Hasta La Gadget!

Up until now, if you wanted to send content from a website directly to your Kindle for later reading, you had to install a browser extension. Now, however, you don’t necessarily have to if the site in question has implemented Amazon’s new “Send to Kindle” button. Made just for web publishers and WordPress bloggers, you can already see it on The Washington Post, TIME and Boing Boing websites. Publishers can design how they want the button to look to a certain degree via limited customization of the font, color, size and theme. Like all the other Send to Kindle shortcuts, all readers need to do is select the article they want to ship over, hit the button and they’ll see it on their favorite Kindle reader, be it the app or the device. Site owners can head over to the sources below to see how they can participate.

Filed under: Software, Amazon

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Via: PaidContent

Source: Send to Kindle for websites, Send to Kindle WordPress plugin, Kindle Daily Post

While Apple’s iBookstore is available in numerous countries, readers who sit outside of a certain privileged zone have had to make do with public domain e-books at best. The Japanese won’t have to settle as of today: a low-key iBookstore expansion gives them access to paid content, including manga and other more localized material. Accordingly, there’s an iBooks 3.1 app update rolling out that both unlocks “hundreds of thousands” of titles in the Japanese store and improves support for Asian languages as a whole. Residents who’ve been looking for the most official means of reading JoJolion on their iPads just need to grab the refreshed iBooks at the source.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Apple

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Source: App Store

Currently the subject of many a rumor, Barnes & Noble just announced its quarterly results for Q3 2013 (its current fiscal quarter), showing what many expected: revenue is down almost 9 percent over last year to $2.2 billion, with gross earnings showing a precipitous 63 percent decline to $55.5 million. Despite well regarded (and priced) tablets, Nook business took one of the biggest hits, taking in only $316 million compared to $427 million over last year, a decline of nearly 26 percent. The company recently denied innuendo that it might be stepping away from Nook hardware altogether, but said in today’s statement that it’ll be “calibrating its business model” to look at reducing costs in the segment. However, with other expenses considered, the company has dropped $47 million so far this year, compared to a loss of only $11 million at the same time last year — a trend which the Amazon competitor will need to put the brakes on, one way or the other.

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Source: Barnes & Noble

Structural color — that’s engineer speak for a reflective display that mimics iridescence. And tech of that very sort could be trickling down into future generations of e-readers, thanks to current research by the University of Michigan. Using the “refined hairline grooves” of a peacock as a template, a research team led by Professor Jay Guo has found success in creating a prototype of one such high-res display by crafting nanoscale metallic grooves on silver-plated glass. Using the CMY color model (cyan, magenta and yellow) as its basis, the team was able to produce blues with a groove measuring 170 x 40 nanometers, reds at 60 nanometers wide and yellows at a width of 90 nanometers — all with reflected sunlight and unaffected by viewing angles. At the moment, only static images can be reproduced, but Guo and his crew hope to add moving images to the format soon. If and when this reflective display makes it to market, you can surely expect e-reader battery life to go even more of a distance.

Filed under: Displays

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Source: University of Michigan

Google’s long had a contentious relationship with France. But it seems the Mountain View-based company has come up with a way to squash that problem: by throwing money at it. Taking to the company’s official blog today, Chairman Eric Schmidt announced the creation of a €60 million Digital Publishing Innovation Fund, in cooperation with French prez François Hollande, that will help “stimulate innovation and increase revenues” for the country’s publishing houses. And in a move that’s in no way self-serving as a gesture of goodwill, Google’s also pledging to partner with those publishers to help monetize their digital offerings using AdSense. In the search giant’s defense, it had begun to work more closely with La France back in 2011, even going so far as to create a cultural center in Paris; a city it once described as “one of Europe’s fastest-growing Internet economies.” So, okay, maybe there’s more to this investment than beefing up the bottom line. Now, if only Google could talk to Hollande about the hashtag…

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Source: Official Google Blog