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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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Engineers at the University of Cincinnati have shown that under the right conditions, ordinary paper can be as dynamic as any screen.

Nothing looks better than paper for reading, says research leader Andrew Steckl. We hope to have something that would actually look like paper but behave like a computer monitor in terms of its ability to store information. We would have something that is very cheap, very fast, full-color and at the end of the day or the end of the week, you could pitch it into the trash.

Steckl’s e-paper uses electrowetting, moving colored pigments from pixel to pixel using electronic charges, on a paper substrate. Electrowetting offers color, fast response times and video capability that current E Ink electrophoretic screens can’t match, but with similarly low power consumption.

Companies like Liquavista and Plastic Logic have prototype color e-readers that use this technology, but apply the electrowetting chemicals to a sheet of glass. The Cincinatti team say its electrowetted paper offers the same performance as glass, but with greater flexibility and at a lower cost.

Steckl and grad student Duk Young Kim of U of C’s Nanoelectronics Laboratory presented their findings in the October issue of the American Chemical Society’s ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces journal. It was then reviewed in the November issue of Nature Photonics. The research was part of Kim’s doctoral dissertation.

One of the main goals of e-paper is to replicate the look and feel of actual ink on paper, write Steckl and Kim in the ACS article. We have, therefore, investigated the use of paper as the perfect substrate for EW devices to accomplish e-paper on paper.

In general, this is an elegant method for reducing device complexity and cost, resulting in one-time-use devices that can be totally disposed after use, the researchers note.

Technical details from the ACS paper on electrowetting

It’s still not easy, and industrializing the process will likely take some time. For maximum performance, the process involves a specific grade of paper with a particular surface coating, roughness, thickness and water uptake and a carefully controlled contact angle at which the electrowetted material is applied to the paper support. Electrowetted glass e-readers may appear sometime next year, but you’re unlikely to see disposable paper screens in newspapers or posters for at least three to five years.

Meanwhile, the Nanoelectronics team will continue experimenting with electrowetting on various flexible surfaces, with different fluids and electronic components, trying to maximize performance.

There’s an historical irony here. In the nineteenth century, “wet plate” photography involved applying a silver nitrate collodion solution to a glass plate. Eventually, George Eastman was able to take a dry collodion emulsion and apply it to ordinary paper, creating the first camera that ordinary people could use. After Eastman substituted celluloid film, which was stronger but just as flexible as paper, the rest was history.

UC Breakthrough May Lead to Disposable E-Readers [University of Cincinatti Press Release]

Image (top): Electrowetted E-Paper Display Mockup from Liquavista.

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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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The much anticipated Kno, an oversized reader/tablet targeted at students and teachers, is taking preorders to ship just before Christmas. Prices run between $599 for a 16 GB single-screen tablet and $999 for a 32 GB dual-screen folio. That’s with an educational discount.

Sound expensive? The 14″ Kno has the same relationship to the 6″ Kindle that college textbooks have to trade paperbacks. Textbooks are big, heavy, they cost a lot of money, they’ve got expensive illustrations, and the publishers are all different.

Kno doesn’t compare itself to other e-readers, or even other tablets. It compares itself to new textbooks. Considering the thousands of dollars students spend on books, the company says — and the tens of thousands they and their parents spend on college — $599 for our entry-level unit is a bargain.

Kno’s extraordinary benefits represent only a tiny fraction of the overall cost of college, but its impact on the student’s career – and the energy it adds to the experience, the thrill of learning, and the ultimate grade – is dramatic,” said Osman Rashid, Co-Founder and CEO of Kno, Inc. “Even better, when you do the math, it actually pays for itself and still saves $1,300 in digital textbook costs.”

That figure is misleading, since it assumes a student purchases all their books new and doesn’t sell them used. What’s more, Rashid, founder of textbook-borrowing site Chegg, knows it.

The Kno is an extremely capable device and deserves to be sold on its own merits. It’s got either one or two 1440×900 LCD touchscreens that support both fingertip navigation and stylus notetaking. It supports either a virtual or a bluetooth keyboard, and it’s backed up by an impressive library of electronic textbooks.

It doesn’t have third-party apps, which will make parents happy: it’s built to read, write, and browse the web. But it can play the major audio and video formats, including Flash. It’s got an NVidia Tegra 2 graphics chip with an A9 dual-core 1GHz processor and 512 MB RAM. Despite this giant display of video power, it still claims up to 6 hours of battery life on “normal campus use” (whatever that means).

The Kno is heavy (2.6 lbs for the single-screen, 5.6 lbs for the dual-screen) by e-reader and tablet standards. But again, that’s not necessarily the relevant comparison. Compared to a bag full of first-year biology and calculus textbooks, 5.6 lbs is light as a feather.

A lot of companies have tried to make e-reading in this space work. It’s more complicated than direct-to-consumer trade publication, because there are just so many stakeholders: students, parents, teachers, authors, publishers, retailers. The timing is tough because the economy’s forcing many people to curtail their academic spending, not ramp it up on new gadgets — which is one reason the company is pushing the money-saving angle. But Kno’s hardware looks good, the pricing is high but reasonably competitive, the company’s strategy is sound, and its people understand those complexities as well as anyone.

I think we can expect a gradual rollout of the product this semester for holiday-season early adopters, and if it’s successful, a big push for back-to-school next fall. we’ll just have to see whether it clicks.

Kno Announces Pricing and Pre-Order Availability for Tablet Textbook; Pays for Itself in 3 Semesters [Press Release]

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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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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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7-inch tablets may have drawn Steve Jobs’ contempt, but they could be a very good thing for consumers.

During Apple’s earnings call yesterday, Apple’s CEO argued forcefully that a 7-inch Android tablet could never compete with Apple’s nearly 10-inch iPad.

7-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad, Jobs said, in an extended thrashing of Apple’s competitors. These are among the reasons that the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA dead on arrival.

What I don’t understand is why that’s necessarily a bad thing for Android or tablet-makers.

If Jobs is right that the 7-inch tablets won’t be able to beat Apple’s iPad on price, that could indeed be a deal-breaker. But the pricing we have seen on smaller Android tablets suggests that they’ll be at least $100 cheaper than the current entry-level iPad, even without a data plan. If they’re sold with data plans and carrier subsidies like smartphones, they could be even cheaper than that.

Lower cost isn’t the only appeal of going small. 7-inch tablets are lighter than 10-inch devices. They’re infinitely easier to hold in one hand. They’re easier to type on with two hands (particularly if you have small hands). They fit into smaller bags. And you use them to do different things.

Really, a 7-inch tablet is closer to an e-reader, a personal media player or a handheld gaming device than the iPad is. It’s no coincidence that most e-readers, such as the Kindle and Sony Reader Daily Edition, have 6- or 7-inch screens: That’s about the size of a paperback book.

More…

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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

Briss is a cross-platform open-source Java application that does one thing and does it well: cropping PDFs. Usually, that’s exactly what you need to format cumbersome documents for a tablet or e-reader’s small screen.

It turns out that to format PDFs for e-reading, cropping is the richest tool you usually need, so long as your cropping tool is as easy, fast and powerful as Briss. It can convert two-page spreads into single vertical pages, slice off extra-wide margins and get rid of ugly metadata like page numbers and chapter headings.

Trimming this information is essential if you’re converting your PDF to an e-book format like EPUB or MOBI; because e-book conversion doesn’t keep the same pagination, you’ll wind up with numbers and text in random spots, usually in the middle of a page. Now that even dedicated e-readers like the Kindle, Nook and Sony Reader support PDF out-of-the-box, it’s optional.

The UI is dead simple, if a touch unforgiving. When loading a PDF file, Briss analyzes it to check for repetitive structures — for instance, that all of the pages are the same size and have roughly the same margins. It usually offers different options for even and odd pages. If the PDF is a two-page spread (i.e., two pages of a book or magazine copied onto a single page in the PDF), it detects that as well.

Then outline the parts of the document you want to keep into different crop areas. If you’re splitting spreads into one-page vertical columns, you might have as many as four. If you have a uniform PDF that just needs its margins trimmed, there might only be one. Briss then applies that crop to every page in the document, outputting a file into the same folder with “_trimmed” appended to it. The original file remains intact.

This is usually as easy as cropping an image in any application, but in some cases with spreads I’ve had to perform crops blind. I usually select half the page to be column one and the other half to be column two, then fine-tune it later. Adobe Photoshop’s can perform the same task with a more sophisticated and reliable interface, but it’s nowhere near as lightweight (or free) as Briss.

The romance-novel/e-book blog Dear Author has more detailed instructions on how to use Calibre to further convert PDFs to e-book-native formats, but in my experience, the new generation of e-readers handles PDFs just fine. In most cases, your PDFs may have been simple photocopy-and-scan jobs without OCR text; converting to a text format without also performing an OCR scan won’t help them anyways.

I also leave the page numbers on books I crop, so I can reference them as easily as I could a print edition. For scholar and student users, e-books’ lack of stable page references makes working from them a huge headache; paginated PDFs don’t have that problem.

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

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

Cole Haan Leather Cover for Kindle 3. Photo from Amazon.com

Q: I love my new Kindle 3, but I’m always worried that I’m going to knock a cup of coffee on it, or that my son will use it as a Frisbee. Are there any good cases you would recommend? — Anxious in Akron

A: Akron, I’m in much the same situation with my own Kindle. The device itself seems sturdy enough, but I always have this irrational fear that the beautiful but curiously-static screensavers of famous authors are staring at me, or through me, with their cold, dead E Ink eyes, beckoning me to read their books. Unfortunately, all of the Kindle cases I’ve seen and tried have some serious drawbacks.

Let’s start with the cases available from the Amazon Store. Most of the cases they sell are still for the second-generation Kindle, which won’t fit your device; you just have to ignore those entirely. In the left-hand sidebar you can pick your Kindle model, and you’ll only see relevant results.

Amazon Lighted Leather Cover, from Amazon.com

Amazon itself makes two cases for the Kindle that are basically identical: they’re both leather and come in a range of colors, with a microsuede interior and straps and hinges to keep your reader from sliding around or worse, out. The basic model is $35; add an on-board light, and the whole package costs $60.

Now, when the Kindle cost $400, springing $35-$60 for a decent-quality case and $50 for a two-year warranty had a kind of logic to it. But I don’t remember the woman from the new Kindle poolside ad leaning over and saying: “It’s a Kindle. $139. I paid about as much for the case and the warranty on it.” That would be a really stupid commercial.

Even my friends who love their Kindle cases and want to wrap their beloved e-readers in the best have problems with Amazon’s cases. Everyone agrees that the light on the $60 case can be useful, especially outdoors at dusk and occasionally in bed at nighttime. Everyone also agrees that it adds a lot of weight to the overall package, turning the light-as-a-feather e-reader into a clumsy hardcover.

That leaves you with two options: go for broke with a high-end case, or actually be broke and find something cheap and easy. The Cole Haan Hand-Stained Pebble-Grained Leather Kindle Case costs $99, and has a great rep carried over from its much-loved Kindle 2 cases. But Amazon reviewers complain that Cole Haan skimped on strength and quality to get its case out in time for the Kindle 3 launch.

Apparently the Kindle 2 case had an extra patch of leather strengthening the spine, that added extra protection and made the Kindle in the Cole Haan case feel like a high-quality book. The company’s Kindle 3 case is just one-ply, making the spine less stiff and more likely to wear with use. At other price points, that might be forgivable, but $100 is enough to nudge loyal users into the angry zone.

The longer the Kindle 3 is out, the more manufacturers begin releasing cases for it. Belkin has a line of sleeves available on the Amazon store now that I don’t think were there when I started researching this last week. In particular, many companies are starting to sell sleeves, not cases, that cost around $20.

However, if you’re plan to go this route, the best tip of all comes from Instpaper’s Marco Arment. In his first look at the Kindle 3, he notes how the Kindle 3’s rubberized back (as opposed to the earlier version’s slick aluminum) and slightly-smaller size makes it the first iteration to be comfortably used without a case. As for a sleeve, his solution is ingenious:

Photo credit/permission courtesy Marco Arment at Marco.org

A standard 6×10 bubble envelope the size youd use for shipping a DVD in a case actually makes a decent low-budget Kindle 3 slipcase. And if your goal is to just throw it in a bag and have basic scratch protection until you remove it for use, its a pretty good solution.

Not bad at all. Next thing you know, those envelopes will be available in nano-patterned Naugahyde for $19.95.

In time, the marketplace will catch up, prices will (I have to believe) start to come down, and we’ll get more variety and usability out of our Kindle 3 cases. In the meantime, give one of these a whirl, preferably without putting down hard money first. If they don’t work for you, you can always go back to barebacking it.

P.S.: If you’ve hacked together your own Kindle/e-Reader/tablet case solution. I’d love to read about it in the comments. Share the love!

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

Greyscale screenshot of A Bard’s Tale

Amazon’s Kindle reader isn’t going to get amenities like color, video capability, a camera, or an accelerometer in the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean we won’t see a rich variety of specialized applications for it. A recent high-profile hire at Amazon offers one possibility for the future of Kindle apps, while two Kindle-watchers have offered different forecasts.

Amazon recently hired away Andre Vrignaud, Microsoft’s Director of Game Platform Strategy. Now, Vrignaud worked on many different platforms at Microsoft, from XBox and XBox Live to PCs and mobile phones; presumably, he’ll do the same for Amazon, especially since Amazon already offers casual game downloads for Windows PCs. A revitalized, multiplatform game streaming or download service for Amazon is intriguing, but let’s set it aside for now to focus on gaming for Kindle.

Here, Vrignaud and Amazon face a challenge, as they have to chart a game platform strategy that works within the Kindle’s limitations. These aren’t just technical, but are circumscribed by the Kindle’s user base, few of whom are likely to use the Kindle for heavy gaming even if they’re interested in it.

The sweet spot seems to be black-and-white word games, like you might find in a book or newspaper. The Kindle already has two word-puzzle games available, Every Word and Shuffled Row. It’s easy to imagine crosswords, Sudoku, Scrabble, and the like for Kindle — it’s almost unfair to call this casual gaming, since its fans are so passionate. And I’d wager there might even be a market for vintage text-based computer games, many of which are terrific to play for a few minutes at a clip. Any five-hour airport delay would be a lot more interesting if I could bang out Zork or A Bard’s Tale or entertain my son with Oregon Trail on that terrific Kindle battery while I was waiting. (Note: I’m deliberately the pit of hell that is casual gaming for Facebook, but clearly those companies could clean up here too.)

But games are just the beginning of an ecosystem of Kindle apps. We’ve already looked at a few ways you can make Kindle 3’s much-improved browser work like a champ for news reading, but just like with smartphones, a dedicated RSS application could potentially suit some users even better.

At iReader Review, RSS readers are listed along with email clients, weather apps, finance apps, and chat as functions currently performed using the browser that would make natural apps for Kindle. The author makes a strong case for these apps as indicative of the kinds of apps that will do well on the Kindle — providing focused information in a client specifically tailored to the Kindle device and Kindle user.

Livescribe’s app store provides a potential model for the Kindle; an array of pencil-and-paper games, translation services, and reference applications, all perfectly suited for a simple text interface and black-and-white display.

Finally, there’s the one-in-a-million possibility. One of the biggest knocks on Amazon had been that its Kindle supports its own unique formats but not ePub, an e-book standard many other companies have rallied around. There’s no way Amazon would ever allow an application that duplicates its e-reader function, allowing you to read DRMed or cracked Amazon e-books. Amazon even has a clause in its terms of service forbidding generic readers.

Popular Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, though, recently claimed in a podcast that several app makers were working on building an ePub client for Kindle — and that Amazon had given them the go-ahead.

Now, some people think Ihnatko was confused or misinformed, and it’s quite possible that Amazon could allow a reader for open, non-DRMed ePub files while still barring all the books you bought from Barnes & Noble.

Still, it’s an intriguing possibility — and Amazon could certainly use an App marketplace to open the Kindle to becoming a general document viewer (and casual writer) of a wide range of files without writing a line of code themselves.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Kindle DX Promotional Photo from Amazon.com

It’s easy to figure out why e-readers and tablets are the size that they are: They’re all about the size of paperback books, whether trade (iPad) or mass-market (the Kindle 3). Some oversized models, like the Kindle DX, are closer to big hardcovers. But why are books the size that they are? It turns out it’s because of sheep. Sheepskin, to be exact.

Carl Pyrdum, who writes the blog Got Medieval while he finishes his Ph.D. in Literature at Yale, has the skinny on book sizes. You see, before Europeans learned how to make paper from the Arabs (who’d learned it from the Chinese), books were made from parchment, which was usually made from sheepskin. Sometimes, they’d use calfskin, too; if it was really primo stuff, it was called vellum. Like reading a whole book made out of veal.

We eventually mostly gave up on parchment, because it was expensive, and hard to work with. (There’s a reason medieval monks wrote manuscripts; preparing the parchment was penance.) But all of today’s book sizes (and by proxy, most of our gadget sizes) were established in the Middle Ages, and printers and paper makers carried them over. Booksellers and publishers still use these terms today:

• Fold a sheet of parchment once (two leaves/four pages per sheet) for a folio; if you fold sheets of paper once without a cover, you’ve got a tabloid.
• Twice for a quarto (8pp/s), the size of a big dictionary or big laptop;
• Three times for an octavo (16pp/s), a hardcover or Kindle DX;
• Four times for a duodecimo (24 pp/s), a trade paperback/iPad
• Four times (a slightly different way) for a 16mo (yes, they gave up), aka mass-market paperback/e-reader;
• Five times for a 32mo, aka notepad/old-school smartphone sized
• Six times for a 64mo, or as Erasmus called it, a Codex Nano.

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16mo/Paperback/E-Reader

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All images via Got Medieval.

Story continues …

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews