Hasta La Gadget!

Get ready to welcome some amazing wood grain effects into your lives, future iPad owners, for the iBooks app has just landed at the App Store. Proudly proclaimed as being “designed exclusively for the iPad,” this app gives you direct access to the iBookstore, which will offer free samples of books ahead of purchase and a brand new way for you to channel money into Cupertino pockets. Built-in search, highlighting and bookmarking features are augmented by text-to-speech functionality and ePub format support. Funnily enough, iBooks will only support DRM-free ePub files sourced from outside the iBookstore, but no mention is made as to whether its own wares will be similarly unimpeded. Speaking of restrictions, the whole operation is still limited to the United States, leaving the Stephen Frys of this world sighing wistfully from across the pond.

[Thanks, Brian]

iBooks app meets App Store, produces US-only iBookstore offspring originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 02 Apr 2010 04:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has updated iTunes to version 9.1 to offer support for the iPad release on Saturday. The headline features are iPad syncing and support for books, and there is also some tweaking to the Genius playlist options.

The iPad syncing obviously won’t do anything until you plug in an iPad this weekend, but you can test out the books support right now. Take any EPUB-format book you may have on your computer and drop it into iTunes. It is automatically added to the new Books section, which replaces (and includes) the Audiobooks section. If the book already has metadata and cover art, these are preserved. You can also sort by category, title and author.

Only EPUB will work, and I converted mine using the cross-platform freeware application Calibre, itself a kind of iTunes for e-books. Dragging a MOBI file does nothing. PDF files can still be added, but they end up in the main library as before, not the Books library.

Once the books are in iTunes, what can you do? Right now, nothing. They don’t show up in the list of syncable content for an iPod Touch, nor can you view them in iTunes itself, despite the option to “play” in the pop-up, right-click menu. We hope that the iPhone gets its own version of the iBooks app, if only so you can read from multiple devices, Kindle-style. We doubt the Mac will get iBooks, though. That’s what the iPad is for.

There’s one other takeaway from this early release of iTunes. Normally Apple updates iTunes on the day a new product ships, and this usually makes downloads painfully slow, and often means you can’t use your new device right away. Either Apple has learned its lesson, or it is expecting to sell rather a lot of iPads on Saturday.

iTunes [Apple]

See Also:

• IBooks
• Apple's Tablet E-Book App Rips off Indie Dev's Creation
• iBooks Store Loaded with Project Gutenberg Titles at Launch …
• Apple iPad Raises the Stakes for E-Readers

Continue reading Beijing Gorld combines sub-par cellphone with lackluster e-reader

Beijing Gorld combines sub-par cellphone with lackluster e-reader originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When Apple opens up its iBooks Store for business on the iPad, the shelves will be fully stocked. According to a screen-shot posted at iPhone software blog App Advice, iBooks will contain many free, public-domain titles from Project Gutenberg.

Project Gutenberg takes out-of-copyright texts and, using an army of volunteers, turns them into free e-books. You can download them, print them or read them on a range of applications already on the iPhone: Stanza can pull directly from the catalog, and the very pretty Eucalyptus is nothing but Gutenberg titles, rendered in lovely, paper-like detail.

It makes a lot of sense for Apple to load up on these free titles, although we don’t expect the full range of 30,000 books to be available at launch. All Project Gutenberg titles are in plain text format, with only a subset in the iBooks-native EPUB format. Conversion is simple, but we’re certain Apple is checking each one to make sure it’s up to standard.

And yes, we know you could download, convert and import the books yourself, but with iBooks, the App Store and the iTunes Store, one-click simplicity is kind of the point.

iPad iBooks Features The Gutenberg Project Catalog [App Advice]

See Also:

• Stanza v2.0: The iPhone's Best E-Reader Just Got Better
• Apple Relents, Adds 'Pornographic' E-Book Reader to App Store …
• Wired's 20 Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009
• IBooks
• Apple iPad Raises the Stakes for E-Readers
• Apple's Tablet E-Book App Rips off Indie Dev's Creation

We’ve seen so many e-book readers of late that it’s difficult to get excited about another, but Kobo’s angle here might just make the Kobo eReader worth a look. Kobo’s game is ecosystem, and in fact it doesn’t plan on making a big splash in the actual e-reader market, since it’s primarily about building branded software and delivering branded e-book stores for others, including manufacturers (like Plastic Logic), and booksellers (like Borders). Still, the 6-inch E Ink reader is fine hardware in its own right, with quality plastics throughout, a nice patterned rubber back, and a big friendly d-pad for paging through books. The device is actually laid out to mitigate accidental button presses — even the menu buttons labelled on the front are actually located on the side of the device. As far as software and capabilities, the device is utterly barebones, but at least it keeps its aesthetics throughout, and everything seems responsive and intuitive. There’s no 3G onboard (you sync your e-pub titles with a desktop app over USB), no specific word on storage (our guess is in the 1GB to 4GB range), and there don’t seem to be any other activities available to reading books. Hopefully you’re into that sort of thing, and Kobo at least pre-loaded 100 public domain titles to get you started. The unit will be sold at Borders this summer for $149, preceded by Indigo Books & Music in Canada in May.

Meanwhile, Kobo isn’t neglecting its devices strategy. It already has BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Mac, and PC (and some others we’re likely forgetting), but it’s also showing an iPad app that looks all ready to go. There aren’t many details about it, but like all things Kobo it looks pretty single purpose and slick — check out the screenshots below.

Editor’s note: due to the horrible lighting conditions at the CTIA event we were attending, we had to photograph the device under the warm lights of a meat-cutting station, hence the incongruous backdrop of these hands-on photos.

Kobo eReader is Kobo’s $149 E Ink play for Borders, we thumb through its virtual pages originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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