Looks like that blurry leak we got was dead-on: Target and Amazon just officially announced that the Kindle will be sold in the Minneapolis Target flagship store and 102 southern Florida stores starting April 25, with the rest of the chain getting units as the year goes on. That’s the first time Jeff Bezo’s e-reader will be sold in a brick-and-mortar store, a big step for Amazon we’re taking as a response to Barnes & Noble’s heavy in-store promotion of the Nook — although Target already carries the Sony Reader line, so it’s not totally crazy. We’ll see how this affects sales in the months to come — and whether or not Target follows this up by selling the iPad as well. Full press release after the break.
Update: A kind, anonymous tipster has sent us in that little photo of what appears to be the Kindle’s Target packaging. Thanks!
Amazon’s contempt for anyone other than English-speakers may be the Kindle’s undoing. By ignoring the majority of the world, it has left a huge gap in the e-book market. Now Spanish speakers are being given their own e-reader and store in the shape of Spring Design’s Alex.
The Alex will be re-branded as the Papyre 6.S Alex and join other Papyre readers sold by Grammata, a Spanish-language e-book provider. The dual-screen, Android-powered reader will launch with a mere 1,000 titles (still around 1,000 more Spanish titles than Amazon offers), rising to 15,000 to 45,000 when its publishing deals are signed.
The Alex, you will remember, is similar to the Barnes & Noble Nook, with an e-ink screen up top and a colored touch-screen below. The launch model will have Wi-Fi, with 3G to follow. Good news, then, for Spanish speakers the world over. Or almost. The Alex will cost a ridiculous €450 at launch in July. That’s $615, or the price of another Spanish-speaking e-reader with Wi-Fi and 3G: Apple’s iPad. Good luck, Grammata.
Our watches may be off by a few hours or so, but April 18th it ain’t. Evidently that matters not, as Barnes & Noble’s Nook is now up for order on Best Buy’s website, a full five days earlier than we were expecting it. ‘Course, in-store pickup still isn’t available, but those who plunk down the plastic online should see it ship out within a day or so. If you’re still fond of these e-reader things, and you’re kosher with a few quirks, the big yellow sticker would be happy to craft a shipping label with your name on it for $259.99.
We’d gripe about the wait, but given all the e-book readers we saw at CES that’ve fallen off the radar or been delayed to oblivion, we’re actually pretty proud of Spring Design for shipping the Alex at last. Orders will start going out tomorrow for the $399 dual screen reader. Not sure it’s worth the price? Well, we’re not positive either. Check out our review for a bit of help deciding.
With all of the Nookchatter going down at Best Buy lately, it was bound to become official sooner or later: as of this morning Reuters is reporting that the retailer will start carrying Barnes and Noble’s e-reader beginning, as previously reported, on April 18. We just hope you can contain your excitement until then — we know we’ll be doing our best.
Update: We just got our hands on the PR, and here is a little more detail: Not only will the Nook and B&N eBook giftcards be available at Best Buy locations and in its online store, the Geek Squad is also apparently hard at work installing the Nook eReader software on “select PCs, netbooks, tablets and smartphones” sold in its stores. The device is set to retail for $260. Peep the PR for yourself after the break.
We stopped by Elonex‘s booth at The Gadget Show Live for its product launch extravaganza. First is the iDock XL screen dock for the iPhone / iPod touch, which sadly doesn’t serve as an iPhone-to-iPad converter, but will let you do the usual video and photo display on its 10-inch 800×480 screen (the prototype pictured above has a smaller temporary screen). You’ll find a removable battery that lasts for about four hours or almost twice that with a secondary internal battery, or you can leave the iDock XL plugged in via its micro-USB port. Available in May for £149 ($229).
More toys after the break, including a look at the iDock Aero and the 710EB e-reader.
Man, if only books were like CDs, and we could just slide them into our computers and have them perfectly ripped into e-books within minutes. Not since the CD was launched have we been faced with buying all our content over again, just to use it on a new device.
For those willing to put in a little effort, though, a book-ripper can be made for pennies. At Instructables you can learn how to make a “portable, paperless, digital copy machine” from a few metal strips and rods and an old digital camera. The principle is simple: To scan properly, you need to have a clear picture, and the pages need to be flat. This method uses a rectangular frame to press the open book flat without putting glossy, reflective glass over the top. The corners are connected by rods to the camera, keeping it parallel to the paper-plane, and making sure you get sharp, shake-free images.
You don’t need a dedicated camera: The project details a wooden platform onto which any camera can be screwed. If you have a spare old digicam, though, you can make a permanent scanning station, which means you’re more likely to use it.
After that, you can either keep the JPEGs or run them through some OCR (optical character recognition) software to turn the images into proper, searchable, resizable text. Mac users might try out an application called Prizmo ($40), which cleans, straightens and OCRs images all in one package. PC users have a far better selection, some of which are detailed on the Instructables page.
Get to it! Clear some shelf space, and give yourself a fun weekend project, too.
While you can’t buy a QUE proReader until summer it seems that you can buy the company. Well, maybe not you but someone with a few hundred million in the bank. At least that’s the way the Financial Times is framing a piece focused on UK investor Hermann Hauser, whose venture capital firm has a stake in Plastic Logic. According to Hauser, “We’re in very interesting negotiations with … well, that would be a separate interview, you will hopefully hear [more] about this in the autumn.”
Why would anybody want to buy this offshoot from the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory? After all, dedicated monochrome E-Ink devices are on their last legs, right? Chips made from plastic, not silicon, that’s why — intellectual property that could revolutionize integrated circuits and the entire computing industry. For the moment, however, Plastic Logic is only manufacturing the simple plastic transistors found inside its QUE proReader display that switch each pixel on or off — a far cry from PCBs loaded with plastic integrated circuits. And as the FT acknowledges, any potential buyer might end up with an e-reader company and nothing more. Not exactly where you want to be at the dawn of the second coming of tablet computers.
Updated: We heard from Plastic Logic investor Hermann Hauser who firmly says the company is not for sale. Apparently his comments were taken out of context. That still doesn’t answer our question of when we will be able to get our hands on a QUE proReader.
Three universities are getting pumped to hand out free iPads to students and faculty with hopes that Apple’s tablet will revolutionize education.
Seton Hill University, George Fox University and Abilene Christian University each pre-ordered bundles of iPads — sight unseen — with plans to experiment with how the tablet could change classroom learning. In interviews with Wired.com just prior to the iPad’s launch last week, officials from each university saw the iPad as having potential to render printed textbooks obsolete.
“Those big, heavy textbooks that kids go around with in their backpacks are going to be a thing of the past,” said Mary Ann Gawelek, vice president of academic affairs at Seton Hill, which is giving iPads to its 2,100 students and 300 faculty members beginning this fall. “We think it’s leading to something that’s going to provide a better learning environment for all of our students. We’re hoping that faculty will be able to use more of a variety of textbooks because textbooks will be a little bit less expensive.”
One hitch in the universities’ plans is that Apple has not inked deals with any textbook publishers to bring their offerings to the iPad’s iBooks store. So far Apple and publishers have only formed partnerships around e-books for fiction and nonfiction titles, like those available for the Kindle.
For textbooks, students can currently access about 10,000 e-textbooks through a third-party company called CourseSmart, which includes titles from the five biggest textbook publishers. CourseSmart is a subscription-based service that charges a fee for students to access e-textbooks of their choice for a limited time. The company has already announced an iPad app (demonstrated below).
The iPad may succeed where Amazon’s Kindle DX failed. Amazon released its 9.7-inch Kindle DX e-book reader in 2009, which was aimed squarely at students and the textbook market. Not only did Amazon not penetrate the e-textbook market; it also failed to impress students with Kindle DX pilot programs launched at a handful of universities.
The majority of the 50 students who were part of the pilot program at Princeton said they were not pleased with the Kindle’s slow performance and limited feature set, according to the campus’ newspaper, The Daily Princetonian.
“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” Aaron Horvath, a senior at Princeton, told the school paper last year. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”
The iPad has far greater potential to succeed as an educational device than Amazon’s Kindle DX, said Sarah Rotman, a Forrester analyst. Where the Kindle is sluggish, monochrome and limited in interactivity features, the iPad is fast, sports a colorful touchscreen and supports enough apps to cater to a broad audience of students, she said.
“The Kindle DX is essentially just a big Kindle with not much of the functionality that students need,” Rotman said. “It’s not color, it’s not touch and it doesn’t have faithful pagination, which is a really big deal for students.”
Seton Hill, George Fox and Abilene Christian said that in addition to giving students iPads, they would train teachers to integrate mobile web software and iPad apps into their curricula.
Both George Fox and Abilene Christian have already experimented with programs in which they gave students and teachers free iPhones and iPod Touch devices. George Fox’s iPod Touch program wasn’t the greatest success, because it turned out that the iPod Touch wasn’t the primary device students were bringing to the classroom. However, George Fox believes the iPad’s bigger screen will change that.
“We think the iPad will become the device students carry with them everywhere, and the laptop will become the base station in their dorm room,” said Greg Smith, chief information officer of George Fox University. “The iPad becomes the mobile learning device.”
Wired.com last year reported on the results of Abilene Christian’s iPhone program, in which 2,100 students were equipped with free iPhones. Abilene Christian professors and students said mobile software was improving classroom participation. Web apps enabled students to turn in homework, look up campus maps, watch lecture podcasts and check class schedules and grades.
Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies at Abilene Christian, called the iPhone program the “TiVoing of education,” because the iPhone was giving students the information they need, when they want it and wherever they want it. After the success of the pilot program, the iPhone has now become a regular part of Abilene Christian’s course structure.
Rankin views the iPad as the potential sequel to Abilene Christian’s iPhone program. The university has ordered 50 iPads to kick off an iPad pilot program, which Rankin believes will focus on the future of publishing.
“This is really about people re-imagining what books look like — re-imagining something that hasn’t really been re-imagined in about 550 years,” Rankin said.
Already, Abilene Christian is getting started with that idea. Abilene Christian’s campus newspaper, The Optimist, has re-purposed its website and newspaper into an iPad app (below) to launch in the App Store soon.
“We want the students to start thinking about, what’s the best way to present information on the iPad?” said Kenneth Pybus, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication, who serves as adviser for The Optimist. “We’re challenging them to design features that would take full advantage of photos and texts and HTML5. There’s an academic component to that — forcing students to think differently about how information is distributed and presented to readers.”
Say what you will, the past couple of days have been littered with signs of a rapidly expanding set of functions that the iPad can perform. Latest on the block is the iDisplay desktop extender, which will turn any of your iPhone OS devices into a WiFi-connected second monitor, allowing you to finally unchain your Mac OS (Windows version forthcoming) desktop and take it on the move. Introductory price is $4.99 and you’ll find an early hands-on experience at the TUAW link. Next up we have the Kindle for iPhone app contracting its name to just Kindle and making the expected jump to iPad compatibility with version 2.0, which comes with iBookstore-like page turning and, best of all, won’t cost you a thing. We’ve also got word of Time Magazine pricing what’s free on the iPhone at $4.99 per issue on the iPad, with the excuse being that you can “experience Time in a revolutionary new way.” Good luck with that, we say.
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