GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

One thing the otherwise excellent Kindle is not is a great web-browser. Even with a hardware keyboard to type urls, the process of visiting even one site is painful. If you’re like most people, you’ll try once or twice and then give up, forever.

Which is a shame, as the little e-reader has a free, life-long 3G connection, perfect for quickly checking your mail or the news. Which is where Kinstant comes in. Kinstant is a customizable home-page (remember those?) which has just been updated with some fancy new features.

Save Kinstant as your home-page and you have one-click access to Kindle-friendly versions of many sites (Gmail, the New York Times, CNN) plus links to category pages. Click one of these and you’ll see a further list of sites, plus headlines and summaries for that subject.

With the new version, you can also add in your own links, either direct from the Kindle or from a proper web-browser somewhere else. You just add the regular URL and then, when you click the link, you are taken to a vastly simplified version formatted for the e-reader.

And there’s more. A menu gives access to a calculator and Google Maps. Yes, maps. Add your location and destination and you get directions and an embedded map with the route marked.

Users of older Kindle’s with even crappier browsers (Kindle 2 and DX) can access a trimmed down version. It’s not pretty, but it works.

Kinstant is free, and available now. To get it, just follow the link, and be amazed that you have just turned your Kindle into the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Kindle-less can view the page in their computer or cellphone’s browser too, if you want to see how it looks.

Kinstant [Kinstant. Thanks, Sherwood!]

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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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Like books, e-readers and tablets need protection. Their delicate, computer-like screens can get cracked or smashed by the vagaries of life.

And like books, we spend hours staring at these delicate devices. So why not make them look more like books?

We don’t just want to protect tablets and e-readers, but honor and personalize them, and maybe bring back some of the quaint pleasures of reading an old leather-bound volume at the same time.

The most natural way to signal their special status as reading machines and engines of cultural consumption is to borrow what we know from the look and feel of book covers. And if making an e-reader look like an old hardcover book or a composition notebook adds a little trompe l’oeil fun, so much the better.

This slide show highlights some of the best faux-book covers for e-book readers and tablets.

Above: Covers made by Dodocase for the Kindle 3.

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When Amazon launched Kindle for the Web earlier this year, we all cried “what?!” The service let you preview small snippets of Kindle ebooks in your browser, and that was about it. It kind of proved itself as a way to promote books on other sites, thanks to embedding features, but it remained a curiosity.

Now Amazon has announced an update, bringing the full Kindle experience to the browser, and also to Google’s new Chrome Web Store, meaning any notebook running Google’s Chrome OS. You’ll be able to read entire books on any web-connected device, and if you embed books on your site and people read them there, you’ll earn affiliate fees.

Kindle seems to be the default option for reading ebooks: There’s a Kindle app for pretty much everything, and Amazon has the biggest catalog, too, especially if you live outside the US where things like Apple’s iBooks Store are crippled. I spend almost as much time in the Kindle app on my iPad as I do in Safari.

Putting the Kindle on the web is smart, and shows that Amazon is way more interested in selling Kindle books than selling Kindle hardware. Hell, even the Barnes & Noble Nook has a browser. Maybe you could even read Kindle books on that?

Kindle for the Web [Amazon]

Every Website Can Now Be a Bookstore [Amazon press release]

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The feel of a print book in your hand is largely a function of its cover; it turns out, Kindle cases are exactly the same. Two new third-party cases do their best to imitate the look and feel of a hardcover book, but take very different approaches in doing so.

The first is by DodoCase, makers of a popular iPad case who’ve brought the same traditional bookbinding aesthetic to a Kindle 3 case, just announced today.

From a distance, the Kindle DodoCase looks almost exactly like a Moleskine notebook, but the exterior is a stiff black faux leather. If you knock on it, it feels and sounds like a hollow-core door — less like a Moleskine and more like a sturdy old Bible.

The Kindle’s enclosure is also deceptively simple. It’s carved of wood, and the exterior has a vertical grain that simulates yellowed or lightly gilded pages. My wife joked that it looked like it was made of popsicle sticks, but it’s sturdy, too, carved down from bamboo. Sloped gaps on the left and right edges allow access to the page turn buttons; a larger opening at the bottom lets you control the sleep/wake switch, volume control, and headphone and USB jacks.

The access to the jacks at the bottom is great, better than I’ve seen in many cases. The side buttons, though, are pretty constricted. You can’t really come

Rubber grips on each of the four corners hold the Kindle in place. I had my doubts about these, too (Kindle cases are notorious for not keeping the devices secure, but once my Kindle was squeezed in, it was definitely stuck. In fact, it’s a little tricky getting the Kindle out.

Just like with the iPad, each DodoCase comes with a different interior lining (see photo above): the original red-lined case costs $50, and $5 more gets you green, sky blue, dark blue, pink or charcoal. The linings are not exactly plush. The color is good, and I’d guess it’s made of linen — traditional in bookbinding, but a little slim for gadget cases, where everything’s been sueded up.

M-Edge’s Cambridge Jacket for Kindle 3

For a different take on the Kindle-cover-as-hardcover-book, I like M-Edge’s Cambridge Jacket ($45). It has more of an “Everyman’s Library” feel to it: canvas with leather trim around the spine and the interior, which has a place to store cards and notes.

The Kindle’s held in place with leather straps, too; not quite as snug as the DodoCase, but a little more managable to slide in and out. The main complaint I have about the leather straps, though, is that they make it a little trickier to get at the sliding sleep/wake switch. The access to the page turn buttons, however, is perfect.

To be honest, I prefer the Cambridge jacket. It really comes down to feel. It’s softer, it has more texture; the spine’s just as stiff without feeling hard. Readers with a more austere aesthetic might prefer the DodoCase. I prefer either of them to the floppy leather-and-vinyl covers that feel like repurposed purses. Maybe that’s a gendered thing, but I don’t think those work well on bookshelves either.

And if you’re left-handed, or have gotten used to using your left hand to toggle back and forth on the Kindle, you’re essentially out of luck. No case I’ve tried gives uncramped access to the Kindle’s left-hand navigation buttons. You could probably use the DodoCase upside down or a protective sleeve on the go. Not many good solutions here.

What makes shopping for all of these cases difficult is that it’s nearly impossible to know how one will function until you get a chance to try it out. Really, it’s the same with phone cases: with most of them shipping online or in store displays behind cardboard or plastic, it’s tougher than it ought to be to get the things in your hands to find one that fits.

Traditional readers complain that e-reading can’t simulate the look and feel of a quality book. With cases, short of actually turning the pages, it can. It’s just harder for each reader to get a chance to find just one cover that feels right.

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The 3Feet is an almost-indestructible, over-engineered plastic stand for pretty much any tablet or smartphone that needs a one. I tried one out, and found that maybe the best thing about it isn’t the capable range of tablet-cosseting features, but the fact that you can tinker and play with it for minutes on end.

The stand consists of five separate parts, all of which slot together with various deviously-conceived hingeing mechanisms. Thankfully, it comes pre-assembled, otherwise you’d likely mistake it for an impossible-to-solve puzzle and spend hours trying to put it together. In use, though, the 3Feet is very simple. You pull a tab on the back (marked “pull”) and it opens up into an A-frame, much like a tiny easel. Slots and rods molded into the plastic fit together to allow two angles, and a little lugged shelf folds down from the front to grab the bottom edge of the tablet.

This fold-open lip is oversized for the iPad, which means you can easily use it even whilst in a case (there is also a hole through which the charging cable can pass). It also means you’re not limited to the iPad: you can drop in pretty much anything, from a cellphone to a Kindle. The stand is sturdy enough to keep even the relatively heavy iPad safe in both portrait and landscape orientations.

The stability is helped by rubber bands made from silicone, which stop it sliding across the desk and also keep the happy tablet scratch-free (although the plastic stand probably wouldn’t damage much anyway).

The final trick is in a little kick-stand which flips out from the back when the main “leg” is folded flat. It is small, but somehow manages to both hold the stand at the right angle for on-screen typing, and also be sturdy enough to keep the iPad steady.

There’s not much to criticize about the 3Feet stand. It is light enough and compact enough that you can toss it in a bag and forget about it, and it’s even dishwasher-safe. And the complex folding design means you probably won’t be able to stop playing and fiddling with the thing. Hell, it’s even cheap, at just $15, and comes in a wide range of (interchangeable) colors.

The only thing that might put you off is the looks. This is a product for which the term “utilitarian” was invented. That’s not to say it is ugly, or even that the appearance hasn’t been considered. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but somehow it reminds me of medical devices, or perhaps even the toys of my childhood, which tended to be chunky and long-lasting rather than stylish and short-lived.

Or maybe I’m just seduced by the fact that this makes the ultimate executive stress-toy, something to keep your hands and brain busy when you should be working. Available now, from Amazon.

3Feet product page [3Feet. Thanks, Steve!]

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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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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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Amazon’s newly overhauled Kindle application for Mac offers notes, search, two-column reading and a much-improved UI. It might even make me read e-books on my computer again.

It’s funny: I used to read a lot of e-books in client apps on my MacBook and iPhone. Since I got my Kindle 3, I hadn’t read any.

Amazon was frankly slow to bring its e-book software to Macs. The PC desktop client came first, and a pared-down Mac application only eventually followed in March. Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble had already released a Nook desktop app for Mac simultaneously with PC.

B&N’s Mac client offered every feature you could ask for: copy-and-paste, two-column reading, notes and highlighting, text search, built-in dictionary, multiple viewing themes, use of every font on your computer. I still think it might be the most powerful e-reading application available on the desktop.

Even generic readers beat Kindle’s UI. Amazon just didn’t seem serious about Mac support, or desktop readers at all.

A few days ago, I noticed that even though I’d been buying Kindle books again, I didn’t even have the Kindle app on my Mac. I hadn’t bothered to transfer it over from my old machine.

So I go to Amazon’s site and download the application, open it up — and I’m astonished. The Kindle desktop app is so much better than I remember — not quite the equal of Barnes & Noble’s app, but infinitely closer.

I thought I was hallucinating, or my memory was faulty. Actually, I’d just downloaded the brand new app a day before it had been officially announced.

Improved WhisperSync support means that I can read a book on my Kindle, open it on my Mac, and it will open to the last page read on the Kindle. When I open the same book on the Kindle again, I have the option to pick up where I left off either on the Kindle or the Mac. I actually like that it’s a prompt on the Kindle, rather than an automatic sync; on the desktop too, I can toggle between last page read on Kindle or last page read on Mac, but it’s a menu option rather than a prompt.

Just because Amazon’s finally getting serious about the Mac doesn’t mean it’s neglecting software updates for the Kindle; only a week after the 3.02 firmware update graduated from beta, Amazon’s offering the 3.03 version for download as a preview release.

As you might guess from its version number, it’s a minor release, offering some performance improvements (moderately faster page syncing and page turns, mostly) and reportedly plugging some security gaps. 3.02 seemed to improve the Kindle’s performance in direct sunlight. 3.03 is download-only for now, but will be available as an over-the-air update soon, probably in a few weeks.

Kindle for Mac — Read Kindle eBooks on your Mac [Amazon.com]

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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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Marco Arment created Instapaper, a tool that strips clutter from online articles and saves them for later reading, because he couldn’t concentrate at his desk. As the former chief technology officer for Tumblr, his Mac Pro’s screen was always pulling him away to do something else.

“In the modern desktop environment, with multitasking and alerts and constant activity, there are always more distractions,” Arment told Wired.com in a phone interview. “When you’re at a computer, your hands are always on the controls.” Whether you’re watching a video or reading an article, he explained, you can always click away to check email or switch to another application, ready to do the next thing.

What’s next for Arment is making Instapaper, the one-time hobby that became a beloved and award-winning iOS application, an even more powerful e-reading application. Writer/designer/e-reading expert Craig Mod recently called Instapaper his “favorite digital reading experience,” combining the flexibility of HTML design with the clean minimalism of e-books: “It’s lovely and a great baseline to which other ereaders should aspire.” To get beyond that baseline, Arment recently left Tumblr to work on his former side project full-time.

The purpose of Instapaper is to promote what Arment calls “attentive reading” in the face of digital distraction. It doesn’t reject the web, but affirms it. On the one hand, it recognizes that we increasingly do more reading on computers and other electronic screens. On the other hand, it tries to extract items of lasting value, removing them from the most toxic aspects of that environment, so we can focus on them more effectively.

“People love information,” Arment said. “Right now in our society, we have an obesity epidemic. Because for the first time in history, we have access to food whenever we want, we don’t know how to control ourselves. I think we have the exact same problem with information.”

We accumulate thousands of unread emails — and the attendant guilt about not having read or answered them — only to empty out our inboxes and start over again. It’s as if we’re suffering from an entire range of collective information disorders: when we’re not binging, we’re purging.

Web media, Arment says, has evolved to fit this environment. Everything is shorter, bullet-pointed, structured to catch and hold a reader’s attention for a few moments, and then ideally emailed or tweeted or reposted. Social networks and feed readers have developed their own alerts, guaranteeing that we keep them in our information stream. It’s the office productivity workflow, recycled for institutionalized distraction.

You might think that smartphones and other mobile devices would only accelerate this trend, and to some extent they have. Twitter comes from text messaging, and low-resolution viral videos are tailor-made for tiny screens. But when Arment developed Instapaper as an application for iPhone and then the iPad, he discovered something different.

“Instapaper wouldn’t be of as much value if it weren’t for these mobile and e-reader devices. They give you a separate physical context for reading,” Arment said. Away from the office, desk and desktop, with each application taking up the entire screen, a reader’s eyes and hands all have to learn how to behave again. For the iPhone, Arment even created a function that would auto-scroll through an article if you tilted it backwards, to take the user’s hands completely out of the equation.

The fewer productivity tools a device has, the better it works as a reading machine. “One reason I love the Kindle, more so than the iPad, is that on the Kindle you can’t do anything else but read,” Arment said. “It’s the best because it does the least. It doesn’t even show a clock.”

There are a few ways to get Instapaper articles onto the Kindle in the Kindle’s magazine format, including wireless email delivery and downloading and syncing over a wired connection. And while the iOS apps are still vastly more popular, with the new Kindle 3, he says, requests for Instapaper support on the Kindle have shot up exponentially.

Given this surge in interest, I asked Arment about whether he might be gearing up to release an Instapaper app for Kindle. “It’s definitely a bigger market now,” he said, hedging a bit.

The problem for a content-delivery app is that Amazon restricts the amount of 3G bandwidth applications can use. Any Instapaper app would have to be Wi-Fi only and abandon backwards compatibility.

Another problem is that the current Kindle Development Kit also doesn’t allow as much access to core technologies like web rendering and hooking into other applications as Apple’s iOS. Essentially, any Instapaper app for Kindle would require recreating all of the coding work Arment did to originally turn Instapaper posts into Kindle magazines.

“Amazon didn’t anticipate this kind of use of their devices,” Arment said. “What I’d like to do is work with Amazon to make what I’m doing now [delivery as a Kindle magazine] better.”

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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.

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Enterprising gamers are formatting vintage text-based adventure games — at the time of this writing, the legendary Zork I-III and 1988’s less-legendary Mini-Zork — for the Kindle and other dedicated e-readers.

“Many people cut their teeth on the imagination-fueled text adventure games released by Infocom back in the eighties,” PortableQuest’s edman writes at MetaFilter. “Whispernet combined with the handy keyboard and the limiting browser made the Kindle perfect for text-based adventures.”

Everyone agrees that E Ink screens render text beautifully. E-readers’ slightly older but tech-inclined demographic definitely includes lovers of vintage games. And the ability to save and reload games using Amazon’s Whispernet is a nice feature.

Are the Zork games at times frustrating? Yes — maybe even more so on the Kindle, where text entry isn’t as fluid as on a full keyboard. (You occasionally have to enter in numbers, and the alt+Q=1 shortcut is a lifesaver there.) Are they immersive and addicting? Yes. And I’m not even very old; these games and I are about the same age.

Could text adventure games on the Kindle benefit from including a few images here and there and introducing slightly more intuitive gameplay while staying within the text-based-adventure genre? I think they could. There’s no reason why mid-to-late-80s RPGs, like my beloved Ultima and Wizardry series, couldn’t be made to work on the Kindle. And that, my friends, is the future of Kindle gaming — just twenty-odd years too late.

Screenshot by Tim Carmody. H/T: Oliver Hulland

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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

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

Screenshot of My Kindle, Getting Beat By the Computer – Image: Tim Carmody

This might be the happiest chapter in Scrabble’s short digital history: Electronic Arts has released an official version of Scrabble for Kindle. This is the first paid game — or application of any kind — available for the e-reader.

Scrabble fits in well with Amazon’s existing game offerings, as it’s a word-based game that requires simple, five-directional navigation. It shows up in a Kindle user’s home screen, right next to existing games and books. (It’s easy to make a “Games” collection/folder if you like to keep your entertainment media organized/segregated.)

The game is, if I may say so, well put together; you use the controller to navigate to particular spaces, and once you’ve chosen a direction, you can just type out words. There are also smartly-chosen menu options, including a very useful list of two-letter words.

It’s fast and responsive, and I predict it will be a big hit. Scrabble has a huge built-in fan base that overlaps well with book- and word-loving Kindle owners, and Scrabulous (later rechristened Lexulous) has been a tremendous casual gaming hit on Facebook. In fact, Scrabble-makers Hasbro and Mattel had to fight with Facebook and Scrabulous when the game broke out faster than they were ready with an official version. Words With Friends is the similar unbranded iOS application.

Major drawback: unlike Facebook’s or other online iterations of the Scrabble game, there is no social dimension. You can’t play with another Kindle user online; the best you can do is set up a two-player game where you pass the Kindle back and forth.

Electronic Arts’ Scrabble costs $4.99 and is available for purchase and download today.

The First Kindle Paid App Is Out – It’s Scrabble [iReader Review]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Photo credit/permission courtesy Marco Arment at Marco.org

The Kindle 3 is a deceptively capable device, but Amazon doesn’t, by default, give you access to a lot of what’s going on under the hood. (The “Settings” menu only has three choices.) This is why some users pop that hood using jailbreaking tools — tools that work on the Kindle 3.

I haven’t taken this step with my new Kindle, but I have read in detail the MobileRead forum posts announcing that the Kindle 3 has been jailbroken and describing how (and why) to do it. Here is a short list of why Kindle users jailbreak their device:

• Installing custom fonts, including support for Asian-language scripts;
• Installing custom screensavers;
• USB networking, or tethering.

All of these hacks risk bricking your Kindle and violating Amazon’s terms of service, but only the last might really cause you problems. Amazon’s free 3G networking (assuming you’ve got a 3G-capable device) is intended to be used for Amazon’s services only, i.e., the Kindle store and the built-in web browser.

Again, read the forums carefully, and do some deep soul-searching and gut-checking before you try any of this out. For now, I’m still pretty happy that I’ve got an easier way to enter in numbers using the built-in keyboard: Press “Alt,” then a key on the top row (Q=1, W=2, etc.). See also this great list of Kindle tips and keyboard shortcuts, again courtesy A Kindle World’s Andrys Basten.

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

Actor/comedian/intellectual/newspaper columnist/quiz-show host/techno-bibliophile Stephen Fry’s new autobiography The Fry Chronicles is available in several different editions: hardcover, paperback, and Kindle, naturally, but also an enhanced book in Apple’s iBooks store and most intriguingly, an interactive application called myFry for iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad.

This signals something new. The mere fact of bundling a book as an application is old hat; there was a time, after all, before the Kindle and iBooks apps, when most apps for the iPhone were books. As the video above shows, though, myFry provides both the metadata and interface necessary to read the book nonlinearly — a synthesis of the familiar (flipping through the pages, jumping to any point one likes, not just a chapter head) and the new (sorting data by content tags rather than chapter titles or page numbers; following associative rather than sequential threads).

Alas, myFry is currently not available in the US; in the UK, it costs about 8 pounds, or about $12.50. Also, it’s not currently a universal application, meaning that iPhone and iPad users would have to purchase the application separately for each device.

As for other e-book formats, the iBook version of The Fry Chronicles is organized in the familiar manner, but enhanced with video clips, mostly of the author himself, hyperlinks, and other multimedia. The Kindle e-book, like the print versions, consist of the familiar rows of text + occasional images book-readers have come to know and love for ages.

In the video below, Fry justifies his (and his publisher Penguin’s) approach to e-publishing, and articulates his vision of the future of books: “I think the point is not why I’ve done this, but really why anybody wouldn’t do it now.”

Fry’s embrace of electronic reading is significant in no small part because of the depth of his knowledge of the history of print. In 2008 he made and starred in a BBC documentary on Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press, titled The Machine That Made Us. He’s also a novelist, a journalist, and a celebrated narrator of audiobooks. There are few public figures with the kind of total media experience that he has, both as a performer and thinker.

The myFry application does have its critics. Gavin C. Pugh, a writer for NextRead and FutureBook, complains:

I like a book to look like a book. I like the text to be formatted paragraphs that are indented unless you need to show a scene-break. If they are formatted like a webpage as Penguin have chosen to do here it changes the flow, at least for me. I also like to see each page turn.

Instead each section is presented as a webpage not only in formatting but in scrolling. And it does spoil the flow. Readers tend to scan webpages but absorb books (or things that look like books). How do I know the difference? I downloaded the sample Kindle and iBook versions. I didn’t feel any connection with app but when I started reading the Kindle version my finger ended up hovering over ‘buy’ option

The Kindle version, too, can be read on any device that supports the Kindle app; Pugh appreciates the multimedia enhancements of the iBook version, but laments that it’s limited to iDevices. Chris Matthews at TeleRead adds that the myFry app “does seem a bit expensive for what you get.”

It’s no longer only print aficionados who are resisting the next generation of e-books; experienced digital readers are protesting too, in the name of price, cross-platform portability, and book-specific standards. Meanwhile, other digital readers are waiting for something new; a book designed specifically not only for digital reading but for their device, that takes advantage of all of its strengths to present an innovative reading experience.

I see one potential solution to this impasse: transmedia bundling.

By transmedia, in this instance, I mean simply that different or derivative versions of the same object exist in different media formats. In this case, it’s printed books, audiobooks, enhanced and plain-vanilla e-books, and software applications. It could also include web sites, video games, posters, licensed merchandise, and so forth.

The movie industry has been extremely savvy about bundling its transmedia products — at least after films leave the theater. You can buy a deluxe edition of a film and receive a DVD, a Blu-ray disc, a booklet, an interactive game, a digital file of the film for your computer or media player, and other accessories, for a single price, usually not significantly more than if you had purchased just the DVD.

The book publishing industry hasn’t followed their lead. Instead, every product is treated discretely, released along different production schedules. Moreover, the industry has generally assumed that every e-book sold is a print sale lost — that the few readers interested in reading a book in both a print and electronic version will gladly pay full-price for both.

Now, however, we’re at the point where iBooks, iPad, and Kindle are not offering different scans of the same book, but genuinely different products — each of which may appeal to different readers, but also to the same reader differently depending on context.

The devices — especially dedicated e-readers — have also reached the point where it’s not uncommon for users to have a personal computer, a tablet, an e-reader, a smartphone, and a print library. But there is no way, short of purchasing a book and scanning it yourself, to read the same book in even a handful of those distinct contexts without spending a fortune.

Suppose instead that Penguin offered a deluxe hardcover version of Fry’s book for $35. Or even $50. (Amazon UK is currently selling the hardcover for 9 pounds, or about $14.) With this, you would get:

• A handsome slipcover;
• A finely printed book;
• An audiobook, on either CD or mp3;
• An e-book, in the format of your choice;
• A software application, for the OS (mobile or otherwise) of your choice;
• A commemorative flag, T-shirt, poster, and/or pin.

In other words, instead of punishing your transmedia collectors, reward and embrace them. Let bibliophiles strive to outdo one another with the audacity of cinephiles. Make the release of a new book an event.

Ripping compact discs provided a natural way to enjoy music anywhere; DVDs quickly did the same for movies. Now even Blu-ray’s DRM days are dwindling. In all of these cases, the industry lagged and fretted about privacy while users found and shared solutions on their own.

That’s already beginning with books. This won’t be the end.

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

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

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