Hasta La Gadget!

We’re huddled up in an obscure corner of the New York Public Library, waiting for Sony to drop its new Reader news on us. There are numerous publishing people here, and for our money we’d say a wireless-equipped, “daily” news sort of device is about to descend upon us, but we’ll find out for sure when Sony gets on the makeshift stage and tells all.

10:30AM: The President and CEO of the New York Public Library is up front, and he says the digital content of the NYPL will be available to Sony Readers for free.

10:34AM: Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division is up now, and he likens the transition from books to digital books to vinyl to CD and film to digital photo.

10:38AM: Launching 3.0 eBook Library software. Mac and PC compatible, notes made on the touch edition can be printed.

10:40AM: Library Finder. You can register for a library card, and then check out ebooks from the “library” over the internet. Content expires in the number of days specified by the library. No late fees!

10:43AM: Sony Reader Daily Edition! 3G, 7-inch touchscreen, $399. Picture is up top.

10:53AM: Check out some “hands-on” photos below. He didn’t let us touch it, and apparently this isn’t even a working prototype. Still, from our angle, it’s looking pretty slick!

Filed under: Handhelds

Sony’s ‘Daily Edition’ Reader launch event originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Aug 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Brick and mortar book mega-retailer Barnes & Noble has its sights set firmly on Amazon’s Kindle. The company has already teamed up with Plastic Logic to sell a new ebook reader, and now iRex Technologies has joined the fight. The Dutch company is currently working on its own e-reader set for a release this fall.

Not that iRex is keeping this relationship exclusive, or anything. “We will change the dynamics of the consumer market,” said the company’s North American CEO, Kevin Hamilton, “users want to easily purchase content from a variety of sources and we allow them to read it on an IREX eReader as well as other devices.”

iRex has been in the ebook space for a while now, having already brought a device called the iLiad to market.

Microsoft, its new pet dog Yahoo, and Amazon have decided to join together in the soon to be formed Open Book Alliance. You might expect this to be a revolutionary new collaborative effort at delivering the written word in a way that makes Google Books pale into insignificance, but you would, of course, be wrong. Far from trying to compete with Google, The OBA is set to act as the collective mouthpiece for all those opposed to Google’s recent $125 million settlement deal with book publishers and authors. With the US Department of Justice already investigating antitrust concerns relating to the case, the other big dogs just couldn’t restrain themselves from pitching in together for a united whinge. Should the settlement be cleared, it will permit Google non-exclusive rights to orphan works (those without an established writer) and will give it a 30 per cent cut of books sold via Google Books, both things that authors have agreed to. So what’s there to moan about, fellas — we all trust Google to do the right thing, right?

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo unite against Google Books originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As it turns out, those Sony Reader leaks from earlier this week were spot on. The company just went official with the PRS-300 and 600, which will more affectionately be known as the Pocket and Touch editions, respectively. The latter (pictured left, not to scale) is the 6-inch resistive touchscreen model replacing the PRS-700, with Memory Stick / Duo and SD card slots. The backlighting layer from its predecessor has been dropped to improve touch responsiveness and to alleviate concerns of glare. It also comes packing a stylus and a digitized copy of the Oxford American English Dictionary and will be available in red, black, and silver. The Pocket Edition, on the other hand, is your standard fare with no touchscreen or expandable disk port, and palettes including blue, silver, and rose. Both models have USB 2.0, 512MB internal memory, and no WiFi whatsoever — Sony assures us a WiFi version is coming and there’ll be news on those coming soon, but this isn’t it. There’s also Mac compatibility, a first for the series, that’s trickling down to older models via a firmware update. Touch and Pocket will be available by the end of August and will retail for $299 and $199, a substantially more competitive price point than its previous generation. Speaking of which, as of tomorrow, the Sony’s e-book store is dropping the prices of its bestsellers from $11.99 to $9.99. A win all around, but will it be enough to make a dent in Kindle‘s stronghold? Things are certainly getting more interesting.

Filed under: Handhelds

Sony Reader Pocket and Touch editions lower cost of entry, online e-book store follows suit originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It seems we have yet another reason to volley complaints in Amazon’s directions. 17-year old high school student Justin Gawronski had apparently been taking electronic notes and annotations on his Kindle for a summer assignment on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yeah, you can probably guess where this is going — after the retailer remotely pulled the plug on that particular version of the book, Gawronski’s notes were lost in the ethers, rendered useless. The suit, which is seeking class action status, asks that Amazon be legally blocked from improperly accessing users’ Kindles in the future and punitive damages for those affected by the deletion — and if he asks nice, we’re pretty sure Jeff would write his teacher a note. [Warning: read link is a PDF]

[Via Trading Markets]

Filed under: Handhelds

Student sues Amazon after Kindle eats his homework originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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