Hasta La Gadget!

Barnes & Noble may be selling millions of Nook products, but it’s sounding like the 3G variant hasn’t really done its part to help those figures. We’ve received hard evidence from within B&N that the Nook is being discontinued, with sales to seemingly continue until stock is exhausted. The outfit is encouraging retail partners to not send out any bulk orders for the Nook 3G, as there simply won’t be sufficient quantities to fulfill those orders. Of course, we’re told that the company never actually received a huge amount of Nook 3G bulk orders to begin with, so maybe WiFi really is everywhere these days. At any rate, grab yourself a Nook 3G post-haste if you’ve been thinking it over — once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. Or, you could wait for a next-gen version with a Pearl display. Just sayin’.

Update: We received clarification that the discontinuation isn’t due to the lack of bulk sales, they’re just the first casualty of a dwindling supply.

Exclusive: Barnes & Noble phasing out the Nook 3G originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Jan 2011 17:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Galaxy S owners will already be familiar with the awesome power of overlaying text on a live view of their phone’s camera feed, but now their iPhone counterparts get to join in the fun as well. MegaReader, an e-reading app that’s survived the cutthroat App Store waters long enough to reach version 2.1, has just added a “Heads Up Display” feature to its list of attributes. Its function is to make your iPhone appear transparent, which is achieved by relaying camera images of what’s behind the phone to its front. A real life saver, a mere gimmick, or a golden opportunity for a hilarious promo video? Why not all three?

Continue reading MegaReader brings true multitasking to the iPhone, lets you walk and read at the same time (video)

MegaReader brings true multitasking to the iPhone, lets you walk and read at the same time (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Jan 2011 06:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Who can forget the Plastic Logic Que proReader — a textbook study on the vaporous gadget. Start with an incredible (but truthful) claim to have developed plastic semiconductors that could be used to fabricate flexible e-reader displays. Then follow up the breakthrough with the all-important consumer tease: an amazing (for the time) 8.5 x 11-inch e-reader with a gesture-based UI that would launch in the first half of 2009. Unfortunately, the Que never shipped and was ultimately canceled, partly because of
reliability issues associated with manufacturing those early Que displays and partly because of the launch of a rather disruptive Apple tablet you might have read about. Fast forward to today and we’ve got the state-owned Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies (Rusnano) announcing a $700 million investment in the US-based Plastic Logic Inc. Why? Are you listening? Plastics. Here’s how this “unprecedented” investment was described by Georgy Kolpachev, Rusnano’s managing director:

“Flexible plastic electronic displays will provide another major milestone in how people process information. Entering this new disruptive segment at the stage of its inception gives Russia a chance to win a leading position in global market of future electronics.”

The investment will be used to pay off Plastic Logic’s debt including a $50 million loan the company took out after approaching financial collapse. The rest will be used for a second plastic electronics factory in Russia (a sister to the Dresden Germany plant) which is expected to start production in 2013 or 2014.

Update: Press release added after the break offering more details on the “world’s largest commercial plastic electronics factory” that will be capable of producing hundreds of thousands of “next-generation plastic electronics displays” per month.

Continue reading Plastic Logic receives massive $700 million Russian investment

Plastic Logic receives massive $700 million Russian investment originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Jan 2011 04:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Clicking your way through Ulysses and having a hard time remembering just what it is Bloom ate for breakfast or, indeed, just what he did on the beach? Don’t blame James Joyce, blame your Kindle! A Princeton study entitled “Fortune favors the bold (and the Italicized)” (their emphasis) has shown that readers retain information more reliably when they are challenged with so-called “disfluent” fonts (like the top one above). This flies in the face of the belief that easy to read text is easier to remember and should give typographical titans something else to ponder when placing text upon a page character by character.

Now, what does this have to do with e-readers? Most are stuck with standard fonts that cannot be changed and fall squarely in the “fluent” category — they’re so easy to read your brain spins down. The solution is, of course, to add more and broader font support to the devices, something we’d love to see regardless of scientific merit. Until that comes to pass try holding your Kindle at odd angles or squinting. Maybe that’ll help. Or, you could just put down the Proust and pick up some Clancy.

Princeton study shows that easy fonts make things harder to remember originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You can now add your own ebooks to Amazon’s Kindle App on iOS devices, as well as books from Project Gutenberg and other copyright-free sources. Great news, right? Not so fast.

The release notes for the iPad and iPhone app contains this line:

Access millions of free and out-of-copyright books from Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and other online sources. Open supported files from Safari and Mail or use File Sharing in iTunes to transfer files to your Kindle app. [emphasis added]

That makes it sound like you can load up your EPUB-format books, right? Or at the very least a range of “supported formats”, given the wording. The problem is that you can only use Kindle files, so just dropping in all those EPUBs you’ve relucantly been keeping in iBooks isn’t possible.

And the addition of all those free Gutenberg texts? These are exactly the same texts that have always been available to the hardware Kindle, formatted for the device. You’ll need to download them and transfer them yourself, either via email or using iTunes Sharing.

And talking of iTunes, the Kindle app will let you drag anything and everything in there, including PDFs and EPUBs, although these aren’t actually recognised by the Kindle app.

So it seems that the only big new feature is iTunes transfers, and the ability to open Kindle-format files from emails. You also get a few tweaks. The icon has been uglified with orange text, and the icon view of your library (the “Home” section) now has much bigger thumbnails for your books. The problem here is that they still use the same artwork, scaled up and therefore rather blurry. The app also adds multi-tasking, and can continue to download a book when you quit it.

Finally, here’s a workaround to get your own books into the Kindle app. Grab a copy of the (free) software Calibre, which manages ebooks. Drop in your EPUBS, or whatever you have, and convert them to MOBI format. They will now work on the Kindle.

Kindle for iOS [iTunes]

See Also:

• Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad
• How to Do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle 3
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• Enable Web Browsing and Full Catalog Access on International …
• Crippleware Alert! International Kindle Gets No Web Access Outside …