Hasta La Gadget!

Spent some quality time watching the Home Shopping Network this morning to hear just how the Nook Color will be improved? That’s what we thought… but we bit the bullet and tuned in ourselves to get the details for you. Simply put, HSN says Barnes and Noble will start rolling out an over-the-air software package in “mid-April” that will update the Nook Color to Android 2.2, bringing Adobe Flash Player, Angry Birds, and push email of some sort. It’ll also apparently include “lots of Nook apps,” though the channel’s pitchmen only had one to show on TV — a kid-friendly sketchpad, with a variety of drawing utensils and colored paper. HSN hosts also claim that customers who purchase the Nook Color on the show are “guaranteed to be the very first people updated,” though we’re not sure we’ll take them at their word, considering some of the other fabulous exaggerations we just heard on the air.

HSN details Nook Color update for ‘mid-April’: Android 2.2, Flash, apps and push email originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 26 Mar 2011 13:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Heads-up, Kindle owners — digging into your next audiobook just got a lot less troublesome. Audible has just announced that over 50,000 of its audiobooks are now available to download directly onto Kindles everywhere through WiFi. Granted, that’s still one step away (3G) from being as good as it could possibly get, but it’s still a tremendous improvement over the tried-and-true USB sideloading method. For those looking to get started for the first time, the outfit’s offering a 30-day free trial of AudibleListener Gold, detailed in the source link below. Happy listening, bookworms.

Audible audiobooks now flying onto Kindles via WiFi originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Mar 2011 20:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Inkling is a pretty cute name for a product, you have to admit, but by the end of the year it could be pretty serious business. It’s a company that specializes on publishing textbooks on the iPad, devices that are rapidly killing the poor paper industry. As of now the company’s products are few, but two major publishers, Pearson and McGraw-Hill, have signed on to support the service, a deal that will see Inkling’s product catalog swell by several orders of magnitude. Up to 100 books are expected to be there by the end of the year and, while that’s nothing compared to the massive variety of volumes that swell students’ backpacks and diminish their drinking funds at the beginning of every semester, it is a solid start. Best of all, Inkling’s current texts cost 35 percent less than their printed doppelgangers, meaning there’s hope for cheaper e-books after all.

Inkling signs with major publishers to bring 100 textbooks to iPad by 2012, no actual ink originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Mar 2011 04:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s taken a long, long time to fully consider Google’s proposed $125 million settlement with publishers and authors of out-of-print works, but now the ruling has been handed down and it’s not the one the Mountain View team wanted. Circuit Judge Chin, who had preliminarily approved the deal back in November 2009, has returned with the new conclusion that actually it goes “too far” in Google’s favor. The origins of this settlement stem from a class action lawsuit filed against El Goog for a book digitization project it began back in 2004, and it’s important to note that terms were agreed way back in 2008, before a bunch of external objections made them revise the document to its current state and refile it with the court in ’09. Since then, the Department of Justice has had a look at antitrust concerns relating to Google potentially having a monopoly on orphan works (those whose author cannot be identified) and Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo have all piped up to say it’s a bunk deal. Now, the one man standing between us and a whole ton of web-accessible reading materials has agreed with them. He does leave a pretty large door open for reconciliation, however, should Google be willing to accede to less favorable terms. Let’s just hope whatever else transpires doesn’t take another year and a half to do so.

Google’s deal for book digitization rejected by judge, Books plans sent back to drawing board originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Mar 2011 19:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We doubt the world will ever get to a stage where it’ll completely ditch ye olde paper books, but the US consumer market seems to clearly have its heart set on the electronic kind right now. Net ebook sales in January were this week reported to have accumulated $69.9 million in revenue for their publishers, which amounts to a 116 percent jump from last year’s total for the month. During the same period, adult hardcovers were down 11.3 percent to $49.1 million and paperbacks faced a similar reduction in demand and fell to $83.6 million, a precipitous drop of 19.7 percent year-on-year. Educational and children’s books weren’t spared from this cull of the physical tome, either — skip past the break to see the full statistical breakdown.

Continue reading Ebook sales in the US double year-on-year, paper books suffer double-digit losses

Ebook sales in the US double year-on-year, paper books suffer double-digit losses originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 Mar 2011 17:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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