Hasta La Gadget!

Amazon must have heard the martini-fueled whining of Wired.com New York Bureau Chief John C Abell, for it is finally adding real page numbers to Kindle Books through a firmware update (v3.1).

One big complaint about e-readers is that their page numbers don’t correspond to the page numbers in a printed book. This makes it tricky to match where you are if reading in E Ink and regular ink, and also makes referencing passages very hard. (It’s a pain if you’re discussing the book in a class or book club where some people are reading in one format and some in another.) You can get around these problems with search, and the Kindle uses “page locations” to keep your place.

Amazon seems to have solved the problem of transferring numbers from physical, fixed-sized pages to the virtual page, where changing font sizes alter the number of “pages” a book has. The fix is clever: The Kindle only displays the page number when you press the “menu” button, working out the equivalent paper-book position on demand. And because the Kindle pages don’t correspond exactly to the printed page, it tells you the page number for the text at the top right of the screen, i.e., the first few words.

And to let you know just which book your page numbers match up with, there is a new “Page Numbers Source ISBN” field in the e-book’s description.

The 3.1 update also brings “Public Notes”, which lets you share your note, and “Before You Go”, which lets you rate the book from the Kindle when you get to the end, and see recommendations. Finally, newspaper and magazine layouts have been improved to look more like a proper table of contents.

The “Early Preview Release” of v3.1 can be downloaded now, or you can just wait for it to be delivered automatically. Page numbers will be coming to Kindle apps in the future.

Kindle Software Update Version 3.1 — Early Preview Release [Amazon]

Take your iPad to the beach, the lake, the bathroom or the kitchen and keep it safe with this waterproof iPad case from DryCase. The clear plastic bag seals in your tablet and keeps the water out, and you can keep using it while it is safely sequestered within.

Attentive readers will remember my home-made effort at a kitchen-proof iPad case, fashioned from nothing but a zip-lock bag and a healthy disdain for peril. It worked, but I wouldn’t trust it underwater.

The DryCase, on the other hand, provides a stronger seal. You slide in the iPad (or other tablet, or Kindle) and close the top. You then suck out the air inside using a small (included) bulb-type hand-pump, or just your mouth. The vacuum seals the bag, so nothing gets in or out. Except light (you can use the tablet’s camera), touch and sound – the case has a sealed pass-through headphone jack with a plug inside, and it’s a three-way so you can use it with the iDevice remote and mic.

The DryCase will cost you $60. Steep, but cheaper than a new iPad, and with one big advantage over any other iPad case – unless Apple makes the iPad 2 with a 15-inch screen, the DryCase will fit perfectly, whatever case-shape changes Apple makes.

Available now.

DryCase product page [DryCase via Cult of Mac]

See Also:

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July 19, 2010 marked the day that Amazon’s digital book sales eclipsed the sales of hardcover books, and it barely took half a year for those e-book sales to also overtake the sales of paperbacks. According to the ouftit’s latest earnings release, “Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com.” The company had surmised that this would happen by Q2 of this year, but it clearly went down a lot earlier than even it expected. Bezos and co. also sold through $12.95 billion worth of goods, representing The Jungle’s first “$10 billion quarter.” That came up to $416 million in net income, representing an eight percent uptick year-over-year. Of note, operating income slipped from $476 million in Q4 2009 to $474 million this year, with the unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates generating a staggering $18 million hit.

When looking at 2010 as a whole, Amazon’s sales were up 40 percent over 2009, with operating income rising some 25 percent to $1.41 billion compared to the whole of 2009. Speaking specifically of the Kindle, the company is now moving 115 Kindle books for every 100 paperbacks sold, but this obviously only takes into account the US book business. We’re still no closer to finding out exactly how many Kindles have been moved, but we’re told that “millions” of the third-gen model were moved in Q4 2010, and the Kindle Storeitself has over 810,000 books on its digital shelves. Head on past the break if you’re thirsty for more, Sir Economist.

Continue reading Amazon celebrates its first ‘$10 billion quarter’ in sales, finds Kindle books overtaking paperbacks

Amazon celebrates its first ‘$10 billion quarter’ in sales, finds Kindle books overtaking paperbacks originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:58:00 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
• Kindle Singles Will Bring Novellas, Chapbooks and Pamphlets to E …
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