B&N says the Nook's battery lasts twice as long as the Kindle's, and Amazon doesn't like it. Photo: Lena Groeger/Wired.com
Amazon and Barnes & Noble are duking it out over the respective battery lives of the Kindle and the new touch-screen Nook. The field of battle is the ghostly ground of press releases and promo-page blurb, and the last word seems to have been had by B&N. Read More…
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on May 26, 2011
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Photo credit: Tim Carmody/Wired.com.
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NEW YORK — Barnes & Nobles Nook Color is real. For $250, it may even be spectacular. Readers will find out for themselves sometime around November 19th.
Our customers snack on content of all kinds all day, Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch said in a press conference announcing the device. He called the new Nook Color the first readers tablet.
The booksellers second-generation e-reader takes aim at both Amazon and entry-level Android tablets. Like its predecessor, the Nook Color is powered by Android. But this e-reader gives Googles OS a bit more of a workout, ditching the low-power, monochrome E Ink display and the two-screen interface of the original Nook.
Instead, it’s got a 7-inch color LCD touchscreen made by LG. The screen technology is called “VividView” and incorporates an anti-glare coating, but is otherwise far closer to a tablet display than an e-book reader like the Kindle.
In related e-book reader news, Amazon announced Tuesday that the Kindle would be gaining a strictly limited e-book lending feature similar to what the B&N Nook has.
This graduates the Nook from dedicated e-reader to personal media player, if not quite a full tablet computer. In addition to Barnes & Nobles current library of EPUB-derived black-and-white e-books, the Nook Color will be able to display color books, photos and games, multimedia-enhanced ebooks, a good chunk of the web, and even video.
Opportunities to test out the new Nook Color were very limited. Barnes & Noble did not give reporters unfettered access to the device. Most of the press conference centered around giant mockups on the screen.
The first showpieces for Nook Color will be magazines and newspapers. Barnes & Noble has partnered with Cond Nast (the publisher of Wired and parent company of this website) and Hearst to offer magazines as both single issues and as subscriptions. (Apple lets publishers sell tablet magazines for its iPad, but hasnt sorted out subscriptions just yet.)
B&N is also inviting other developers to create interactive color reading content specifically for Nook Color. The company is starting a program for developers to create Android applications specifically for Nook Color, to be offered in the Nook store. At launch, the Applications section will offer Pandora for streaming music, a handful of games like Chess and Sudoku, and a gallery application for viewing photos and video.
You’ll also be able to upload media by mounting the Nook Color as a hard drive on your PC’s desktop (using a USB cable) and doing a drag-and-drop; it will support MP3 and AAC audio and MP4 video.
When you also consider the recently announced Nook Kids store for childrens books, Barnes & Noble’s strategy is clear: Flank Amazon, Apple and other Android devices by offering formats and genres at the seams, which the other devices hardware and marketplace models have difficulty handling. While Apple’s hardware offers vivid color and interactivity, and Amazon’s store is flush with books and periodicals, Nook Color will have both.
Nook Color will also leverage its Wi-Fi connection to integrate reading with popular social networks. Readers will be able to share comments and excerpts from books, newspapers or magazines via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter by opening up a submenu while viewing a document.
The interface will be familiar to existing Nook readers. In its default view, the library scrolls along the bottom quarter of the screen (where the old LCD touchscreen used to be), although you can also navigate in full screen.
Barnes & Noble was able to keep the device fairly lightweight; the Yves Bhar design weighs less than a pound and comes in at just one-half inch thick. It will have 8GB of internal storage and a microSD port for additional memory.
The battery life predictably suffers from supporting an LCD color screen, but Barnes & Noble claims it will still get around 8 hours of reading time.
There are some things the Nook Color won’t do. There’s no 3G option, which saves you some money and Barnes & Noble a lot, but does limit your ability to buy a book on a whim at an airport or hotel. It won’t have access to the Android Market or have the ability to run applications originally designed for other Android devices — you’ll be stuck with the apps Barnes & Noble picks, unless you opt to root/jailbreak your device.
Barnes & Nobles Nook has been available for less than a year, but its quickly established itself as a solid competitor to the Kindle, capturing 20% of the e-book retail market, a worthy Pepsi to Amazons Coke.
The company has leveraged its in-store presence and customer base, building in-store Nook boutiques and offering free Wi-Fi and book browsing in-store. Its also branched out from its own stores, selling its reader online, and at other retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy; it plans to continue that wide retail availability with Nook Color.
Barnes & Noble plans to continue selling the original Nook as an entry-level black-and-white E Ink reader for $150 and $200 and the company promises to continue to support and enhance the original device.
It’s clear, though, that Barnes & Noble is thinking of E Ink readers as a “segment of the e-reading market,” to borrow a phrase its executives used over and over again. Its bet is on interactive color as the e-reading standard of the future.
When asked whether Nook Color would cannibalize Barnes & Noble’s sales of print books, Lynch pointed to data suggesting that current Nook owners were actually buying more print books from Barnes & Noble.
“We plan to cannibalize other people’s physical book sales more than our own,” he added.
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Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 26, 2010
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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Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 25, 2010
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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Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 22, 2010
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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Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 22, 2010
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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Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 20, 2010
A year ago today, Barnes & Noble presented its Nook e-reader. Yesterday, the book retailer sent media invitations for an October 26 event at their Union Square store in New York. Next week, we might see the next generation of the Nook.
Here’s what we know: A Nook 1.5 firmware update is coming out late next month for current-generation Nooks. It promises faster page turns, better search, custom library organization, password protection and the ability to sync last page read between the Nook and all Nook mobile and desktop apps.
This gets the Nook close to feature parity with Amazon’s Kindle. It also means Barnes & Noble has done some investment, both in developing new software and on its backend services. And that suggests that it might be ready to announce a new device.
This summer, Amazon rolled out a 2.5 firmware update for Kindle 2 users. Then a month later, it unveiled the new Kindle 3.
Last October, Barnes & Noble announced the dual-screen, Android-powered Nook, promising preorder delivery and in-store sales before Christmas. The company wasn’t able to ramp up production to meet demand and had to fix immediate firmware bugs, delaying some preorders and pushing back in-store availability to February.
I doubt Barnes & Noble wants that scenario to play out again. There’s a chance that a next-generation Nook will be available right away, but I would expect that new devices would ship around the same time as the 1.5 firmware, either in late November or early December — or Barnes & Noble will give a more conservative delivery date of early next year.
Although the Kindle has captivated mindshare, the Nook and its bookstore has been tremendous hits for Barnes & Noble, boosting revenues through strong e-book sales, particularly among Barnes & Noble members, both for the Nook and for its mobile and desktop apps. It has a 20% share of e-book sales — higher than its share in sales of printed books.
The bookseller spent the last year reoutfitting its retail stores to show off the Nook. It dropped prices and offered a Wi-Fi only model before Amazon matched them with Kindle 3. Now it’s B&N’s move again. No company is more ready to deliver a next-generation e-reader than Barnes & Noble.
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Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 20, 2010
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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Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 18, 2010
Image via BarnesAndNoble.com
Oh, you thought we were just all up in Amazon’s Kindle on the tweed beat here at Gadget Lab? NOT TRUE. The newest iteration of Barnes & Noble’s Nook offered Wi-Fi only before Kindle, dropped its prices before Kindle — and yes, it was jailbroken and rooted a long time ago.
Major advantage to rooting a Nook over jailbreaking a Kindle: because the Nook runs Android, you can use it to run Android apps. Popular Science’s gadget blog isn’t the first to describe how it’s done, but this guide is one of the most readable I’ve seen — just five steps.
It’s all software-based, requiring you to first connect your Nook to your computer via USB, downgrade your firmware to version 1.0, and then install the hacked/rooted version of 1.4, which includes an Android app installer. However, as Nook-rooting experts NookDevs.com note, “Barnes and Noble has likely introduced a new hardware revision which bricks your unit if you install their official 1.0.0 Firmware (A step needed to root). As of right now, Nooks with serial #s starting with 1003 (running firmware 1.4.1) cannot be rooted, and should NOT be attempted.” This warning is on top of the usual watch-yourself-you-might-break-something caution whenever you mess around with your devices. Be careful out there.
How to Add Applications to Your Nook [Apartment Therapy Unpluggd]
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 23, 2010
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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
This post was written by Journalist on September 13, 2010
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
This post was written by Journalist on September 9, 2010
You might think it was already dead, but sales for the Barnes & Noble Nook (both B&N-branded hardware and multi-platform software apps) are booming.
The company’s web stores are doing great, too: B&N has a bigger share of the market in digital books (an estimated 20 percent) than it has in physical books.
That’s pretty good considering the Nook’s only been available for nine months, and the company still generates more revenue selling hardcovers and paperbacks than anyone, including Amazon.
Surprised? It’s easy to think about e-reading as a two-horse race, with Amazon’s austere text-centric Kindle facing off against Apple’s “magical” iPad, like PCs vs Macs or Protestants vs Catholics. And it’s true, Barnes & Noble lost money this past quarter, partly because it’s still sorting out its messy relations with its investors.
But Barnes & Noble is for real, and isn’t going anywhere. In the religious analogy, the Nook might be, I don’t know, Judaism, trying to adapt to a newer world while holding onto its traditional community.
Barnes & Noble has consistently gone for a hybrid strategy: providing touch and text, tightly integrating e-sales with its existing stores while also selling the Nook at Best Buy, letting its books be read on the Nook as well as other platforms. B&N’s apps for PC and Mac are arguably best-in-class (bonus points, too, for getting its Mac app out way before Amazon’s). The company is doubling down on (and rebranding) its apps for mobile devices. And it’s drawing on a solid base of neighborhood customer/members and university bookstores. Even as Amazon cuts its prices and diversifies its models to match the Nook, it can’t match Barnes & Noble’s deep reach into the real world.
According to B&N, its members with Nooks have increased their spending by 20%. The company’s building and staffing Nook boutiques in its stores. The idea is that you’ll go buy the Nook in the store, learn how to use it in the store, browse through titles (for free) in the store. And by the way, you might also want to buy some coffee, have lunch, pick up a photo album — all goods with better margins than books.
If the Kindle offers the promise of books anywhere at once and nowhere in particular, the Nook keeps alive the idea that books have a place. And the best place, Barnes & Noble thinks, is in one of its stores.
Photo credit: orb9220/Flickr
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 25, 2010
