouldn’t bet it’s going to be all that cheap.

By Paul Biba

The biggest opportunities are in smartphones and netbooks and notebooks, not dedicated e-readers with E Ink, says Amanda Edmonds, Google’s director of strategic partnerships. Her points at DigitalBookWorld:

• Google wants a model that simplifies life for consumers and publishers. Consumers will be searching for a lot of backlist books.
• Google Editions wants to monetize book searching and buying. Can purchase print and digital editions. Search traffic from smartphones increasing faster than search rate for PCs. Has ability to share notes; 39% of people who access cloud computing say that they do so for sharing purposes.

By Chris Meadows

We have already said plenty about the possible e-book reading potential of netbooks as opposed to dedicated e-book readers. Now here comes a whole new category of micro-laptop that might also be good for e-book reading, at a lower price point.

In the last few years, we have had notebooks, powerbooks, macbooks, netbooks…and now “smartbooks” and “webbooks”. ^* It seems as though every time computer manufacturers decide to make a different size of machine, they have to come up with a new name for it. Remember when we only had “laptops”? Or even just “notebooks” and “subnotebooks”?

How Smart is the “Smartbook”?

This latest new name, smartbook, refers to something even smaller and less capable than a traditional netbook—something between a “smartphone” and a “netbook” in size, hence “smartbook”. Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal has a piece previewing their appearance at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

According to the article, smartbooks are meant to cost less than today’s average-price $250 netbook, will probably have provision for a built-in cell connection, and will offload most of their functionality to the cloud.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Housekeeping—reminder: The Previous Entries link  at the bottom of the home page will let you  browse through our earlier postings.

I’ve just reviewed the new Sony Reader Library 3.1 and found it to be good but still underdeveloped, especially as an e-reader. Why the devil can’t 3.1 display ePub in double columns, which it can do with the Sony proprietary format? 

This isn’t just a Sony issue alone. The Kindle e-reading app for desktops and laptops also wastes screen real estate, at least for readers who don’t want the text to be too wide.

Owners of all kinds of machines suffer from lack of double-column capability, but this is especially true on netbooks, like my Acer Aspire One, where the screen isn’t as deep as it would be in a laptop. Please, Sony and Amazon and the rest, do something about that. Many owners of E Ink machines will want to read the same books, too, on netbooks.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Tablet-friendly writings have popped up on the sites of  Computerworld and PC World, both owned by IDG. And  others are also talking up tabs.

Is this an authentic trend, fuelled partly by the rise of e-books?

Or just the desire of business people to get on with The Next Thing—having already done netbooks, which, inconveniently, have actually sold at reasonable prices?

I suspect a mix. The reborn CrunchPad, now the Joo Joo, along with the Microsoft-designed Courier and the Apple tablet reports, can’t hurt.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

It is only a few more days until Black Friday, the day that strikes horror into the hearts of Christmas shoppers everywhere. And of course, gadget-lovers that e-book fans are, I have little doubt a lot of us are already poring through the on-line ad sites and contemplating setting our Friday morning alarms for 4 a.m.

But still, all that’s black is not black gold, and not everything sold on Friday morning is going to be a bargain. For example, even though Apple is slashing prices by 8% for a one-day Black Friday sale, you can still find lower prices at some authorized on-line resellers.

And Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has posted his own caveat emptor lecture, warning consumers against being taken in by bad bargains. In particular, he warns against investing in e-book readers, netbooks, overpriced HDMI cables, and “cheap” inkjet printers.

The faults Farhad finds with e-book readers are that they are currently overpriced, the multiple competing formats make it too easy to bet on the wrong horse, and nobody knows whether Apple is going to come out with another game-changing innovation that does to the other e-book readers what the iPod did to other mp3 players.

The biggest problem he sees with netbooks (which have often been touted here as possible e-book readers) is that the rush of Black Friday shopping does not provide sufficient time to research the purchase, and it is far too easy to get stuck with a device that is ergonomically unusable or runs an outdated OS.

What are the best Black Friday bargains? According to Farhad, 22” monitors for $100, and 1TB external HDs for $70. I would say that other good things to look at are the lists of sale DVDs, Blu-Rays, and games. If there’s a title you’ve been jonesing for, might as well grab it while it’s cheap.

Do you agree with Farhad about e-books and netbooks? What Black Friday bargains have got you drooling? Let us know in the comments.

(Black Friday cartoon found on http://www.ac-nancy-metz.fr/enseign/anglais/Henry/thanks.htm.)

By Paul Biba

Editor’s note: We’ve pointed to the video before, Paul has added the GSM angle. – DR

This is a remarkable video that Michael Pastore let me know about. I strongly suggest you give it a shot. The full size version is here.

It’s in French, with subtitles (the first minute is blank for some reason, but you don’t miss anything). The infrastructure for the telecommunications part is almost there as the 4th generation of GSM is on the way.

The display technology is, I would guess, at least 10 years off. But when it is ready…

The role of the bookstore is interesting— it becomes a catalog for the reader, but note that there is still a place for hardcover ownership.

Technorati Tags: e-book, e-books, ebook readers, ebooks, ereaders, Paul Biba, publishing, TeleRead

By Joe Wikert

Have you seen the leaked photos of the upcoming Asus Eee-Reader? If you missed it, here’s a short article on CNET with a picture. OK, I get the lower price. Sure, that’s something the market is clamoring for as the Kindles, Sony Readers, etc., are destined to be nothing more than nichey luxuries as long as they’re $300+.

But what’s with the two-panel hinged display? Why take a relic of the print book and force it into an e-reader? Think about it. There’s not a single time in the past year where I’ve said, "gee, I really wish this Kindle had a second display that hinged onto this one." Never.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

Wired has an interesting article on what it terms “the Good Enough revolution”—a growing trend in products and services that are cheap and feature-light being much more widely adopted than top-of-the-line products with every possible function.

The article looks at examples from a wide range of industries—Skype versus regular phone service, the Pure Digital Flip vs. more expensive camcorders, the Predator UAV vs. manned fighter planes, mall-based “micro clinics” vs. complete mini-hospitals—but one example happens to be the Kindle:

Amazon’s Kindle can’t display complex graphics, and paper still has much higher resolution. But the device does store hundreds of titles in a slim package, ensuring that you always have access to whichever Philip K. Dick tale you’re in the mood for. The Kindle is expected to generate $310 million in revenue by the end of 2009. Barron’s estimates that annual sales could reach $2 billion by 2012.

MP3 Sound Quality: “Good Enough”

One interesting point the article makes has to do with how the music industry never saw the mp3’s popularity coming; they thought that the mp3 would never take off because the fidelity of MP3-compressed music was less than CD-quality (which was itself the subject of disdain from audiophiles who preferred the pure analog reproduction of vinyl). Only visionaries like Michael Robertson disagreed.

But it turned out that Robertson was right: portability turned out to be more important to consumers than fidelity. And once consumers were used to the way mp3s sounded, Stanford music professor Jonathan Berger found, they actually came to prefer compressed music over more faithful reproductions.

Every year, [Berger] reports, more and more students preferred the sound of MP3s, particularly for rock music. They’ve grown accustomed to what Berger calls the percussive sizzle—aka distortion—found in compressed music. To them, that’s what music is supposed to sound like.

(more…)

By David Rothman

The New York Times links to sites pushing accessory keyboards.

No need to stick to the shrunken one in your notebook.

Got your own accessory keyboard recs?

By Chris Meadows

For some time, netbooks such as the Eee have been discussed as a possible e-book-reading solution. Well, now DigiTimes reports that Asus will be launching an Eee-branded e-book reader (an “Eee-book reader”?) possibly by the end of 2009, and MSI is considering an e-reader of its own.

The sources pointed out that the requirements for entering the e-book reader market are even lower than for netbooks, but the key to success lies in establishing a content delivery platform.

The article is fairly short and sparse on details (it does mention that e-book readers are more popular in North America and Europe than in Asia, due to differences in reading habits), so there is not a lot of information here to go on. Regardless, it is interesting to watch the e-book reader market start to heat up.

Here’s hoping Asus (and possibly MSI) will be smart enough to go with industry-standard formats to minimize further market fragmentation.

By David Rothman

Strange. CrunchGear has published an anti-netbook guide to netbooks—with a title that makes you think the guide will be genuinely helpful.

Trouble is, CrunchGear taints the guide with mentions of laptops as as pricey as $1,998 and of the four gizmos written up, just one is below $500, the $349 Lenovo Ideapad S10-2. Bait and switch?

What’s going on? Netbooks aren’t for, say, graphics designer or demanding gamers. Rather they’re great as second computers for Web-browsing, email—and, yes, e-books.

I generally favor the tablet form factor for e-booking, but hybrid netbooks exist: laptop-tablet combos. Check out the $499 hybrid from Asus, the Eee PC T91, which includes a touch screen.

(more…)