I honestly can’t tell you what it’s like to see and touch and consume news, magazines and comics on the iPad. You just have to experience it. But I can tell you what to read to blow your mind. More »
Time to add HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster to the list of publishers who’ve managed to strongarm Amazon into acceding to their supposedly industry-saving agency pricing model. Under the new agreement, you might still see e-book versions of bestsellers priced at the familiar $9.99, but the majority will be jumping up to $12.99 and $14.99 price points, depending on the publisher’s discretion. This is essentially the same deal that brought Macmillan books back to Amazon.com, and the e-tailer is believed to also be in advanced negotiations with Hatchette Book Group and Penguin Group to ensure that no book is left behind. This development was cryptically predicted by Steve Jobs mere hours after the iPad’s launch and then reiterated by Rupert Murdoch with regard to HarperCollins, so we can’t exactly act surprised now, but we can at least grimace a little at having to face a more expensive e-reading future.
Amazon agrees to agency pricing model with two more publishers, Jobs prophecy coming to pass originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Apr 2010 03:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
What better way to show your contempt for the mail-order set of “classics” on your bookshelf than burning through their hearts with a Lightsaber? After all, if you’re never going to read Moby Dick or Ulysses, you might at least make them useful.
Now you can, with the glowing Lightsaber book-ends from the Star Wars shop. The Lightsaber doesn’t really spear through the books, although judging from the photos it does turn at least part of them into a clammy mess of scrambled egg. That’s not quite fair: the photos show a prototype, so the final shipping version should look (hopefully) a little more like molten metal, and the light part will glow via battery-powered lamps.
No amount of the Force will help you keep track of your place in the books however. Now, at least, you can say “This is not the page I’m looking for.” $50, ships March 31st. Move along.
Exclusive Illuminated Lightsaber Bookends [Star Wars Shop. Thanks, Jon!]
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Professor Ishikawa Komuro’s Tokyo lab is better known for robot hands that can dribble and catch balls and spin pencils between their fingers. Now, two researchers have taken this speedy sensing tech and applied it to the ripping of paper books.
Books are different from other kinds of media, like music and movies — it’s very hard to get them into a computer. There is no equivalent of CD or DVD rippers like iTunes or Handbrake. This not only makes piracy laborious, it also stops you from turning your own books into e-books.
This high-speed scanner changes that, at least if you have the room and tech skills to build one. By using a high-speed camera that shoots at 500 frames per second, lab workers Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe can scan a 200-page book in under a minute. You just hold the book under the camera and flip through the pages as if shuffling a deck of cards. The camera records the images and uses processing power to turn the odd-shaped pictures into flat, rectangular pages on which regular OCR (optical character recognition) can be performed.
The technique is unlikely to be coming to the home anytime soon (although ripping a book by flipping it in front of your notebook’s webcam would be pretty awesome), but it could certainly speed up large scanning efforts like Google’s book project.
Superfast Scanner Lets You Digitize a Book By Rapidly Flipping Pages [IEEE Spectrum]
High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation [Hizook]
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If you think the coming wave of tablets is about to make e-book readers obsolete, guess again.
Although dozens of tablets are scheduled to hit the market this year — from companies like Apple, HP and Dell, as well as upstarts like JooJoo — executives in the e-reader industry aren’t particularly worried.
Instead, they say, tablets and E Ink-based reading devices are likely to co-exist, targeting different groups of consumers based on their purchasing power, the extent of interactivity they need and their reading patterns.
“In the short term, every company is likely to have two lines of products,” says Robert Brunner, founder of Ammunition, a design firm that worked with Barnes & Noble to design the Nook e-reader. “If you think of a paperback-like reader, E Ink does a fantastic job. But color will definitely happen and it is likely to be LCD or OLED. It seems logical.”
Think of this strategy as something similar to the one employed by the print publishing industry. There are more expensive, better-designed hardcovers for consumers who value presentation — while the same books are often available in cheaper, but still functional, paperback editions.
In the digital world, that’s likely to translate into two sets of products: Full-featured tablets with color displays and lots of features that cost $400 or more, and inexpensive black-and-white E Ink-powered e-readers that will be available for $150 or less.
The launch of Amazon’s Kindle in 2007 kickstarted the market for electronic book readers. Last year, an estimated 5 million e-readers were sold and sales are expected to double this year. Meanwhile, companies like Apple and HP are promoting their tablets as devices that can be used to read digital books — although, as mini computers, these tablets can also do a lot more. Apple has already planned an iTunes-like iPad book store, called iBooks, that will compete with Amazon in selling electronic books.
The resurgence of tablets has given rise to chatter that tablets could mean the end of the road for e-readers. After all, who would want to buy a black-and-white Kindle that is basically good only for reading, when for only slightly more money, they could get a slick iPad that also does e-mail, shows movies, displays your photos and lets you edit documents?
That line of reasoning is moot, say executives in the e-reader industry.
“If reading is your primary entertainment activity, you are more likely to buy an e-reader,” says Glen Burchers, director of marketing for Freescale. “So this is a person who will pick up a book when they have the spare time instead of turning on the TV or opening up the computer.” Freescale’s processors power nearly 90 percent of the e-readers available currently.
Recent research commissioned by Freescale showed an e-reader buyer, on average, is 43 years old, earns $72,000 and buys two e-books a month.
Those who say they’re interested in buying a tablet tend to be much younger, Freescale’s research showed. Tablets will be more attractive to people who want to use them for reading but also for keeping up with their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.
An e-book designed for tablets could have interactive elements, color photos and video embeds, making it perfect for textbooks or cookbooks. Narrative non-fiction or fiction books need that kind of multimedia enhancement less, so they are more likely to be targeted at black-and-white e-readers, says Brunner.
E Ink screens aren’t particularly good at anything other than books, leaving newspapers and magazines out in the cold. That’s where tablets could step in, says James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. Indeed, many magazines — including Wired — have already announced plans to develop electronic magazines that will work on tablets. But it will be a battle that could take a toll on e-paper based displays, he says.
“For people who read more of those media than they do books, tablets will be an ideal device and can easily take some wind out of E Ink sales, once we get beyond the fourth of the population that really enjoys reading books,” says McQuivey.
Still, tablets won’t immediately supplant lower-priced electronic paper-based e-readers, he notes.
“The first thing you need to consider is whether tablets will actually be as good for book reading as the E Ink readers are,” says McQuivey. “Having a two-week battery life and a device that’s comfortable to stare at for hours at a stretch without strain (as with e-paper based e-readers) is hard to beat.”
Another major factor is price. Currently, most e-readers cost about $260, and the cheapest e-reader currently available is a $200 Sony Reader. Driving the price down could help keep the category alive, especially if tablets cost $500 or more, as the iPad will.
Earlier this month, Freescale announced a new processor designed exclusively for e-readers that could bring down their cost to $150 and lower.
According to Freescale’s estimates, a $50 reduction in price potentially doubles the pool of consumers who say they will buy an e-reader.
“At this stage of the market, price is a very important factor for growth,” Freescale’s Burcher says.
So what’s a company like Amazon likely to do next? Create a color Kindle or a color tablet for e-reading?
Brunner says a tablet that puts e-reading at the center is a more likely response to the iPad. “They don’t have a choice if they want to offer a richer, more in-depth experience,” he says.
At least in the next two years, electronic paper displays are unlikely to offer color and video on par with LCD screens. E Ink’s color screens are not expected to be widely available until next year and alternative low power technologies, such as Qualcomm’s Mirasol, aren’t optimal for the large screens (greater than 6 inches) that are the hallmark of tablets. And even when these color, low-power display technologies become widespread, they will still lack the speed and contrast people are used to with LCDs.
Instead, say some industry executives, it is likely that Amazon could design a tablet with an LCD screen that puts digital books at the center of its user interface.
“Tablets currently focus on the web-surfing experience,” says Sri Peruvemba, vice-president of sales and marketing for E Ink. “But there’s room for a tablet that’s primarily targeted at students.”
Even if the e-readers market splits into two, it shouldn’t make a difference to publishers or readers, says Trip Adler, CEO of Scribd, a document-sharing social network. Companies like Scribd and Lulu support multiple devices including PC, smartphones and e-readers and a wide variety of formats such as ePub and PDF.
“People can upload a file in any format and we can convert it to all other formats,” says Scribd’s Adler. “We make the process simple.”
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Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
The Nintendo DS’s dual-screen design has always invited book comparisons, and the new DSi XL even more so with those two 4.2-inch displays, so now’s as good a time as any for Nintendo to announce that its 100 Classic Book Collection will be coming to American shores on June 14 for $20. Joystiq says they’re expecting the book list to be the same as the Euro pack, so expect some choice public domain works here — we doubt this has got any of the big e-book players shaking in their shoes, but just wait until Miyamoto releases the $129 Wii Eye Motion Detector with packed-in Mario’s Read Speed mini-game. Then it’s gonna get crazy.
Nintendo to release 100 Classic Book Collection for DS on June 14 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Apple said to be using FairPlay DRM for iBookstore originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Yinlips is jumping on the e-reader bandwagon with a 6-inch, touchscreen E Ink reader all its own. While we don’t have full specs for this think-looking little guy yet, we do know that it supports a wide array of file formats, supposedly gets around 20 hours of battery life, and that it’s got an FM radio with recording functions. There’s no word on pricing, other specs, or even the official name of this product yet (possibly just ‘E-Book’?), so make your suggestions in the comments, and we’ll try to get word to Yinlips for you.
Yinlips busts out a 6-inch, E Ink-boasting e-reader originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Putting traditional print publication on an iPhone screen is old hat for ScrollMotion, and now it’s taking that know-how to a larger screen. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Kaplan, Pearson Education, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt K-12, and the educational sector of McGraw-Hill have all made deals with the company to develop textbook apps and test-prep / study guide apps for the Apple iPad. No other details are given and we unfortunately lack any timeline. It certainly makes the machine more classroom-viable, but we’ll hold judgment until we see what actually comes of this partnership — your move, Kindle.
Major textbook pubs partner with ScrollMotion for iPad development originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
We hate to iPad-ify the news so bluntly (matching lower back tattoos aside), but the timing of this one is uncanny. Mere days after Apple’s announcement of a deal with Macmillan for its new iBooks store, and right after a shakycam video of Steve Jobs predicting some publishers would be pulling books from the Kindle due to a lack of satisfaction with Amazon’s prices, Macmillan’s books have mysteriously disappeared from Amazon.com. Even the paper ones, like the new Wheel Of Time book, pictured to the right. You can of course buy books from the other retailers that Amazon’s systems support (along with Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca), but there’s no getting a Macmillan publication straight from Amazon.com. Without a peep about the issue from Amazon or Macmillan, it’s easy to see this as some sort of wild glitch — after all, what could possibly cause such a rift between these two companies to end sales of all Macmillan books, instead of just the e-books for Kindle? Hopefully we find out soon, before our heads implode conspiratorially.
Macmillan books gone from Amazon.com, Steve Jobs grins wryly from his throne of golden iPads originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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