Oct 04

Barnes & Noble opens ‘PubIt!’ self-publishing portal, details compensation model

Posted in: barnes and noble, BarnesAndNoble, Books, e reader, e-book, e-books, e-readers, ebooks, nook, sales, Today's Chili

It ain’t exactly summer, but we’ll take it. Launching just a few days after we’d been told to expect it, Barnes & Noble’s PubIt! self-publishing portal is finally open for business. As you’d heard before, this platform is essentially designed to give independent writers a venue for hawking their masterpieces, with PubIt! converting files to ePUB for use on a wide range of e-readers (read: not only the Nook). Published titles will be available for sale within 24 to 72 hours after upload on the B&N eBookstore, and the company’s pretty proud of its “no hidden fees” policy. Unfortunately, the compensation model — which is being detailed today for the first time — has its quirks. For PubIt! eBooks priced at or between $2.99 and $9.99, publishers will receive 65 percent of the list price for sold content; for those priced at $2.98 or less, or $10.00 or more, publishers will only receive 40 percent of the list price. In other words, there’s a no man’s land in that $10 to $15 range, so you’ll probably be settling for a $9.99 price point or reaching for the skies at $19.99. But hey, at least all PubIt! ebooks will also be lendable for a fortnight — surely that counts for something. Right?

Continue reading Barnes & Noble opens ‘PubIt!’ self-publishing portal, details compensation model

Barnes & Noble opens ‘PubIt!’ self-publishing portal, details compensation model originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Oct 2010 22:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oct 04

Mirasol displays slated for ‘converged devices’ in Q1 2011, followed by low-power smartphones

Posted in: Displays, e reader, e-book, e-books, e-readers, qualcomm, Today's Chili

When we reported that the Mirasol low-power color displays were pushed back to early 2011, that wasn’t technically correct — Qualcomm just informed us that the company’s cranking out panels even as we speak, and will ship them to OEMs this fall. So what’s actually going to happen in Q1 2011? The formal release of Mirasol devices, of course. Representatives told us that the 5.7-inch, 220ppi XGA color display will appear in multiple products with multiple partners next year, and that they “will be in devices that are converged and look a lot more like a tablet PC than an e-reader.” Following that, they said, the company will turn its attention to developing Mirasol for smartphones. We couldn’t get Qualcomm to comment on a rumored $2b Mirasol plant, unfortunately, and there’s no word on that color Kindle, but we imagine all will be revealed at or shortly after CES next year.

Mirasol displays slated for ‘converged devices’ in Q1 2011, followed by low-power smartphones originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Oct 2010 14:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oct 02

Qualcomm’s Mirasol displays pushed back to 2011, Pixel Qi breathes a sigh

Posted in: delay, e reader, e-book, e-books, e-readers, qualcomm, Today's Chili

We don’t know a soul who doesn’t want a low-power color display that looks great in bright sunlight, but nobody’s really stepped up to the plate — not Pixel Qi, whose awesome dual-mode display sold out in a single day, and not Qualcomm, whose Mirasol has similarly been the subject of delay after delay. We’re sorry to say that the latter has been bumped back yet again, as GigaOM reports the panels won’t arrive till early 2011, right alongside their rival technology. Sure, competition’s always great for pricing, but still — what a shame.

Qualcomm’s Mirasol displays pushed back to 2011, Pixel Qi breathes a sigh originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 02 Oct 2010 19:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oct 01

Bluetooth Sheet Music Turner Could Help Readers With Disabilities

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, e-books, e-readers, ipad, Music, Today's Chili

AirTurn’s Bluetooth foot-switch for iPad turns pages with the tap of a foot. It’s designed for keeping both hands free to play an instrument while reading digital sheet music. However, it may turn out to be an important technology for e-book readers with disabilities.

Gadget Lab wrote about AirTurn’s BT-105 prototype in July, but I discovered its accessibility potential in this thread at e-reading site TeleRead. A reader wrote the following email to TeleRead editor Paul Biba:

My friend’s grandson is bright, loves to read, but doesn’t speak and lacks the fine motor skill to turn pages on his iPad book reader. Is there any software or device that could turn the pages for him?

Could you also ask if they know of an input device, do they know how a non-technical person would hook the input device to the iPad or computer?

I did my own research and was discouraged not to be able to find any purpose-built software or hardware to do the job. Late last night, reader “possentespirto” mentioned the AirTurn, which is still scheduled to be available sometime in Q4 of this year. Bluetooth pairing doesn’t require a great deal of technical wizardry, and the AirTurn foot pedal is already compatible with third-party software. This could be a terrific solution.

Users lacking either full control of their arms and hands or the limbs themselves could use the foot pedal to turn pages and zoom in on text; users with other disabilities could convert the foot clicker into a hand-clicker. In fact, the device reminds me of nothing so much as the clicker Stephen Hawking used to select text before he eventually lost control of his hands as well.

AirTurn’s foot-clicker may be too heavy or require too much force to be usable for some disabled users. Here’s where there’s a natural opportunity for an accessibility-minded company to build on this technology, make something explicitly for these readers and do it right.

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Sep 30

Ray Kurzweil’s Blio E-Book Launch Met With Confusion, Controversy

Posted in: e reader, e-books, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili

Updated at 5:30 p.m. Eastern to add comment from K-NFB.

This week, K-NFB, an e-reading company founded by Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation for the Blind, launched its much-anticipated Blio reading app and e-book store. Blio was immediately and widely panned by publishers, developers and readers.

“Many of the failures are fundamentally at odds with the one thing that Kurzweil was touting above all else: accessibility,” wrote Laura Dawson, a digital reading industry consultant, formerly of BarnesAndNoble.com. K-NFB initially promised to make e-books more accessible to blind readers; yet Windows, currently its only enhanced books platform, has known text-to-speech conversion issues.

K-NFB and Kurzweil responded by saying the software had been released before a fully-accessible version was ready, and that they plan to release an improved version next week.

“People understandably have very high expectations,” Kurzweil said in an interview with Wired.com Thursday. “We believe Blio is very usable and has many features other book formats don’t. And there are many features that we want to add.”

In addition to bug fixes and other tweaks, an accessibility release scheduled for October 25 will work with Freedom Scientific’s JAWS, screen reader software for Windows specifically tailored for blind users. The 1.0 version released Tuesday relied on Windows’ built-in text-to-speech capabilities.

K-NFB spokesperson Peter Chapman acknowledged the problems with Blio’s text-to-speech in an interview with Publishers Weekly, but blamed the platform, not the books: “the TTS software on most Windows machines isn’t very good.” Yet many Windows XP users were unable to even install Blio’s software. (This has since been resolved.)

K-NFB also confirmed that an iOS 4 version for iPhone and iPod Touch is currently in private beta, and that an iPad version will shortly follow the iPhone, probably sometime after November’s release of iOS 4.2. Android and Mac OS X versions are also in development.

Users weren’t the only ones frustrated with Blio. Hadrien Gardeur, founder and CEO of free e-books site FeedBooks, complained on Twitter that Blio was offering downloads from FeedBooks’ catalog without permission: “Hey Blio, next time that you add our OPDS [Open Publishing Distribution System] catalog to a commercial product, send us an e-mail first.”

In a follow-up e-mail, Gardeur noted that FeedBooks only allows other systems to include their catalog under the following conditions:

  • full support for the EPUB standard (Blio converts EPUB into its own format and can’t support EPUB with other companies’ DRM)
  • support the entire OPDS catalog (Blio only includes some of FeedBooks’ feeds)
  • Add other OPDS catalogs to its library (Blio can’t do that)
  • allow payment for commercial content through open standards (Blio doesn’t)

For these reasons, Gardeur asked Blio not to include FeedBooks’ content in its initial launch; according to Gardeur, K-NFB went ahead and included part of Feedbooks’ OPDS catalog anyways. Since FeedBooks has a planned system update forthcoming, it will most likely break Blio’s access to the catalog.

Kurzweil stated Thursday that K-NFB was continuing to work with Feedbooks and other free book providers; he credited the dispute over Blio’s use of their feeds to a miscommunication.

Finally, as we noted earlier this week, Toshiba launched its own branded version of the Blio application, store and e-book catalog called Toshiba Book Place. Toshiba is offering 6,000 titles at launch; Blio 11,000. This puts Blio at a distinct disadvantage against the 700,000 e-books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers for sale from Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s library of over 1,000,000 e-books.

It’s not precisely clear why there’s a gap in the number of books offered by Toshiba and Blio. But the brand and store fragmentation is another confusing component of a deeply confusing product launch. It’s especially troubling for those who have been hoping for serious innovation in making e-readers accessible to users of all abilities.

Image via Blio.com

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Sep 29

Kobo Updates E-Reader with Wi-Fi, Price-Drop

Posted in: e-books, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili

Kobo, the independent e-reader company that could, has updated its popular e-book. It gets a price-drop, a few tweaks and one big new feature.

Kobo started out as client-software on mobile devices and now exists on everything from the iPad to the PC to the upcoming Blackberry PlayBook. It has also been selling well in its physical incarnation, and this new model replaces the old, shaving $10 off the price (it is now $140) and adding much-needed Wi-Fi. Previously, you’d need to download purchases from the Kobo store to your computer and send them to the Kobo via Bluetooth or USB. Now, with Wi-Fi, you can shop direct, just like you can with Amazon’s Kindle. You can also have magazines and newspapers delivered to the device.

The new reader also has improved, sharper text (in five sizes), 1GB memory (the Wi-Fi Kindle has 2GB) and a battery life of ten days (Kindle, one month). You can, however, stick in an SD-card to increase capacity. The processor has also been upgraded, making page-turns 2.5x faster, and Kobo has added a built-in dictionary.

Unlike the Kindle, the Kobo supports the industry-standard EPUB format, the same as used by Apple’s iBooks, and just like the Kindle, any of your books will stay in sync across your various applications and devices. It also comes in a variety of colors, including black, “Pearlized Onyx” and silver (these last two only color the quilted back panel – the black is black all-over).

Available now.

Kobo reader [Kobo. Thanks, Meghan!]

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Sep 29

Blio for Windows review, now available for download

Posted in: e reader, e-book, e-books, e-readers, review, Software, Today's Chili

Last week we brought you news that KNF-B was prepping for a September 28 launch of its Blio e-reader software, and according to our date books, the time has come! The free PC software (Windows XP, Vista and 7 are all supported) can be downloaded now at the source link below; the iPhone app should be hitting the App Store very soon, however. We’ve been using the program for the last few days to, you know, “read,” so before heading over to download it yourself you’ll naturally want to hit the break for our impressions of the unique reading application.

Gallery: Blio for Windows preview

Continue reading Blio for Windows review, now available for download

Blio for Windows review, now available for download originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sep 29

New Kobo eReader gets wireless connection, faster processor, pretty colors

Posted in: e reader, e-book, e-books, e-readers, Today's Chili, wifi
New Kobo eReader gets wireless connection, faster processor, retail availability at Borders

When we reviewed the $150 Kobo e-reader this summer we liked the value it offered, but didn’t particularly appreciate the poor performance nor the missing wireless connectivity. Now it’s back, a new version offering fixes to those two issues (the system works!) and selling for $10 cheaper to boot. The new Kobo Wireless eReader adds WiFi into the mix, enabling on-device book downloads whenever you’re in range of a suitably accommodating hotspot. There’s also a new processor to speed things up, but at this point we don’t know by how much. That question will be answered on November 1 when the thing starts shipping in your choice of three colors (black, silver, and lovely lavender), but as it’s currently up for pre-order now at Borders you’d better hurry and make with the clicking if you want yours by the holidays.

Gallery: Kobo Wireless eReader

Continue reading New Kobo eReader gets wireless connection, faster processor, pretty colors

New Kobo eReader gets wireless connection, faster processor, pretty colors originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Sep 2010 07:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sep 28

Toshiba, Blio Jump In With Enhanced E-Books For Laptops

Posted in: e-books, e-readers, Laptops, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili, Toshiba

Today, Toshiba will announce its entry into the e-book market with Toshiba Book Place, a Windows application developed by K-NFB, to both purchase and read enhanced e-books. The application will be bundled with all of Toshiba’s laptops, and will also be available as a free download from their website. The library will initially offer 6,000 e-books for purchase. K-NFB also launched its own application, Blio, described below.

Wired.com interviewed Terry Cronin, a vice president for Toshiba America. While e-books for dedicated e-readers and other devices have been successful, he believes e-books for laptops can offer something unique for particular kinds of reading — especially those that benefit from immediate access to other media.

“It’s a device that people already have,” he said. “If you’re traveling or bringing a bag, you’re already bringing your laptop with you. You don’t need to bring another device.”

Cookbooks, children’s books, and textbooks all benefit from the greater storage space and graphics capabilities of a laptop, Cronin said. The goal a library of e-books enhanced with 3-D viewing and embedded video, audio, and online search and web browsing.

Toshiba developed the application with futurist Ray Kurzweil’s K-NFB Reading Technology, Inc., a joint venture with the National Federation for the Blind. K-NFB is working with publishers to encode the books in the XPS e-book format and add video and audio enhancements to the e-book library.

UPDATE: Today, K-NFB is also announcing Blio, its own e-reader application with a built-in bookstore, available for immediate download (Windows only). It appears to be essentially identical to Toshiba Book Place, and the books available are the same format and selection; you could say that Book Place is a Toshiba-branded version of Blio.

It’s not clear to me whether this will work. There are already e-book applications from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others available for Windows laptops with a much wider selection of books and portability across devices. The Amazon Kindle marketplace contains 700,000 e-books for sale, for instance, while Barnes & Noble’s offers over a million.

The hope is that XPS will catch on, and emerge as a standard alongside EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and other electronic document formats. Then the store will be able to expand to support other outlets. But right now, that looks like a long shot.

Toshiba Book Place [ToshibaBookPlace.com]

Image credit: Toshiba

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Sep 28

Kindle for Web, Blackpad, Sure; Amazon Android Tablet, Maybe

Posted in: amazon, Android, apps, BlackBerry, e-books, kindle, Media Players, playbook, RIM, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili

Image by Charlie Sorrel and Tim Carmody

Amazon continues to expand its reading and media software to whole new classes of devices, from new tablets to PC web browsers. It’s just not immediately clear just how far the retail giant is going to go.

We’ll take these news items one at a time, in increasing order of uncertainty:

  1. Amazon launches Beta version of Kindle for the Web. Think YouTube for books. You can preview short selections of books in your browser, embed them on web sites with a little bit of JavaScript, and customize the size (it won’t automatically keep the aspect ratio) or even add your Amazon Associate tag to the embed. Click through and it takes you to the book’s entry on the Amazon Kindle store. Level of certainty: This you can actually use right now.

  2. Amazon announces Kindle app for forthcoming RIM Playbook tablet. Makes perfect sense given yesterday’s Playbook announcement, natural extension of the Kindle app for Blackberry, iPad, and other platforms. Level of certainty: Actual press release from Amazon after high-profile announcement from RIM. I suppose a bolt of lightning could strike one or both companies tomorrow. But you can’t see it today.
  3. Amazon to Launch Android App Store, which my pal Charlie Sorrel already let you know about. Level of certainty: Well-reported rumor. But it makes sense — Amazon sells a lot of stuff, and there are a lot of Android app stores — and it’s confirmed by multiple developer sources. Don’t be surprised if you hear details soon.
  4. Amazon to Build Own Branded Android Tablet. Okay, so, a source comes to you with what seem like two wild, fan-fiction stories about Amazon and Android. You ask around, and one of them — an Amazon App Store — turns out to probably be in the works. Is the other story true?

    On the one hand, again — Amazon sells a lot of digital products online, not just e-books: movies, games, music. And it’s not hard to make an Android tablet. In fact, at this point, Amazon has more hardware-production experience with the Kindle than some of the companies that are coming forward with pretty solid products. Add an App Store and it starts to look pretty appealing.

    On the other hand, Amazon’s built up good brand identification with the Kindle, e-books, and E Ink. Will they turn around and say, “oh yeah, multimedia tablets are really awesome, but not, um, more awesome than a Kindle, I mean, um, why not buy both?” Just seems a little surprising. Level of certainty: Pretty cloudy. The source was right about an app store, but as they say, a stopped clock can be right twice a day. If Amazon releases some kind of other media hardware, whether using Android or anything else, it’s equally likely to be a TV box or a smartphone or something else that equally plays to their strength while being a little more differentiated from a dedicated reading machine than a tablet.

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