TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Palm’ Category

By Chris Meadows

Steve Riggio has stepped down from the CEO position of Barnes & Noble to become B&N’s Vice Chairman. The new CEO will be William Lynch. In addition to serving as President of the Barnes & Noble website, bn.com, Lynch has an impressive amount of e-commerce experience with HSN.com and Gifts.com (which he co-founded), as well as a lot of involvement with e-commerce and websites for Palm.

As Gizmodo’s headline puts it, “Barnes & Noble has no illusions about what it’s becoming.” It seems like a pretty clear indication of what B&N sees in its future to appoint an e-commerce and Palm veteran as CEO over its entire operation.

By Paul Biba

Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, Skiff; Corey Podolsky, Entourage; Nikolay Malyarov, Newspaper Direct; David Donovan, IREX

Van Rensselaer: funded primarily be Hearst. They do a representation of the printed version. Building a digital storefront with a platform that can plug into many devices. Not betting on a category or device type. Very keen on epaper, though. When Skiff was formed were no ereader devices on the market that could do a newspaper so created one. Wanted to lead by example so created an end to end system. Will be adding some more hardware partners. Would like more people talking about advertising in ereading. Building an advertising insertion platform for Skiff reader and other platforms. iPad will be good for the category because others will challenge their ODM partners to do better.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

Mobile Marketer covers a report (PDF file link) by “mobile audience media company” JiWire that says consumers are more often using wifi-enabled devices for Internet access on the go. The article claims 56% of consumers who use mobile Internet connect to the Internet via a handset. The report adds that 21% of mobile Internet consumers primarily use “non-laptop” mobile devices (handsets or netbooks) for mobile Internet.

“People are utilizing a tremendous range of devices from laptops to netbooks to e-books when choosing to remain connected while on the go,” said David Staas, senior vice president of marketing at JiWire.

It is interesting to me that Staas said “e-books” given that the only e-book I know of that offers any kind of useful Internet connectivity is the Kindle (I’m not counting the Nook here, since its net access can only be used for downloading e-books), and that device does not currently use wifi at all.

On the other hand, the report itself pictures a Nook on the chart that breaks wifi use down by device (e-book readers come in at 4%, just ahead of cameras at 3%) so perhaps they are not quite so picky as I am.

I will say that I’ve used my iPod Touch a great deal in public wifi locations myself. It’s a great little device for surfing the web, checking and writing short e-mails, and social networking. But I’ve also used my Motorola RAZR2 cell phone for that purpose, and it does not use wifi at all.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

A couple of weeks ago, Paul reported on self-e-publishing site Scribd’s plans to add direct mobile download capability.

CNet reports that Scribd has now done so: Scribd-hosted documents can be sent to any of a dozen different e-book devices (including Kindle, Nook, iPhone, Palm, EZReader, and others) with two mouse clicks.

The documents are sent as PDF files via e-mail or SMS message link. At present, only DRM-free titles are supported, but Scribd CEO Trip Adler has plans to expand to copy-protected versions in the future.

Another part of Scribd’s mobile strategy is creating device-specific Scribd reader applications, which will be released later this year. Much as Amazon does with its Kindle Reader app, these will allow readers to download Scribd documents into their device and keep track of where they stopped reading.

By Paul Biba

From their blog:

We’re starting to share early betas of the Ibis Reader mobile UI for iPhones, Nexus Ones, and other Android devices with a limited group of testers. If you’re interested in joining the beta program and testing on other phones, tablets, and laptops, please email info@ibisreader.com. You may be asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

More info on our upcoming ereader is available in our announcement post.

The reader will support iPhone OS, Android and Palm webOS and will support Epub. It will use the Bookserver ecosystem from the Internet Archive.

Technorati Tags:
e-book, e-books, ebook, ebooks, iPhone, Paul Biba, Android, Palm, WebOS

By Paul Biba

There don’t seem to be any that I can find. eReader has apps for a lot of platforms, including the old Palm OS, but none for the WebOS Pre. Mobipocket doesn’t have one either. Palm’s app catalog has been closed, but now House of Palm has opened it up on the web. I can find about 500 listings for individual books, but no listing for any ereading software.

I guess if you have a Pre you are out of luck with reading most ebooks. Am I right?

By Chris Meadows

I ran across a post in the baen.EBookReader forum of Baen’s Bar from someone who said he got “format bait-and-switched” by Barnes and Noble. He said he ordered the e-book of D. D. Barant’s Dying Bites expecting to get the eReader format, which is what they had last time he shopped there.

Instead, he  got an ePub—which didn’t do him any good because he reads e-books on his Palm.

Curious, I went to Barnes & Noble to check for myself. I loaded up the page and cast myself in the role of the average consumer who knows very little about e-books, but who was at least smart enough to know what format he needs. I found a number of “helpful” little clues that end up confirming the wrong impression.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

Earlier today, I happened to be looking back at a post I wrote three months ago, casting the iPod Touch as “Apple’s game-changer”. Today in the New York Times, Jenna Wortham wrote that “Apple’s game-changer” is something else: the entire App Store concept.

“[Before the App Store came about, it] took six to nine months to build a relationship with a carrier, maybe a quarter-million to get the infrastructure built, and the company took 50 percent or more from each dollar,” [Flurry marketing executive Peter] Farago says, a process that limited access to mobile platforms. “Apple has helped create a much healthier middle class of developers and expanded the pie for everyone.”

This fairly lengthy article looks in depth at not only Apple’s App Store, but the stores (current or coming) of its competitors—Blackberry, Palm, Android, and Windows.

It is not uniformly positive in its outlook, either. It notes Apple’s reputation for a difficult approval process, as well as the difficulty of finding any one specific app when there are over 100,000 available. It likewise points out the flaws in the other stores, as well as their benefits.

As much as I think the term “game changer” is by and large overused, it may be apt in this case. Not only is Apple’s App Store something special for the iPhone, but the success of the idea has sparked imitation in all of its major competitors. The smartphone landscape has been altered irrevocably.

Or, if you will, the game has been changed.

By Chris Meadows

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

A number of other sites are doing Thanksgiving lists (Ars Technica, Wired, another Wired, and Wired again on things not to be thankful for), and I thought I would assay one of my own. Of course, we all know that we have a lot more to be thankful for than just e-book-related things, but they are this site’s focus after all.

There are a lot of people and companies that have made a difference in the e-book industry this year, and I thank the ones important to me below. These are the folks who I think have made reading e-books easier for me, or provided the e-books that I want to read, or have just plain done something cool.

Some of these are big, industry-wide things. Others are little things that may only be important to me and a number of other fans. Some of them may surprise you.

But that’s all right. This is a list of things for which I personally give thanks. If you’re thankful for something I left out, please add it in the comments.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

David Pogue’s latest column in the New York Times concerns the new Palm Pixi, the Pre’s precocious kid sister. The official price is $100 with a 2-year Sprint contract, but Amazon is selling it for $25—plus $2,309 in monthly fees over the course of the contract.

The phone is tiny, light, and thin, weighing in at 3 ounces. The design is nothing fancy, and it cuts a few corners (for example, no wifi—connection via Sprint’s cell network only—and an overall slower processor). In fact, for just $55 more you can have the somewhat more featureful and faster Pre.

But at least it shows that smartphone prices are definitely falling. Now if only they could rein in the calling plan prices, too. (Even if, as the article notes, Sprint’s are overall significantly less than AT&T or Verizon’s prices.)

Presumably, the Pixi will run the same e-book applications that the Pre will, so this may look like a reasonable option for people wanting a cheap smartphone. On the other hand, taken as a percentage of overall cost over two years, upgrading to the more-capable Pre is just a drop in the bucket.

By Chris Meadows

Photo Note: My auto-focus digital camera had a little trouble getting good shots of the screen; no matter what I do, the shots tend to turn out slightly off-focus. The shots may look blurry, but suffice it to say that’s a problem with my camera—in person, the reader is quite as crisp and clear as printed text.

I’ve had more time to play around with the Astak, and the bloom is off the rose. Yes, the e-ink screen is truly amazing, and far clearer than the touch-sensitive Sony reader’s. However, it has certain other problems.

In Praise of Astak

Before I start talking about the Astak’s shortcomings, I should mention that the company itself has some astoundingly good customer service. For one thing, they monitor the Astak forums on MobileRead and pop up to answer questions.

Whenever I have posted a technical question on the forum, I have almost immediately been emailed by an Astak representative with suggestions and offers of advice. Now, granted, I do not know whether this is their default behavior toward all users, or just because they know I’m reviewing their product. I’d like to think the former is true.

Another nice thing about the device itself is that the firmware is remarkably easy to upgrade. Just put the firmware file on an SD card, slide the card in, and reboot into upgrade mode using a combination of keypresses.

My only complaint in this regard is that the instructions I found for upgrading on their website were not entirely clear. One of the buttons to be pressed is mentioned as the “increase volume key”. I assumed that meant the rocker switch on the right—but after that did not work and I searched some more, I learned that those instructions only applied to the 6” Astak reader devices; for the 5”, you press the page-forward button left of the screen instead. Just a little confusing.

Now let’s talk about some of those shortcomings.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

There are some articles whose subject matter is far from new, but which are still interesting because they show more people are taking notice. One of these is the piece the New York Times is currently running on the popularity of reading e-books on smartphones.

We’ve known for a long time that a lot more people read e-books on multi-purpose than dedicated devices—they’re cheaper, they do more, they’re easier to pocket.

And more people have them. It is estimated 1.7 million people own a dedicated e-reader, and that number may rise to 4 million by the end of the holidays. But Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches.

“The iPod Touch is always at hand,” Shannon Stacey, who has written several romance e-novels, said. “It’s my calendar, it’s my everything, so my books are always with me.” Ms. Stacey, who also owns an early Sony Reader model, said she had now bought twice as many e-books for her iPod Touch as for her Sony.

But others are still dubious:

“The Kindle is for people who love to read,” [Ian Freed, vice president for the Kindle division at Amazon] said. “People use phones for lots of things. Most often they use them to make phone calls. Second most often, they use them to send text messages or e-mail. Way down on the list, there’s reading.”

Of course, we know that people who read e-books have been in love with their small screens for more than ten years. E-books were one of the first big “killer app” uses for the Palm, and e-book vendors eReader and Fictionwise have been in business ever since.

Some have even gone so far as to predict “the end of single-purpose devices,” but that is probably still premature.