GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Newly-approved Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is a Kindle user, while longtime conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wields an iPad.

This nugget of information appeared in a recent video clip on C-SPAN. Both justices use the devices (plus hard copy printouts) to read the vast quantities of written material they must wade through — up to 40 or 50 briefs for each case, Kagan says in the video above.

The news, however, made us wonder about something of far more pressing national importance: Is this a deep ideological divide on the Supreme Court?

Would Scalia see things differently if he read opinions on the monochrome Kindle? Does Kagan need a dose of iPad color, and maybe a round or two of Flight Control HD between court sessions?

Are Kindle-wielding Justices writing angry “Mactard” and “fanboi” comments on the opinions of their opponents, while the Mac-loving faction refuses to talk or even think about anything that wasn’t designed in Cupertino?

Nah, that doesn’t seem realistic.

Thanks, Jeremy!

An award-winning writer specializing in technology, science and business, Dylan Tweney is a senior editor at Wired.com and publisher of tinywords, the world’s smallest magazine.
Follow @dylan20 and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Copia, the long-awaited social reading platform unveiled at CES in early 2010, is live. It won’t be officially announced until next week, and it’s still rough around the edges. Call it a public beta, call it a release candidate; it’s finally ready for readers to see for themselves what it’s all about.

I’ve spent a lot of time with Copia’s private beta, which has gone through a handful of iterations building up to this release candidate. The idea behind it — to bring the social aspects of sites like Facebook and the store + client model of applications like iTunes to books — is great. But it’s very difficult to get all of those parts working well on their own, let alone working well together: hence the delays, and some shortcomings in the final version.

This video from Copia explains the philosophy very well:

To try to make this vision real, Copia’s platform has three parts:

• a social-networking website, where you connect with friends and other readers of the same books to discuss what you’re reading, share recommendations and ratings. To make connecting a little easier, you can sign in with a Facebook account, or create a separate Copia account. Once you’re in, Copia can connect with LinkedIn and Twitter, too.
• a desktop e-reading client for Mac and PC where you can buy books through the Copia store (EPUB with Adobe DRM, so you’ll need an Adobe account) and read those books on your desktop or laptop. You can also read PDFs or DRM-free EPUB files in the client.
• An iPad app that like the desktop, includes both your e-book library and the store.

Originally, DMC Worldwide, Copia’s parent company, had planned to release a suite of multi-size e-readers in conjunction with Copia. Now, their plan is to expand their software platform to multiple devices, from the iPad to OEM partners.

So let me quickly walk you through the typical Copia experience. You get an account on the website and start connecting to friends. These can be one-sided or two-sided follows, like Twitter; so you could, if you wished (and users wanted to share) follow what a favorite author is reading or recommending.

You download one of the seven free books Copia’s made available to new members. Some of these are pretty good — hey, EM Forster’s A Passage to India! I don’t have an e-book copy of that. Now, even though you can buy or select it from the site, you can’t actually download it. You have to open up the desktop client for that.

So you download and install the desktop client and enter in your ID. Now you can download. Unfortunately, if you picked some books to add to your library (say, you wanted to discuss The Complete Turing with a friend) that you didn’t actually buy from the site, weird things will happen when you try to double-click it. Basically, the app assumes you’re trying to download the book, can’t find it in your purchase list, and spits out an error message. OK.

When you open up the e-reader, it’s pretty typical stuff; there’s no full-screen view, and zoom in/zoom out doesn’t actually seem to zoom anything, but it does change your view from, say, one column to two. It handles annotations and notes that I can then beam up to the mothership in the website and keep synced across my devices. So long as I remember to press the big “Sync” button. It can’t auto-sync anything.

The iPad app offers probably the smoothest experience; you can browse, download and connect without much of a hitch. But again, you need to actively sync your content between the website and desktop client, and there’s a bit of a lag between syncing a book and it appearing on the iPad. If you’ve used iPad e-book applications like Nook or Kindle, there isn’t much here that’s new.

Copia actually turns out to be a really instructive case of why companies with great ideas and a clear vision don’t always end up shipping the best products. It’s not for lack of smart people, good design, or good code: it’s about control.

Copia doesn’t control any of the ends of book production or distribution. It has to deal with the book publishers, Adobe (who makes the DRM), the companies who make the devices, the App store who has to approve getting your software on a device (over which you have zero control of the date they finally approve an app for release). If you want to broaden your scope, to offer a wider range of formats on every device imaginable, that increases the complication by powers of ten. To try to make all of those partnerships cohere and still create a single, coherent platform without the established relationships or marketing clout to beat everyone into shape is nearly impossible.

E-reading is a particularly troublesome market to try to make a project like this work. Book publishers are if anything more conservative than their counterparts in the movie and music industries. They’ve been at this longer, and they’ve seen bad deals, failed formats, rampant piracy.

Book readers, too, are more conservative in their approach to these objects. They like simplicity. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have been the most successful in this space because they offer one store, one brand, one experience. Sony, for instance, makes great consumer hardware, including great e-readers — but haven’t been able to crack the consciousness in the way Amazon and Barnes & Noble have, because they aren’t associated with books.

In the year since Copia was announced, Amazon and Barnes & Noble responded to the problems that Copia sought to address and integrated their own however-limited social functions into their products. They’ve done it with partnerships with existing social networks: Twitter, Facebook and Google. The NOOKcolor is arguably more social than Copia already, exactly because it allows readers to hook into these larger social networks.

That’s the model both the content management companies and the social networks are pursuing, and it took them a long time to get there. Don’t dry to jam too much content into the social network: bring the social networking logins and profiles to where people are using their content.

Likewise, don’t spend most of your energy building social networking features into your content site. Let Netflix be Netflix and let Twitter be Twitter. No company should spend too much time and resources trying to do something it doesn’t have the skills to do better than anybody else.

Even Apple — the master of controlling an end-to-end solution — has had to discover this with Ping, and to a lesser extent with iBooks. Steve Jobs just isn’t all that interested in sharing things about himself on a social network, and he might love to read, but he’s not all that interested in the publishing industry. Steve Jobs likes The Beatles. Let him have The Beatles.

I’m sure that in iteration after iteration, Copia will take all of the services under its control and make them work seamlessly with each other. And the big thing that it will force e-readers and e-book companies to do is to think hard about how they want to integrate social components into their devices.

Will it just be tweeting, “Hey! I read this, check it out!” Will be an open standard, like the proposed OpenBookmarks framework, that allow readers to share their annotations and bookmarks with each other no matter what devices they’re using? Or will customers want richer connections — a space for virtual book groups, the ability to get to know strangers based on their shared affinities, browse their friend’s libraries, consider their purchase recommendations? Could Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Apple implement something like this? Would they want to?

As it is, Copia isn’t the future of reading, publishing, e-retail or anything else. (All of these claims have been made at various points leading up to its launch.) Right now, it’s two things:

• a solid frontend client for Adobe Digital Editions;
• a very good proof-of-concept for how far you the social-network model can be extended into social reading.

That is not bad. If you’re a reader, you should check it out; see what works, and see what doesn’t. If you’re involved in this business in some other capacity, see what you can use — or what another, hungrier company might use to try to take you down.

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When will books benefit from the addition of multimedia magic? Narnia may hold the answer.

HarperCollins has released an enhanced e-book for C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in advance of the film adaptation of the same. The book is a perfect test case for the promises and flaws of the enhanced e-book market.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader isn’t an app, but a multimedia EPUB book. EPUB is as close as we have to a universal e-book standard. This immediately makes it multi-platform and multi-device — no need for separate iOS or Android code, or store approval. All you need is an application on those platforms that can read EPUB, and a touchscreen. EPUB books can’t be read on the Kindle, but the Kindle isn’t a multimedia touchscreen device either, so that’s no loss anyways.

The book is available for iBooks now, and according to the press release, “will be available on a number of handheld multimedia readers and touchscreen devices” — read: the forthcoming Nook Color, and possibly other Android tablets too. On all available platforms, it will cost $10.

Sometimes, enhancing e-books with multimedia seems like a solution in search of a problem. Generally, readers aren’t clamoring for enhanced books. Writers and publishers don’t always understand them, and there isn’t always good content to put in them.

Lewis’s Narnia books are different. They have a well-established readership and are broadly popular with both adults and children. They’ve already gone transmedia, spinning off games and movies; the writer’s estate is willing to develop and authorize new media, and companies like HarperCollins and Disney have the tools and incentives to develop them. The serial nature of the books, in turn, gives the books continuity and room to evolve.

What’s more, the visually rich and conceptually encyclopedic nature of the books means that adding maps, illustrations, animations, reference guides, and timelines actually become very useful reading aids. Add in audio readings and commentaries, critical essays, and you have something that could become the equivalent of a deluxe DVD edition of a beloved book.

Really, the deluxe DVD editions of The Lord of the Rings were enhanced e-books without us fully realizing it — at least those portions devoted to author JRR Tolkien, the writing of the books and the world of Middle Earth. That’s the standard against which we should judge enhanced e-books.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader doesn’t quite get there. I reviewed the iBooks version, which costs $10, $2 more than the $8 “non-enhanced” version. It gets the Pauline Baynes maps and illustrations, animation and reference encyclopedia right. This material alone is worth the extra $2.

But a promising “read along” feature, using audio from Shakespearean actor/audiobook standout Derek Jacobi’s reading of the book, is hopelessly crippled, providing just the first few paragraphs of each chapter. If you want to hear the whole thing, you’ll need to buy the separate audiobook, which costs another $17 from iTunes. Putting snippets of audio in the e-book feels like a terrible tease.

Again and again, enhanced e-books bump up against rights that have already been sold and assigned. The video content, including an animated timeline/summary of the story, is solid, but considering the e-book is intended as a cross-promotion with the film, it’s sad that it doesn’t even include previews from the film.

It’s a worthwhile object for what it is. But it’s ultimately frustrating, because the potential for an integrated object on video-capable e-readers like the iPad and Nook Color is so clear, at least to me.

The publishing industry, though, is so knotted — the media streams so legally and functionally fragmented — that the opportunities for a clear case study, an example that everyone can point to as a standard, get squandered again and again.

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Amazon keeps rolling out software applications for nearly every device it doesn’t make itself. Next up is the new player in the smartphone market, Windows Phone 7. The forthcoming WP7 Kindle app has virtually the same function as other mobile Kindle apps, but will have Microsoft’s look and feel.

I may have been the only e-reading-focused reporter at the Windows Phone 7 debut event. I asked everyone I could find about e-reading applications for the device. “Just stay tuned,” I was told.

I still couldn’t believe there wasn’t one or more e-reading apps announced at the launch. It’s become an assumed part of app-capable smartphones and tablets in what has to be record time. Having an app for Kindle is like having an app for Facebook or the New York Times.

Think about it: just a year ago, there were only a few e-book apps, some by companies that are dwindling if not long gone. Now nearly every e-bookstore has a reading app on every screen you can carry.

Kindle joins just one other e-reading application that will be in the application Marketplace: Wattpad. Sometimes called “the YouTube of eBooks,” Wattpad is a service where users share their own original writing; half e-book commons, half social network.

Wattpad looks great — but it’s neither an e-bookstore nor an e-book reading application as we’ve come to recognize it from the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks, Stanza or MobiPocket smartphone apps (this list goes on and on).

The Kindle app for WP7 may not be ready when the phones are officially ready for sale. If history is any guide, this won’t be the last e-reader app announcement you’ll hear between now and then.

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Photo credit: Tim Carmody/Wired.com.

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NEW YORK — Barnes & Nobles Nook Color is real. For $250, it may even be spectacular. Readers will find out for themselves sometime around November 19th.

Our customers snack on content of all kinds all day, Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch said in a press conference announcing the device. He called the new Nook Color the first readers tablet.

The booksellers second-generation e-reader takes aim at both Amazon and entry-level Android tablets. Like its predecessor, the Nook Color is powered by Android. But this e-reader gives Googles OS a bit more of a workout, ditching the low-power, monochrome E Ink display and the two-screen interface of the original Nook.

Instead, it’s got a 7-inch color LCD touchscreen made by LG. The screen technology is called “VividView” and incorporates an anti-glare coating, but is otherwise far closer to a tablet display than an e-book reader like the Kindle.
In related e-book reader news, Amazon announced Tuesday that the Kindle would be gaining a strictly limited e-book lending feature similar to what the B&N Nook has.

This graduates the Nook from dedicated e-reader to personal media player, if not quite a full tablet computer. In addition to Barnes & Nobles current library of EPUB-derived black-and-white e-books, the Nook Color will be able to display color books, photos and games, multimedia-enhanced ebooks, a good chunk of the web, and even video.

Opportunities to test out the new Nook Color were very limited. Barnes & Noble did not give reporters unfettered access to the device. Most of the press conference centered around giant mockups on the screen.

The first showpieces for Nook Color will be magazines and newspapers. Barnes & Noble has partnered with Cond Nast (the publisher of Wired and parent company of this website) and Hearst to offer magazines as both single issues and as subscriptions. (Apple lets publishers sell tablet magazines for its iPad, but hasnt sorted out subscriptions just yet.)

B&N is also inviting other developers to create interactive color reading content specifically for Nook Color. The company is starting a program for developers to create Android applications specifically for Nook Color, to be offered in the Nook store. At launch, the Applications section will offer Pandora for streaming music, a handful of games like Chess and Sudoku, and a gallery application for viewing photos and video.

You’ll also be able to upload media by mounting the Nook Color as a hard drive on your PC’s desktop (using a USB cable) and doing a drag-and-drop; it will support MP3 and AAC audio and MP4 video.

When you also consider the recently announced Nook Kids store for childrens books, Barnes & Noble’s strategy is clear: Flank Amazon, Apple and other Android devices by offering formats and genres at the seams, which the other devices hardware and marketplace models have difficulty handling. While Apple’s hardware offers vivid color and interactivity, and Amazon’s store is flush with books and periodicals, Nook Color will have both.

Nook Color will also leverage its Wi-Fi connection to integrate reading with popular social networks. Readers will be able to share comments and excerpts from books, newspapers or magazines via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter by opening up a submenu while viewing a document.

The interface will be familiar to existing Nook readers. In its default view, the library scrolls along the bottom quarter of the screen (where the old LCD touchscreen used to be), although you can also navigate in full screen.

Barnes & Noble was able to keep the device fairly lightweight; the Yves Bhar design weighs less than a pound and comes in at just one-half inch thick. It will have 8GB of internal storage and a microSD port for additional memory.

The battery life predictably suffers from supporting an LCD color screen, but Barnes & Noble claims it will still get around 8 hours of reading time.

There are some things the Nook Color won’t do. There’s no 3G option, which saves you some money and Barnes & Noble a lot, but does limit your ability to buy a book on a whim at an airport or hotel. It won’t have access to the Android Market or have the ability to run applications originally designed for other Android devices — you’ll be stuck with the apps Barnes & Noble picks, unless you opt to root/jailbreak your device.

Barnes & Nobles Nook has been available for less than a year, but its quickly established itself as a solid competitor to the Kindle, capturing 20% of the e-book retail market, a worthy Pepsi to Amazons Coke.

The company has leveraged its in-store presence and customer base, building in-store Nook boutiques and offering free Wi-Fi and book browsing in-store. Its also branched out from its own stores, selling its reader online, and at other retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy; it plans to continue that wide retail availability with Nook Color.

Barnes & Noble plans to continue selling the original Nook as an entry-level black-and-white E Ink reader for $150 and $200 and the company promises to continue to support and enhance the original device.

It’s clear, though, that Barnes & Noble is thinking of E Ink readers as a “segment of the e-reading market,” to borrow a phrase its executives used over and over again. Its bet is on interactive color as the e-reading standard of the future.

When asked whether Nook Color would cannibalize Barnes & Noble’s sales of print books, Lynch pointed to data suggesting that current Nook owners were actually buying more print books from Barnes & Noble.

“We plan to cannibalize other people’s physical book sales more than our own,” he added.

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Accessory makers are the weak link in keep any super-secret product launch super-secret, even if the folks making accessories are in the same company. So it’s not especially a surprise that a Nook Color Film Screen Kit appearing on (then quickly pulled from) BarnesAndNoble.com has leaked a likely image of the Nook Color a day early.

Barnes & Noble has a media event tomorrow (October 26) at its Union Square store where it’s expected to announce its next-generation Nook. On Friday, CNET reported sourced information that the new device would be called Nook Color, have a 7″ color-capable screen and retail for $249, splitting the difference between its current-generation E Ink Nook and more expensive Android or iOS tablets. Now a CNET source again has the Nook Color Film Screen Kit, featuring the image above.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Barnes & Noble is launching a subsite of its e-book store called NookKids.com. Nook Kids should have 12,000 chapter books available by this Sunday (October 31), with 100 or so picture books following in mid-November, and enhanced children’s books coming in early 2011.

Picture books suggest color screens and a mid-November availability for the Nook Color. (David Carnoy’s source at CNET also tipped towards a November release.) In addition to NookKids.com, Barnes & Noble has also registered NookColor.com. So if nothing else, the new device will almost definitely be called Nook Color.

Assuming the mockup above is a fair image of the new Nook Color, we’re looking at a single hardware button on the face — so touchscreen, probably Android-based like the first Nook.

As I reported Friday, the big question hanging over the Nook Color, like all color e-readers, is its choice of screen technology. E Ink is low-power and highly readable, even in direct sunlight, but is limited to grayscale still images. LCD and LED screens have great color and video capability, but are power-hungry and harder on the eyes for extended reading. Qualcomm’s Mirasol technology, which combines aspects of both (low power consumption, good readability, color/video capability) is still probably six months off, maybe longer for larger screens.

Barnes & Noble’s EPUB-based e-book format is color-capable, so they could switch over to producing color books without many problems. But Pandigital, a company that partnered with B&N on a touchscreen e-reader, produced an LCD color e-reader earlier this year that was generally considered a failure.

Unless Barnes & Noble’s has a really neat trick up their sleeve, they have some tough choices. It’s a huge gamble. When it comes to e-readers and e-books, adding more color, more interactivity, more features always seems like a good idea. But there’s a very fine line separating an absolutely amazing, incredibly capable e-reader and a really crappy, hamstrung tablet.

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Amazon has good news for Kindle owners that it wanted to share with them first. A post from the Kindle team on Amazon’s Kindle Community forum says that 14-day lending will come to the Kindle sometime this year.

There is a catch: “Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period.” If you’re familiar with Barnes & Noble’s lending feature on the Nook, this isn’t a surprise. “Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable – this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.” Again, to borrow some jargon, this is a known issue.

Books will be lendable both to Kindle owners and users of Kindle apps, which is nice: even if you don’t have your own Kindle, you can borrow an e-book from someone who does.

The Kindle team also revealed that Kindle app users will soon also be able to read Kindle magazines and newspapers through the app. Periodicals had been a Kindle-only feature. Support for newspapers and magazines is coming to iOS “in the coming weeks” and Android and other app platforms “down the road.”

Since there’s so much news about Kindle’s e-reading competition lately, I guess Amazon just wanted to let Kindle users know that the company still loved them — and more importantly, that it’s going to keep giving them reasons to love the Kindle.

Coming Soon for Kindle [Amazon/Kindle Community Forums, via Kindle Review]

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Rumors are swirling that Barnes & Noble’s next device after the first-generation Nook will be an Android-based, full-color, touchscreen e-reader. The company will reportedly announce the e-reader/tablet hybrid, called the Nook Color, at its October 26 media event in New York.

“It’s a big step ahead, instead of chasing Amazon,” a source told CNET editor David Canroy. Canroy identifies the source as an anonymous tipster “who has proven reliable in the past.”

Reportedly, the Nook Color will have be Android-based like the current Nook, have a 7-inch screen and retail for $249. It won’t have quite as much functionality as the iPad or a full Android tablet, but it will also cost much less.

Currently, the Nook has a custom Android-based OS, a 6″ black-and-white E Ink screen, a 3.5″ color touchscreen LCD for navigation, and costs $149 ($199 for a model with 3G). Barnes & Noble will reportedly continue to sell the current Nook along with the Nook Color.

Barnes & Noble has definitely long been interested in combining e-books with color. Earlier this year, Pandigital offered a 7″ color reader with access to Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore. The Pandigital Novel was available at many retail outlets, but was panned for poor hardware and interface design and went back to E Ink in its second iteration.

It’s possible that a color-capable Nook could use a Mirasol screen. Developed by Qualcomm, the Mirasol is low-power, is readable in direct sunlight, switches back and forth between color and black-and-white, and can play video. In August, we reported that Qualcomm was shipping 5.7″ screens at the end of 2010 for devices — including one from “a major client” — slated to appear in early 2011.

That doesn’t match the specs suggested by CNET’s source, which instead point to a 7″ LCD touchscreen. It would also mean that the new Nook wouldn’t appear until sometime next year at the earliest.

Barnes & Noble could also stick with the Nook’s two-screen approach, using a 5.7″ Mirasol screen for display and a 3.5″ LCD touchscreen for navigation. It may not run a full range of applications like a hybrid, but would be a solid media player, offering color books, photos, the web and some video on a single screen. Barnes & Noble could announce the device now, do preorders later this year, and begin shipping it in late winter or spring 2011.

That’s not quite as good as being able to sell it right away, but might slow the Kindle 3’s momentum. And with a firmware upgrade for existing Nooks on the way, they can continue to sell the discounted older device and plenty of e-books until the Nook Color arrives.

Image: Mirasol prototype e-reader.

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There have been other e-book price comparison sites, but I don’t think any of the others were built in 48 hours. A team of four developers built Leatherbound from scratch as part of this weekend’s Rails Rumble competition. It’s designed to help iOS app users (or anyone else who is platform-agnostic when it comes to e-books) compare prices across formats in a jiffy.

“No more searching the Kindle, Nook, and iBook stores to find the eBook you want at the price you want,” the site promises. “Search once with Leatherbound.”

There are a handful of devotes who own multiple e-readers, but Leatherbound is especially useful for readers who use the e-bookstores applications for desktops, tablets or smartphones — and consequently have greater ability and incentive to shop around. The inclusion of Apple’s iBooks suggests that the site is targeted for iPad and iPhone users, since iBooks isn’t available for any platform besides iOS.

Leatherbound has a simple but well-animated interface. When you enter in a search term (either author or title works equally well), you first get three matches for the book, with an option to load more results. Select a book, and the site fetches the prices from the Kindle, Nook and iBooks stores.

The book loads results as it finds them, meaning that it will show you a Kindle price even if it hasn’t yet found the book in Nook or iBooks. (When the site can’t find results, the “searching” wheel just never stops spinning.) Then there’s a button to tweet your search results — an easy way for readers to advertise a find or authors or publishers to let readers know about availability across the three major e-book stores, at least for iOS users. (Sony, Kobo and a few other e-bookstores are left out in the cold.)

Rails Rumble is “a kickass 48 hour web application development competition,” according to the official site, where contestants have “one caffeine-fueled weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that you can.” The competition has become popular among developers using the open-source web application framework Ruby on Rails.

According to the site’s otherwise self-satirizing “About” page, the four developers — Nathan Carnes, aka “The Hand of God,” Andrew Dumont (“The Suit”), Adrian Pike (“The Brain”) and Amiel Martin (“Mr Juggles”) met while working as developers for group text-messaging company Tatango.

When searching Leatherbound, be forewarned: like every new storefront, it’s a little crowded on its first day. An unexpected deluge of visitors from tech sites (including this one) have made the quickly-built service rather slow.

Leatherbound Helps You Compare eBook Prices and Availability [ReadWriteWeb]

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Amazon is announcing that a new kind of content will soon join books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs in the Kindle store. Called Kindle Singles, the 30-to-90 page e-chapbooks aim to split the difference between feature-length magazine articles and shorter books.

“Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format,” said Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti. The costs of print production, marketing and distribution have historically driven the page-counts of book monographs up and the word-counts of magazine and newspaper articles down.

Amazon said that Kindle Singles will have its own section in the Kindle store and will be priced “much less than a typical book.” Amazon will also grant authors and publishers the same royalty split for singles as on the Kindle Digital Text platform: 70% on books costing between $2.99 and $9.99.

There are print precedents for 10,000-to-30,000-word works — novellas, chapbooks, long pamphlets, extended journal articles, among others — but they’ve usually been either tied to specific genres or downright exceptions to the form. They’ve never been a central part of the publishing model in either fiction or nonfiction.

Translation Jackets for On Bullshit; Image by Princeton University Press

Kindle Singles is also unusual in calling on publishers to produce stand-alone “born-digital” works that may not ever be traditionally printed. Some publishers may use the form to sell individual sample or advance chapters of longer print books. Individual writers may benefit the most from the program, as it makes it easier for them to self-publish works that precisely for reasons of length can’t find support from traditional publishers.

Two further possibilities, particularly if other e-book retailers follow suit with similar chapbook-length offerings: digital-only publishers (or offshoot imprints) could emerge to produce works specifically for this format, or the additional revenue and marketing stream of electronic publishing could lead print publishers to produce more short-form books in print.

I wouldn’t discount this last possibility. In 2005, philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit became a surprise hardcover bestseller. Frankfurt’s “book” was a reprint of a journal article that had already been collected and published in a longer anthology. It sold over half a million copies and spawned a sequel, despite being just 67 pages long and printed in an unusually small 4″ by 6″ format.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

AirTurn’s Bluetooth foot-switch for iPad turns pages with the tap of a foot. It’s designed for keeping both hands free to play an instrument while reading digital sheet music. However, it may turn out to be an important technology for e-book readers with disabilities.

Gadget Lab wrote about AirTurn’s BT-105 prototype in July, but I discovered its accessibility potential in this thread at e-reading site TeleRead. A reader wrote the following email to TeleRead editor Paul Biba:

My friends grandson is bright, loves to read, but doesnt speak and lacks the fine motor skill to turn pages on his iPad book reader. Is there any software or device that could turn the pages for him?

Could you also ask if they know of an input device, do they know how a non-technical person would hook the input device to the iPad or computer?

I did my own research and was discouraged not to be able to find any purpose-built software or hardware to do the job. Late last night, reader “possentespirto” mentioned the AirTurn, which is still scheduled to be available sometime in Q4 of this year. Bluetooth pairing doesn’t require a great deal of technical wizardry, and the AirTurn foot pedal is already compatible with third-party software. This could be a terrific solution.

Users lacking either full control of their arms and hands or the limbs themselves could use the foot pedal to turn pages and zoom in on text; users with other disabilities could convert the foot clicker into a hand-clicker. In fact, the device reminds me of nothing so much as the clicker Stephen Hawking used to select text before he eventually lost control of his hands as well.

AirTurn’s foot-clicker may be too heavy or require too much force to be usable for some disabled users. Here’s where there’s a natural opportunity for an accessibility-minded company to build on this technology, make something explicitly for these readers and do it right.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

This week, K-NFB, an e-reading company founded by Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation for the Blind, launched its much-anticipated Blio reading app and e-book store. Blio was immediately and widely panned by publishers, developers, and readers.

“Many of the failures are fundamentally at odds with the one thing that Kurzweil was touting above all else: accessibility,” wrote Laura Dawson, a digital reading industry consultant, formerly of BarnesAndNoble.com. K-NFB promised immediately to make e-books more accessible to blind readers, yet Windows, currently its only enhanced books platform, has known text-to-speech conversion issues.

K-NFB spokesperson Ray Chapman acknowledged the problems with Blio’s text-to-speech in an interview with Publishers Weekly, but blamed the platform, not the books: the TTS software on most Windows machines isnt very good. Yet many Windows XP users were unable to even install Blio’s software. K-NFB currently offers a mobile reader for Nokia phones; Blio for Android and Mac OS X are reportedly “in the works,” and an iOS application is being beta-tested.

Users weren’t the only ones frustrated with Blio. Hadrian Gardeur, founder and CEO of free e-books site FeedBooks, complained on Twitter that Blio was offering downloads from FeedBooks’ catalog without permission: Hey Blio, next time that you add our OPDS [Open Publishing Distribution System] catalog to a commercial product, send us an e-mail first.

In a follow-up e-mail, Gardeur noted that FeedBooks only allows other systems to include their catalog under the following conditions:

• full support for the EPUB standard (Blio converts EPUB into its own format and can’t support EPUB with other companies’ DRM)
• support the entire OPDS catalog (Blio only includes some of FeedBooks’ feeds)
• Add other OPDS catalogs to its library (Blio can’t do that)
• allow payment for commercial content through open standards (Blio doesn’t)

For these reasons, Gardeur asked Blio not to include FeedBooks’ content in its initial launch: K-NFB went ahead and included part of the catalog anyways. Since FeedBooks has a planned system update in the works, it will most likely break Blio’s access to the catalog.

Finally, as we noted earlier this week, Toshiba launched its own branded version of the Blio application, store, and e-book catalog, Toshiba Book Place. Toshiba is offering 6,000 titles at launch; Blio 11,000. This puts Blio at a distinct disadvantage against the 700,000 e-books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers for sale from Amazon, and Barnes & Noble’s library of over 1,000,000 e-books.

It’s not precisely clear why there’s a gap in the number of books offered by Toshiba and Blio. But the brand and store fragmentation is another confusing component of a deeply confusing product launch. It’s especially troubling for those who have been hoping for serious innovation in making e-readers accessible to users of all abilities.

Image via Blio.com

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Image by Charlie Sorrel and Tim Carmody

There’s a lot of gadget news about Amazon today, so we’re going to take these items one at a time, in increasing order of uncertainty:

1. Amazon launches Beta version of Kindle for the Web. Think YouTube for books. You can preview short selections of books in your browser, embed them on web sites with a little bit of JavaScript, and customize the size (it won’t automatically keep the aspect ratio) or even add your Amazon Associate tag to the embed. Click through and it takes you to the book’s entry on the Amazon Kindle store. Level of certainty: This you can actually use right now.

   KindleReader.LoadSample({containerID: ‘kindleReaderDiv’, asin: ‘B003X28734′, width: ’640′, height: ’346′});

2. Amazon announces Kindle app for forthcoming RIM Playbook tablet. Makes perfect sense given yesterday’s Playbook announcement, natural extension of the Kindle app for Blackberry, iPad, and other platforms. Level of certainty: Actual press release from Amazon after high-profile announcement from RIM. I suppose a bolt of lightning could strike one or both companies tomorrow. But you can’t see it today.
3. Amazon to Launch Android App Store, which my pal Charlie Sorrel already let you know about. Level of certainty: Well-reported rumor. But it makes sense — Amazon sells a lot of stuff, and there are a lot of Android app stores — and it’s confirmed by multiple developer sources. Don’t be surprised if you hear details soon.
4. Amazon to Build Own Branded Android Tablet. Okay, so, a source comes to you with what seem like two wild, fan-fiction stories about Amazon and Android. You ask around, and one of them — an Amazon App Store — turns out to probably be in the works. Is the other story true?
   
   On the one hand, again — Amazon sells a lot of digital products online, not just e-books: movies, games, music. And it’s not hard to make an Android tablet. In fact, at this point, Amazon has more hardware-production experience with the Kindle than some of the companies that are coming forward with pretty solid products. Add an App Store and it starts to look pretty appealing.

   On the other hand, Amazon’s built up good brand identification with the Kindle, e-books, and E Ink. Will they turn around and say, “oh yeah, multimedia tablets are really awesome, but not, um, more awesome than a Kindle, I mean, um, why not buy both?” Just seems a little surprising. Level of certainty: Pretty cloudy. The source was right about an app store, but as they say, a stopped clock can be right twice a day. If Amazon releases some kind of other media hardware, whether using Android or anything else, it’s equally likely to be a TV box or a smartphone or something else that equally plays to their strength while being a little more differentiated from a dedicated reading machine than a tablet.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Image from Toshiba

Today, Toshiba will announce its entry into the e-book market with Toshiba Book Place, a Windows application to both purchase and read enhanced e-books. The application will be bundled with all of Toshiba’s laptops, and will also be available as a free download from their website. The library will initially offer 6,000 e-books for purchase.

Wired.com interviewed Terry Cronin, vice president of Business Development and Channel Marketing for Toshiba America. While e-books for dedicated e-readers and other devices have been successful, he believes e-books for laptops can offer something unique for particular kinds of reading — especially those that benefit from immediate access to other media.

“It’s a device that people already have,” he said. “If you’re traveling or bringing a bag, you’re already bringing your laptop with you. You don’t need to bring another device.”

Cookbooks, children’s books, and textbooks all benefit from the greater storage space and graphics capabilities of a laptop, Cronin said. The goal a library of e-books enhanced with 3-D viewing and embedded video, audio, and online search and web browsing.

Toshiba developed the application with futurist Ray Kurzweil’s K-NFB Reading Technology, Inc., a joint venture with the National Federation for the Blind. K-NFB is working with publishers to encode the books in the XPS e-book format and add video and audio enhancements to the e-book library.

It’s not clear to me whether this will work. There are already e-book applications from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others available for Windows laptops with a much wider selection of books and portability across devices. The hope is that XPS will catch on, and emerge as a standard alongside EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and other electronic document formats. Then the store will be able to expand to support other outlets.

Toshiba Book Place [ToshibaBookPlace.com]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Photo of third-generation Kindle. Courtesy Amazon.com

Amazon’s Kindle can do a lot more than just buy and read Amazon-sold e-books. This is often a surprise. I usually wind up in conversations where someone says “I’d like to try a Kindle, but it can’t _______.” Usually, it can.

I was actually surprised when I bought my Kindle not just by how much it could do, but by how well it did it. The Kindle suffers from two things: 1) it’s never going to do everything that a full-fledged computer or even a color touchscreen tablet can do; and 2) the Kindle 3 has improved on a whole slew of features that were either poorly implemented in or entirely absent from earlier iterations of the Kindle.

Here I want to gather up knowledge generated from and circulated by many of my favorite e-reader blogs, just to try to give you an inkling of all the things that a new Kindle can do. For organizational purposes, I’m going to do it as a Q&A. Most of these questions I’ve actually been asked (some of them frequently); others are rhetorical. (There are many features you wouldn’t even think to ask about.)

Q. Can the Kindle read PDFs?

A. Yes — and it actually handles them very well. You don’t need to email yourself copies; you can hook up your Kindle to your computer through a USB cable, mount the Kindle’s drive, and drag-and-drop.

One big suggestion. Just because of its screen size, viewing PDFs on the Kindle is much better if they’re oriented in portrait rather than landscape, and if they’re single-page documents rather than spreads (i.e., where a book is scanned/photocopied two pages at a time). Printed office documents, downloaded journal articles, maps, etc., all look great. They’re monochrome, obviously, but they read as well as an e-book. You can even highlight and annotate them just like you can Kindle books — that is, assuming they’re real text PDFs, not just bundled images.

Q. Can I read free/public-domain books on the Kindle?

A. Yes, and you should. Amazon “sells” a number of public-domain books for $0 through the Kindle store. You can also download public-domain books from Project Gutenberg and Google Books. In fact, that’s where a lot of Amazon’s free books come from.

At TeleRead, Kindle World blogger Andrys Basten points out that Project Gutenberg actually has a mobile version of its website where you can download Kindle-compatible e-books directly. Just fire up your Kindle’s web browser and go to m.gutenberg.org.

Virtually all mobile-optimized web sites look terrific on the Kindle’s web browser, and Project Gutenberg’s is no different. You can search or browse by author, title, subject, release date, or popularity, and download Kindle books with or without images included.

Select a book, scroll downwards (using the “next page” button allows you to scroll quickly), and select the “Kindle” version. (There are also HTML, EPUB, and TXT available, usually.) Your Kindle will show you a scary message, saying “Do you really want to download pg###.mobi? It will be available on your Home screen.” Don’t worry. “pg###” is just the Project Gutenberg internal title of the book. It will still show up on your Kindle by its proper book title. And it’s GOOD that the book will be available on your home screen; that’s where all of your other books are kept.

Q. Wait a minute, you just said something about Google Books. Can I read ePub files on the Kindle too?

A. It’s true: Google Books allows you to download public-domain books not in Kindle’s AZW or MOBI formats, but in the competing EPUB standard. But there are a couple of good ways to convert ePub files without DRM into Kindle-compatible formats.

If you are For Real about digging into e-books, I advise you to download the multi-platform e-book management app Calibre immediately. Among its other virtues (e-reader client, e-library manager) Calibre is an e-book-converting monster:

Input Formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC**, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TCR, TXT

Output Formats: EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, TCR, TXT

If you are like 90% of Kindle users, the important input formats in that list are EPUB — and the two comic-book formats CBZ and CBR. The important output formats are MOBI and PDF — either of which your Kindle can read without a problem.

What’s more, Calibre will sync these files to your Kindle. Mounting, dragging, and dropping are pretty easy already, but since the books are already in Calibre, this can make it even easier.

If you don’t want to bother with Calibre — for some people, the sheer scope of the application is overwhelming and even I haven’t tried everything it can do — there’s also RetroRead, a free site/service that converts EPUBs from Google Books to Kindle- and iOS-friendly formats.

Q. I don’t like using a USB cable, and some of these sites say they can send books to my Kindle wirelessly. Don’t I have to pay to have documents sent wirelessly to my Kindle?

A. You do have to pay Amazon to have non-Amazon docs converted and sent to your device if it’s over 3G. The key thing to avoid charges is to always sign up for services using your username@free.kindle.com email address. If you do this, then your device will only add documents when it’s using Wi-Fi — and that’s free.

Q. What’s my username?

A. It’s often identical to the username of the email address that you use to sign in to Amazon. If you’re not sure, go to Amazon’s “Managing Your Kindle” page, which is a great resource for all of this.

Q. Can other people send things to my email address to spam me/make me pay for document delivery?

A. You have to authorize every user who can send a document to your Kindle. I’ve actually never used this to authorize a group of trusted friends to share and convert e-books, but that’s a great idea.

Q. How can I read blogs and websites on my Kindle?

A. The new web browser — based on WebKit, the same rendering engine as Safari and mobile Safari — is so much better than previous instances that usually you can use this to read blogs without any special conversion.

For some reason the web browser is still listed under the “Experimental” menu, but this thing is ready to go. Among friends, we suspect that Amazon doesn’t actually want to advertise how good the web experience is, because it’s on the hook for all the 3G data its users consume.

Again, I prefer the mobile versions of most websites to the standard ones; you don’t have to pan/zoom, but it’s not hard to bookmark your favorites. (Liberal use of bookmarks also saves you from repeat typing, which is improved but still not fantastic.) Mobile versions of text-heavy websites (like mobile Twitter, Instapaper, Google Reader, etc.) look and function the very best.

The other amazing improvement in the new Kindle browser is something called “Article Mode.” This is identical to the new “Reader” button in Safari, or the Readability bookmarklet. Basically, if you go to an ordinary web page, and it’s cluttered with images, ads, or laid out in a way that’s hard to read on your Kindle, click the “Menu” button and then “Article Mode.” Instantly the web page will be laid out in an easy-to-read text column, just like if you’d sent it to Instapaper.

Q. Instapaper? I love Instapaper!

A. Me too!

Q. How can I send web articles I save in Instapaper to my Kindle?

A. Ah. Well, you can navigate through the web interface, which is pretty good. Or, you can have Instapaper send articles to your Kindle device. Again, make sure you use your @free.kindle.com address to avoid getting dinged for 3G transmission charges. Now, instead of being in your browser, your Instapaper articles will be grouped with and formatted like Newspapers and Magazines. Instapaper’s Marco Arment has said that using the Kindle is his “favorite way to read content from Instapaper.” And that was on the janky old Kindle 2. Might a Kindle Instapaper app be in the works? Methinks quite possibly yes.

Q. I’d hate having to scroll through a long home screen. Can I sort my books, articles, PDFs, or whatever into folders?

A. Yes. They’re called “Collections.” From your “Home” screen, click the “Menu” button — there are a lot of keys on the keyboard, but “Menu,” “Home,” the directional keys, Return, Select, and the page turn buttons are your friends — and choose “Create New Collection.” Once you’ve created it, you can add/remove items, change how you sort through them — the works. Great way to group by kind, genre, category, or even levels of attention.

Q. How can I share books I read with my friends and family?

A. Ah. This is a sore spot, as Barnes and Noble’s Nook has promised some limited ability to lend out e-books. Kindle doesn’t really have that. However, there are some clever ways to get the same functionality.

First, you can share an Amazon account with another person and authorize both of your devices to download e-books purchased from that account. This is probably most obvious for families, who often buy from a single Amazon account anyways. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t do the same with a group of friends. The trouble is that each Kindle is tied to one account. So if you’re reading e-books in a group account, you’re only reading e-books in that group account.

With free books, it’s not a problem to share either. As I mentioned above, every user can authorize a number of e-mail addresses to send documents to their Kindle. This is a great way to share PDFs or free books you’ve converted in Calibre.

Q. I read a little bit in English, but my first language is German. Can I change the default menu/user-interface language?

A. Aha. As far as I can tell, definitely not on the Kindle itself. The only way you can change the “country” setting is by entering in an address on the web site. I think this is a huge disadvantage to the device, and shows some of the limitations in how Amazon thinks of its user base. Even in the United States, there are plenty of readers who would prefer to have their menu language displayed in Spanish, French, or other languages.

Q. Can I use Twitter on the Kindle?

A. Yes. Kindle’s 2.5 update added a feature where you could share passages or tweet about books. As for working with Twitter itself, again, I recommend the mobile site, mobile.twitter.com. New Twitter is translucent and beautiful in an ordinary web browser, but that beauty if totally lost on the Kindle.

Reading mobile Twitter on the Kindle is a blast. You can even use your page turn keys to quickly scroll up and down. You can easily favorite or use the built-in retweet. Typing tweets on mobile Twitter… Hmm…

Well, I’ll say this. I don’t like writing tweets using Twitter’s web page anyways. And the keyboard on the Kindle 3 is much-improved, but still no champ. If you’re used to either a full keyboard OR a smartphone’s software typo corrections and autofills, the Kindle is bound to disappoint.

The Kindle excels as a reader, not a writer. Really, the keyboard is there to enter in search terms, not to compose. It doesn’t have number keys, for example — although you use those to enter in URLs or email addresses all the time. (You have to press the “Sym” button to get access to numbers, @-signs, etc.)

Okay! For now, that’s all I’ve got. I hope I’ve answered at least some of your questions. If you have more, let them rip in the comments and I’ll do my best!

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

With the success of the Kindle, Nook, Sony readers, and tablets like the iPad, it seems like electronic books have finally arrived. But I think we’re actually still stuck in between two developmental phases on the way to the future.

For a long time, work on interactive books was about building either theory or prototypes. People talked about what multimedia reading might or could or should look like, and they built what were mostly one-off or low-volume projects using CD-ROMs, software applications, or the web.

Now, though, the theory and the prototypes have blended: even when designers and programmers don’t have the resources to put their ideas into production, they have the visual tools (and we have the device literacy) to make concept videos that explain clearly what we think/hope the future of reading will look like.

Here are three examples. The first (which you may have already seen) is from Microsoft, demonstrating its aborted Courier tablet project:

The second, which I think is very smartly done, is from the design consultancy firm IDEO. It details three concepts: “Nelson,” a reading application that incorporates commentary on and context for the primary text; “Coupland,” a reader with a built-in social- and sharing-network; and “Alice,” an interactive/participatory reading/gaming app where readers can “unlock” elements of a story by manipulating the device or traveling to geotagged places.

This third concept video, from Canadian new-media-publishing firm PadWorx, is for an interactive electronic version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula scheduled to ship this fall:

The breadth of approaches reflects the difference in backgrounds. There are relatively few people currently working in this space with a long history of working on interactive fiction. E-books — even future-concept e-books — assembled by traditional publishers or booksellers tend to look like a traditional publisher’s or bookseller’s idea of what a book ought to look like. Microsoft casts a wide net, but it’s fundamentally a computer software company; IDEO has futurists who work in design and advertising; PadWorx’s e-book is assembled by makers with a background in film, animation, and video game design, and it shows.

For another view of an actual (not projected/conceptual) application — one perhaps driven slightly more by a mobile app designer’s experience — look again at Stephen Fry’s wonderful, autobiographical myFry app:

I don’t think anyone knows exactly what the future of reading will look like. But I think we may finally have a handle on how we might try to see and explain it before it finally arrives.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Image by VirginAmerica.com

I flew Virgin America for the first and only time in December 2008, from New York to San Francisco. When I used its interactive back-of-the-headrest food-and-media menu, the first button I pressed, naturally, was Books. “Coming soon,” it said. Two years later, when you use the menu, books are still “coming soon.”

eBookNewser’s Dianna Dilworth recently had the same experience, and wondered whether Virgin might be on the verge of brokering some content agreements to finally bring reading into the picture:

There are a number of ways that it could work. Perhaps you could sign in to an existing Amazon or Barnes & Noble account and access your digital bookshelf directly. Or perhaps the airline could sell bestsellers or short stories directly. Think Atlantic Fictions monthly short stories in the Kindle store.

It could also be a great place for publishers to market their books and give away sample chapters. I like to catch up on new music videos on Virgins entertainment system, so why not read a couple of chapters from a few new bestsellers to decide which ones I might actually like to buy and read.

Some objections and counterarguments: Don’t people already bring their own books and magazines onto planes? Why would you want to buy one from Virgin? True: but airplanes and airports do a brisk business selling at a markup plenty of things you could consume more cheaply at home or on the ground. Books would be no different. You’re paying for convenience — or, looked at another way, as penance for your poor planning.

Don’t e-readers, tablets, laptops, and online Wi-Fi make this moot? People won’t read from the back of a headrest — they’ll read on the devices they own already. Also true. But don’t discount the power of free, ad-subsidized, or exclusive reading materials. Some of the fun of using these screens is the entertainment/video-game aspect of it: let me goof around with this and see if I can find anything good. And Virgin already lets their first-class and business-class (excuse me, “Main Cabin select”) customers enjoy all the entertainment they want. If Dilworth is right, publishers could use sample chapters or whole books like music labels use music videos — as promotional material targeted for an affluent, tech-savvy audience that literally can’t get out of their seats.

Obviously, in the future, this won’t be limited to Virgin, or even to airplanes: you could imagine similar screens being deployed on trains or intercity buses, performing the same multimedia functions. As these tiny screens become more ubiquitous and we become more accustomed to reading from them, the more likely it becomes that we’ll do more and more reading of all kinds on screens anywhere and everywhere. But as Dilworth says, there’s something about reading books on airplanes that just makes sense.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Amazon’s new commercial puts the Kindle in the best possible light: poolside, in the hands of a beautiful, bikini-clad woman. It even works in a dig at the iPad and other LCD tablets; the dweeby guy next to the Kindle reader can only see his own ugly reflection.

This video has been percolating around the tech blogosphere for a couple of days, but I don’t think anyone has gotten it quite right. (I was off yesterday. Sorry.) I honestly don’t think it’s about competing with the iPad, or touting the benefits of non-reflective screens, as much as it’s about re-positioning the Kindle in the popular imagination.

Think back three years to when the Kindle was first announced. Yes, there was a splashy cover story about the future of reading. But everyone agreed: the device itself was ugly, it was expensive, and its market was limited to rich bookwormy dorks who needed something to read on airplanes where the physical world could vanish behind the virtual mindspace of a not-quite-real book.

Now, the Kindle is stylish; it’s relatively inexpensive; and the world in which you read it doesn’t look like a place you’d want to escape from at all. That is, apart from your nosy neighbors and their self-involved not-quite-pickup lines.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

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Sony 350 with Cover from Sony Style

Remember Sony? The company that owned innovative high-end electronics for a few decades? Well, they make e-book readers. While we don’t write about them as often as the Kindle or iPad, some of Sony’s readers are really good. Their newest and prettiest model will be available stateside this week; it’s definitely worth a closer look.

The most attention-grabbing feature of the new Sony is the fact that its e-Ink screen responds to touch input. The touch sensors aren’t actually in the screen, but are triggered by infrared sensors all around the screen’s edges. Invisible beams respond when your finger breaks the plane of the screen — just like security devices in a spy movie. You don’t even have to actually physically touch the screen for the sensors to respond, just get within the sensor’s threshold.

The Sony PRS-350 has the same Pearl high-contrast e-Ink screen as the Kindle, but in a slightly smaller form factor (5″ instead of 6″). According to iReader Review (and as you can see from the gallery above), this knocks the image and text quality of the old Sony Readers out of the park. And because the new Pocket Reader doesn’t have a hardware keyboard, the whole device is only 5 3/4″ x 4 1/8,” and just a shade over 1/3″ thick.

Like all Sony Readers, it supports both ePub and PDF with or without DRM. The body design is gorgeous, and the build quality is reportedly top-notch.

So we have a tiny, touchscreen e-Ink reading machine that might even display images and tiny fonts better than the new Kindle. Did Sony just make the long-awaited “paperback e-reader” to move the whole show?

No; unfortunately, they didn’t. Here’s why.

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The Sony Pocket reader has no internet capability at all. No Wi-Fi, no 3G. Nothing.

This means that while it’s terrific for reading books, you can’t use it to read anything else. No checking email, no using Instapaper, no Google Reader.

Speaking of Instapaper and RSS readers — there’s also the specter of the Amazon App Store, which promises to add a lot more functionality to the Kindle. Functionality that’s likely to be dependent in no small part on web access. Even if Sony starts thinking seriously about casual gaming on their e-Readers — and frankly, I think moving in the other direction and putting e-Books on PSPs is a lot more likely — they’re still moving uphill.

In a follow-up review, iReader Review notes that actually loading books onto the Pocket Reader is a giant pain. “Its not just that you cant get books to Sony 350 wirelessly in 60 seconds. You cant get books to it in 60 seconds period… Sony proves that its a hardware company and not a software company.” He notes lots of other user-experience problems with the device, too, including an imagined vignette where Sony asks its software design team to take this magical device and completely screw up the UI.

Finally, it costs $179; $10 less than the 3G Kindle (which gets you free 3G forever), and $40 more than the Wi-Fi only Kindle ($30 more than the Wi-Fi Nook), both of which still get you wi-fi. A 20-25% markup is a lot to pay for a touchscreen.

Face it — two months ago, the Sony Pocket Reader would have been a cannonball in the world of e-readers. It would have been cheaper and more capable than nearly anything on the market. But the Kindle 3, with its improved screen and WebKit browser, is actually turning into something more than a repository for e-books.

Sony’s made a gorgeous one, and I think it will appeal to many, many people. Seriously — it’s appealing to me. But it doesn’t look like the future.

According to Sony Style USA, the silver Pocket Reader is available for order now and will ship tomorrow (the 14th); the pink version can be preordered and should ship Thursday (the 16th).

P.S.: Whatever you do, don’t try to find this e-reader by searching for “Sony 350.” Sony makes a kajillion products from cameras to DVD players that all have “350″ somewhere in their official handle. It’s a nightmare. Why they don’t just call the thing “Pocket Reader” is completely beyond me.

All images courtesy of iReader Review.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Photograph of Stphane Mallarm’s Un Coup de Ds, Public Domain

E-readers have tried to make reading as smooth, natural, and comfortable as possible. The ideal is for the device and text to fade away and immerse you in the imaginative experience of reading. This is a worthy goal. It’s also a profound mistake.

This is what worries Wired’s Jonah Lehrer about the future of reading. He notes that when “the act of reading seems effortless and easy… [w]e dont have to think about the words on the page.” If every act of reading becomes divorced from thinking, then the worst fears of “bookservatives” have come true, and we could have an anti-intellectual dystopia ahead of us.

Lehrer cites research by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene showing that reading works along two pathways in the brain. When we’re reading familiar words laid out in familiar sequences within familiar contexts, our brain just mainlines the data; we can read whole chunks at a time without consciously processing their component parts.

When we read something like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, on the other hand — long chunks of linguistically playful, conceptually dense, sparsely punctuated text — our brain can’t handle the information the same way. It goes back to the same pathways that we used when we first learned how to read, processing a word, phoneme, or even a letter at a time. Our brain snaps upright to attention; as Lehrer says, “[a]ll the extra work the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words wakes us up.”

I think Lehrer makes a few mistakes here. They’re subtle, but decisive. I also think, however, that he’s on to something. I’ll try to lay out both.

First, the mistakes. I think Lehrer overestimates how much the material form of the text — literally, the support — contributes to the activation of the different reading pathways in the brain. This actually deeply pains me to write down, because I firmly believe that the material forms in which we read profoundly affect how we read. As William Morris says, “you can’t have art without resistance in the material.”

But that’s not what Dehaene’s talking about. It’s when we don’t understand the words or syntax in a book that we switch to our unfamiliar-text-processing mode. Smudged ink, rough paper, the interjection of images, even bad light — or, alternatively, gilded pages, lush leather bindings, a gorgeous library — are not relevant here. We work through all of that. It’s the language that makes this part of the brain stop and think, generally not the page or screen.

Second, it’s always important to remember that there are lots of different kinds of reading, and there are no particular reasons to privilege one over the other. When we’re scanning the news or the weather (and sometimes, even reading a blog), we don’t want to be provoked by literary unfamiliarity. We want to use that informational superhighway that our brain evolved and that we have put to such good use processing text.

Reading is, as the philosophers say, a family-resemblance concept; we use the same words to describe different acts that don’t easily fall under a single definition. It’s all textual processing, but when we’re walking down a city street, watching the credits to a television show, analyzing a map, or have our head deeply buried in James Joyce, we’re doing very different things. And in most cases, we need all the cognitive leverage we can get.

Now, here’s where I think Lehrer is right: overwhelmingly, e-books and e-readers have emphasized — and maybe over-emphasized — easy reading of prose fiction. All of the rhetoric is about the pure transparency of the reading act, where the device just disappears. Well, with some kinds of reading, we don’t always want the device to disappear. Sometimes we need to use texts to do tough intellectual work. And when we do this, we usually have to stop and think about their materiality.

We care which page a quote appears on, because we need to reference it later. We need to look up words in other languages, not just English. We need displays that can preserve the careful spatial layouts of a modernist poet, rather than smashing it all together as indistinguishable, left-justified text. We need to recognize that using language as a graphic art requires more than a choice of three fonts in a half-dozen sizes. Some text is interchangable, but some of it is through-designed. And for good reason.

This is where we’ve been let down by our reading machines — in the representation of language. It isn’t the low-glare screens, or the crummy imitative page-turn animations. They’ve knocked those out of the park.

In fact, we’ve already faced this problem once. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, book production went into overdrive, while newspapers and advertising were inventing new ways to use words to jostle urban passers-by out of their stupor.

Writers wanted to find a way to borrow the visual vitality of what was thought of as ephemeral writing and put it in the service of the conceptual richness and range of subject matter that had been achieved in the nineteenth-century novel.

That’s where we get literary and artistic modernism — not only Joyce, but Mallarm, Stein, Apollinaire, Picasso, Duchamp, Dada, Futurism — the whole thing. New lines for a new mind, and new eyes with which to see them.

That’s what e-books need today. Give us the language that uses the machines, and it doesn’t matter if they try to get out of the way.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Just as the e-readers market seemed poised for a shakeout, Sharper Image–a store best known for its R2-D2 droids and ionic air purifier–has decided to jump in with a new e-reader.

Sharper Image has announced ‘Literati,’ a device with a color screen that will retail for $160. The device will be powered by the Kobo e-book store. Literati will have Wi-Fi connectivity, wireless book downloads and free reading apps.

The Literati has been created after an “extensive two-year design and development process,” says Sharper Image, and will ship nationwide in early October.

The Literati comes to market at a time when upstart e-readers are disappearing. Price wars by the big three e-reader makers–Amazon, Sony and Barnes & Noble and competition in the category has taken its toll on companies. Earlier this month, Foxit announced it will stop development on its eSlick e-reader. Plastic Logic canceled its plans to bring its e-reader to market, while Cool-er’s e-readers have been listed out of stock in the U.S. for months.

Meanwhile, bigger e-reader makers are ramping up their marketing efforts. Barnes & Noble has started aggressively selling the Nook reader in its stores. Amazon new, improved Kindle e-reader also seems to have turned into best-seller with Amazon racing to keep up with the demand.

Literati will wade into this fiercely competitive market. The color screen on the device is interesting. Though the company hasn’t offered any details about it, it is likely to be an LCD display. But the device doesn’t have a big price advantage over its rivals. The Literati costs just $20 less than the $190 Kindle.

What it has going for it is an impressive retail distribution network. The Literati will be available in stores such as Bed Bath & Beyond, Best Buy, JC Penney, Kohls and Macys.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

You might think it was already dead, but sales for the Barnes & Noble Nook (both B&N-branded hardware and multi-platform software apps) are booming.

The company’s web stores are doing great, too: B&N has a bigger share of the market in digital books (an estimated 20 percent) than it has in physical books.

That’s pretty good considering the Nook’s only been available for nine months, and the company still generates more revenue selling hardcovers and paperbacks than anyone, including Amazon.

Surprised? It’s easy to think about e-reading as a two-horse race, with Amazon’s austere text-centric Kindle facing off against Apple’s “magical” iPad, like PCs vs Macs or Protestants vs Catholics. And it’s true, Barnes & Noble lost money this past quarter, partly because it’s still sorting out its messy relations with its investors.

But Barnes & Noble is for real, and isn’t going anywhere. In the religious analogy, the Nook might be, I don’t know, Judaism, trying to adapt to a newer world while holding onto its traditional community.

Barnes & Noble has consistently gone for a hybrid strategy: providing touch and text, tightly integrating e-sales with its existing stores while also selling the Nook at Best Buy, letting its books be read on the Nook as well as other platforms. B&N’s apps for PC and Mac are arguably best-in-class (bonus points, too, for getting its Mac app out way before Amazon’s). The company is doubling down on (and rebranding) its apps for mobile devices. And it’s drawing on a solid base of neighborhood customer/members and university bookstores. Even as Amazon cuts its prices and diversifies its models to match the Nook, it can’t match Barnes & Noble’s deep reach into the real world.

According to B&N, its members with Nooks have increased their spending by 20%. The company’s building and staffing Nook boutiques in its stores. The idea is that you’ll go buy the Nook in the store, learn how to use it in the store, browse through titles (for free) in the store. And by the way, you might also want to buy some coffee, have lunch, pick up a photo album — all goods with better margins than books.

If the Kindle offers the promise of books anywhere at once and nowhere in particular, the Nook keeps alive the idea that books have a place. And the best place, Barnes & Noble thinks, is in one of its stores.

Photo credit: orb9220/Flickr

Related posts:

• 5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
• Nook Software Update Adds Web Browser, Chess
• Wi-Fi Only Nook For $150 in Best Buy
• 5 Things That Make Us Want Barnes & Noble’s Nook E-Reader

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Publishing professionals and the journalists who cover the industry approach electronic books fundamentally differently from technology journalists and enthusiasts. Just as technophiles’ debates over open vs. closed systems or the relative value of different programming languages rarely filter down to the uninitiated, publishers’ attention to agency vs wholesale models and dramatic power plays between agents, retailers, and publishers can initially be confusing to folks not directly involved.

For example, before Amazon announced its new Kindle last week, the major — and I mean, epoch-making — news in these circles was literary agent Andrew Wylie finally making good on his threat to bypass publishers and ink a deal giving the exclusive e-book rights to his agency’s backlist to Amazon through his imprint called Odyssey Editions. This means that books by Borges, Nabokov, Rushdie, Roth, Ellison, Updike, and Erdrich — some of which had been unavailable in any electronic format — are now available but can now only be bought for the Kindle. It’s the most serious skirmish in a longstanding industry-wide debate between publishers and authors’ representatives over the proper royalty rate authors should receive for e-books, and (in some cases) who owns the rights to electronic versions of a book altogether.

These are arguments readers rarely have the interest or need to pay attention to — until someone claiming the rights to a book (say, George Orwell’s 1984) turns out not to have proper ownership of it, forcing Amazon to remotely remove the book from readers’ machines. Or The legal and economic agreements girding the foundation of the publishing industry, including the sale and availability of e-books, turn out to be like the plumbing running through your house — until there’s a crisis, there isn’t much need to pay attention to it.

I asked publishing professional Don Linn, who’s worked as a book distributor and small press print publisher before starting a much-anticipated but short-lived digital only press called Quartet that closed operations last year, to expand on some points he made on his publishing and technology blog about what he called “L’affaire Wylie.” What became clear is that even publishers, agents, and retailers, who’ve rightly been focused on signing writers and selling books, didn’t appreciate how much the arcana of the business would matter in the move to digital platforms.

Publishing metadata, for instance — things like ISBNs, trim size, etc. — has traditionally been one of the dullest aspects of the business, useful for selling to retailers and libraries but not much else. Now, however, publishers are expanding their definition and uses of metadata, to make their titles easier to find in text searches. Readers don’t care about metadata — until they can or can’t find the book they’re looking for. “Making a title discoverable in a world where hundreds of thousands of books are published each year is more critical than when only tens of thousands were being published,” Don says. “Basically, if you do a poor job with your metadata, you’re hosed.” Metadata is good information management, but in a search-driven business, good marketing too.

There’s also the even thornier issue of rights and licensing — for instance, whether e-books count as a primary right (like the right to print and sell a book in a specific geographic area) or a subsidiary right (like a translation, or in some cases merchandizing). Evan Schnittman of Bloomsbury Publishing wrote a terrific post delineating the specific kinds of rights and royalty rates assigned to each, arguing forcefully that e-books like those sold for the Kindle have to be considered a primary rather than a subsidiary right, since the work of editors, designers, marketers, etc., is the same for each; and most importantly, because the shared ecosystem of print and digital sales means that sale of an e-book typically substitutes for the sale of a printed book.

This may be one reason why innovation in e-books often takes the form of transmedia promotion of print books, like the popular and acclaimed “Cathy’s Book” iPhone app. The app, in this case, is part of a broad network of objects, including the printed text(s) and web sites, positioning the book as part of an alternative reality game (ARG). But what about genuinely self-contained multimedia books, the long-promised synthesis of text, images, video, music, and interactivity that futurists have long-awaited? Are those rights identical to those of a plain-vanilla text e-book like those sold for the Kindle? What happens to them? Linn is wary:

The skill sets required to produce a first class enhanced title are simply not resident in publishing houses, nor are those most qualified to bring those skills to the party likely to choose book publishing as the most promising career path. Because of this, if I were an agent or author, I’d be very careful about which rights (therre’s that word again) I licensed to book publishers unless and until the publisher can demonstrate that it can take full advantage of anything beyond print, digital and audio.

He added that the major e-book retailers were unlikely to do much to push for enhanced titles, or create them: “I could see Apple getting involved as a way to expand hardware sales in the education or business market, though they’ve shown no inclination to create content so far.” Amazon and Barnes & Noble have been cool towards enhanced texts — although Amazon does sell some enhanced ebooks in its Kindle store that, oddly, can’t be read on the Kindle — and are likely to follow the market, rather than lead, according to Linn.

What does this mean for the average reader, trying to bet on a platform or waiting for an immersive experience reading an enhanced version of Austerlitz or House of Leaves? If exclusive ebook deals bypassing the publisher become the rule, some books you want simply won’t be available for the hardware you have. And ultimately, your device’s capabilities will be secondary to whether or not a rights holder has the technical skills and legal clearances to bring the product to market. It may be a few years before the real future of the book is settled. And then, if history is any guide, only for a moment.

Photo credit: www.cathysbook.com

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Just days after updating the hardware Kindle with a smaller, cheaper model, Amazon has updated the Kindle app for iOS devices and it remains the same size and the same price (free). This release brings something for everyone in the form of iOS4 compatibility and general improvements.

There are a few dull but worthy additions: fast app-switching on the iPhone 4, improved search on the iPhone and iPod Touch and something has been done to the line-spacing on the iPad to “improve” it. But that’s boring. Much meatier are Google and Wikipedia lookup for words, along with a 250,000-word dictionary. Interestingly, this dictionary isn’t included in the download itself, but is pulled down the first time you highlight a word. Google and Wikipedia lookups whisk you off to Safari. An in-app browser would be nice, but I guess with the fast app-switching, it wouldn’t save much time.

The best news for iPad users is that there is now searching inside books, so buying cook-books from the Kindle store now makes sense. And that’s it. Like the new Kindle, none of the new features is huge in itself, but together they make an already good product better.

Kindle for iPhone and iPad [iTunes]

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Jeff Bezos has survived the iPad.

Predictions that Apple’s bright tablet computer would be a Kindle-killer haven’t quite come to pass: Amazon CEO Bezos says that the growth rate in sales of his e-reading device has tripled since June, when he dropped the Kindle price to $189. (Clearly increased competition from other e-readers, like Sony Reader and the Barnes and Noble Nook, hasn’t dampened the Kindle fire, either.) And he’s still kvelling over last week’s announcement that e-book sales on Amazon exceed the number of hardback books sold by the e-commerce site. “And that’s with a device at the end of its product life cycle,” he says.

The cycle of life resets on August 27, when Amazon will ship the third-generation Kindle. Judging from a brief hands-on demo, the new Kindle — which still costs $189 — isn’t a drastic makeover but a canny evolution that enhances the device’s raison d’etre: reading.

But by also releasing a lower-cost ($139) version of the Kindle without 3G wireless connectivity, Bezos anticipates millions of new customers who can live with waiting for a Wi-Fi hot spot to replenish their content. He says that the introduction of the Wi-Fi version is purely a price play, a way to sell Kindles to families and couples who already have one in the house.

“At $139, you’re going to have multiple Kindles, not just one,” Bezos says.

Consistent with Amazon’s past practice, Bezos revealed no specifics about Kindle sales to date, other than to say that “millions” have already been sold.

This year’s Kindle comes in either the classic ivory or an earthier graphite hue. The most significant improvement–perhaps as a ’sez you’ to the crisp iPad screen–is a sharper e-ink display than previous Kindles. Bezos claims that the contrast is 50 percent better, due in part to a proprietary technology involving “font hinting” which more skillfully manipulates the electronic ink that forms the letters.

Also, as Apple’s CEO has been known to say, “It’s really thin!” The new Kindle is a svelte 1/3 of an inch thick and weighs 8.7 ounces, making it 21 percent smaller than the 2G Kindle. This makes Kindle lighter than a paperback, while the iPad is heavier than Infinite Jest. (Eventually, Bezos says, he’d like to make the Kindle so light “you’d need a paperweight to hold it down.”)

“Our best estimate is that Kindle books will outsell paperbacks sometime in the next nine to twelve months” — Jeff Bezos

The pages turn 20 percent faster than on the previous Kindle, and Amazon has even tamped down the clicking sound of the buttons, so readers are less likely to disturb a slumbering companion. Those page-turning buttons, by the way, are longer and slimmeralmost like bumpers on the edge of the device. This may be the first Kindle that finally prevents you from turning a page by mistake.

The long-anticipated Kindle touch screen is still not there. “From an engineering point of view, it would have been very easy to put a touch screen on it,” says Bezos. “But it would hurt the reading experience.” He says that e-ink touch screens degrade display quality and add glare. Instead, the Kindle revamps its interface by replacing its stubby joystick with a “five way” arrangement where a thumbnail-sized selection button is surrounded by a thin band of compass-point directional buttons. The home and the menu button are now placed on the keyboard array. Maybe third time’s the charm for the Kindle, which has changed navigational controls on each version.

Other improvements include expanded battery life: a full month if the radio’s off, and ten days if you leave the 3G turned on. There’s twice as much storage, enough for 3,500 books. And though Bezos didn’t show it to me, Amazon is offering a cover with a built-in LED reading light that works off the device’s battery. It’s sixty dollars, which seems pricey for a book light, but Amazon explains that it uses gold-plated conducive hinges. Maybe when you’re done reading you can use it as jewelry.

Citing competitive reasons, Bezos does not reveal Kindle sales figures, only saying the numbers are in the millions. “We’re starting to see evidence that at the $189 price point that this may be a mass product,” he says. “Even though we’re designing it for readers, it seems to be breaking out.” With a Kindle now selling at $139, he expects the tipping point to tip even more.

What’s more, the revelation that Amazon sells more Kindle books than hardcovers is only the beginning of what now looks like an inevitable mass migration to e-books.

“Our best estimate is that Kindle books will outsell paperbacks at Amazon sometime in the next nine to twelve months,” Bezos says. “And then at some point after that they’ll overtake the combination.”

As for the iPad? Bezos is a fan. “My first thought when I saw the iPad is that it will be great for our mobile commerce business — the more Internet-connected devices the better, from Amazon’s point of view.” But if people thought the iPad would be a challenger to Kindle’s e-reading throne, “it hasn’t happened that way,” says Bezos with his trademark laugh. He tried reading a bit on an iPad but didn’t get far because “if I have to read a long document on an LCD display, the first thing I do is print it out.”

He thinks that people will be fine with carrying multiple devicestablet, laptop and, of course, “purpose-built reading devices that are extremely light, let you read outside in bright daylight, a whole bunch of things.” Like the one he’s now selling for $139.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews