Hasta La Gadget!

With rumors piling up about a forthcoming Apple tablet, it appears more and more likely that such a device will emerge soon.

But what’s still unclear is how this gadget will set itself apart from Apple’s multimedia-savvy product line, including the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as the scores of failed tablet PCs that have come and gone. Judging from the company’s past moves, we’re betting that Apple’s tablet will be a media-centric device, focused — at least in part — on shaking up the publishing industry.

Apple is already prepared to blow Amazon and other e-book makers out of the water with one key weapon: iTunes. Having served more than 6 billion songs to date, the iTunes Store has flipped the music industry on its head. It also turned mobile software into a lucrative industry, as proven by the booming success of the iPhone’s App Store, which recently surpassed 1.5 billion downloads. Apple has yet to enter the e-book market, and making books as easy to download as music and iPhone apps is the logical next step.

What can Apple do better with e-books? For textbooks or anthologies, Apple can give iTunes users the ability to download individual chapters, priced between a few cents to a few bucks each. It would be similar to how you can currently download individual song tracks from an album. It might even have the same earthshaking potential to transform an entire industry by refocusing it on the content people actually want instead of the bundles that publishers want them to buy. (Of course, Apple would likely offer the à-la-carte purchase model in addition to the option to purchase the entire book as one download — a more attractive option for shorter works such as novels.)

College students would love this: Teachers rarely assign an entire textbook, so they would save hundreds of dollars by downloading only a few chapters of each textbook. Apple is already popular in the education sector, so here’s even more money to milk from students, with the textbook industry worth an estimated $9.8 billion.

Sci-fi fans might only want one story from an anthology, or a historical researcher might target certain subjects. All Apple has to do to secure the book publishers’ enthusiastic cooperation is to offer them a generous cut of the revenues, like the 70 percent it currently offers app developers.

Other than having the upper hand with digital distribution, an Apple tablet can compensate for other e-book readers’ shortcomings. In a previous story, Wired.com polled students on their interest in Amazon’s large-format Kindle DX reader. Several of them said they couldn’t imagine ditching textbooks for a Kindle DX, foreseeing challenges with tasks such as notetaking, highlighting and switching between books while writing essays.

Assuming its computing powers and interface design are anything like the iPhone’s, a touchscreen tablet would make these student-oriented tasks as easy as a few swipes and taps — far more pleasant than clunking around with the Kindle’s cheap buttons and sluggish interface. Plus, we would imagine students would be able to type their papers on the tablet.

Then there’s the obvious: An Apple tablet would have color, making it better for displaying magazine pages, which could also be purchased through the iTunes Store. It wouldn’t be saddled with a slow e-ink screen, so it could display video and browse the web with aplomb.

Let’s not forget to mention the multitude of other tasks an Apple tablet will likely be able to perform if developers decide to code applications for it. Think along the lines of an interactive remote control to enhance the movie-viewing experience on your TV, or a music video player to accompany the tunes blasting from your stereo. Or, heck, even an album-cover display screen for you to gaze at while listening to music. (For more on an Apple tablet’s advantages versus current e-book readers, see Dylan Tweney’s story “Large-Screen Kindle Won’t Mean Squat if Apple Tablet Arrives.”)

There’s huge potential in a tablet if Apple can pull this off. The challenge lies in establishing the right partnerships. If Apple weaves e-books into the iTunes Store, will book publishers hop on board? Given Apple’s success in numbers, we think so.

As for a data provider, it would be even better if Apple could work with a carrier such as Verizon to subsidize the tablet, bringing it closer to $500 — a more attractive price point for students. Because the device presumably would not feature a phone, the monthly plans could be priced significantly lower than an iPhone — $30 to $40, perhaps, for an unlimited 3-G internet connection.

What do you think an Apple tablet would need in order to be compelling? Add your thoughts in the comment section below.

(An aside: We’re aware, as some of our colleagues have pointed out, that an à-la-carte e-book model is an idealistic prediction. A more conservative guess would be that e-books will be available, in full, in iTunes, which would nonetheless be advantageous against Amazon given the enormous amount of iTunes users. We are, however, hopeful that Apple would be the company to drive radical change with e-book pricing models, given its proven ability to twist partners’ arms.)

See Also:

• Financial Times Confirms Apple Tablet for September
• Analyst Predicts Apple Will Unleash Touchscreen Tablet Next Year …
• Rumor: $800 Apple Tablet Coming in October
• Rumor: 10-Inch Apple Tablet Landing in Early 2010
• Large-Screen Kindle Won’t Mean Squat if Apple Tablet Arrives …
• Apple COO Reveals Plans for Touch Tablet — Kinda

Illustration of an imaginary iPhone tablet: Factoryjoe / Flickr

The guys and gals at MobileRead have scored hands-on time with the Cybook Opus and early impressions are good. They were smitten with the ergonomics of the device and its “gorgeous” 5-inch e-ink display, but oddly neglected to point out any weaknesses. Equipped with an accelerometer, 1GB of storage, microSD expansion slot, and a user-replaceable battery, the Opus is able to read PDF and ePUB files — with or without DRM — and organize them into folders. There are rumors of a €250 ($349) asking price, but the exact details of when and where it will be available remain unknown. Click through for a video of the reader doing its thing or hit the read links for more extensive coverage.

[Via Slashgear]

Read – MobileRead exclusive : sneak preview of the Bookeen Opus
Read – Cybook Opus: Discovering the reader, video

Continue reading Video: Bookeen Cybook Opus ebook reader gets handled and adored

Filed under: Handhelds

Video: Bookeen Cybook Opus ebook reader gets handled and adored originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Digital book clubs could become the next big thing. Over the next few months, electronic book readers are likely to add the ability to access Facebook and Twitter, share book recommendations and rate e-books, says Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps in her latest report. And at least one company is already moving towards the idea.

“Buying and reading books is an inherently social process and the lack of robust sharing capabilities on the (Amazon) Kindle is an obvious weakness that competitors will address,” says Epps.

Txtr, a Germany-based e-book reader startup, is doing just that. Txtr hopes to introduce a new device at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October that will put social networking and sharing at its center.

“Txtr is to focused on the idea of connected reading,” Andreas Steinhauser, founder and CEO of Txtr told Wired.com. “You can create collections of web pages, documents or images and give friends access to it.”

E-book readers have turned into one of the hottest consumer devices of the year. So far more than a million E Ink  displays, which powers most e-book readers, have been sold worldwide. (E-paper manufacturer Prime View Technologies announced Monday that it would be acquiring E Ink, potentially increasing the latter’s capacity to deal with large production volumes.) Companies such as Amazon, Fujitsu, Sony and Samsung are vying to grab a slice of the e-books reader market.  And as the competition heats up, e-book reader makers will have to innovate.

E-Readers will need to sport applications that connect people through recommendations and ratings, says Epps. And that means integration with communities like Facebook and Goodreads. E-readers are also likely to evolve to provide a way to recommend and buy content for others, says Epps.

“We anticipate that some households will have multiple eReaders and the devices will have to support
content sharing within a household to a greater extent than the Kindle’s Content Manager currently does,” she says

Txtr’s Steinhauser agrees that for new e-readers social features will be important as they seek to differentiate themselves from their peers. “We think it is necessary to allows users to sync their device with friends over Wi-fi or Bluetooth,” he says.

Separately, Amazon announced Monday that it will start shipping the Kindle DX, a 9.7-inch  screen size e-book reader, on June 10 for $489.

See also:
Why E-Books Look so Ugly
How to Choose an E-book Reader
Hands On: New Cool-er E-book Reader Turns up the Heat

Photo: Txtr

The Gadget: The Cool-er, a lower (compared to the Kindle) priced eBook reader that lacks built-in wireless functionality and a hardware keyboard, but adds music, an SD card slot and PDF/MP3 support. But of course, the lower price is the big draw.

The Price: $250

The Verdict: Cheap in every sense of the word, but usable. The Cool-er has the same 6-inch screen as the Kindle 2, but renders text with a proprietary computer-screen-esque font face instead of the more “print”-like Kindle 2 typeface. It is, of course, size-adjustable. You can also flip it 90 degrees to read in landscape mode.

As if it wasn’t obvious enough from its appearance, the Cool-er is designed to be the iPod of eBook readers. It succeeds in looking like an iPod and being available in a lot of colors, but fails in usability and design. The only thing going for it is that it works as an eBook reader if reading is the most important part of the package (which it is, to many people). Also, it’s quite a bit lighter than the Kindle 2, so you can easily hold it with one hand while you’re brushing your teeth, lying in bed, or using the bathroom.

The problem comes from the interface—it feels very much like a Chinese knockoff. The giant iPod design, with the D-Pad scrollwheel acting as both a menu selector and a page turner, isn’t the best way to read a book. Meaning, you can only turn pages with either your right or left hand (if it’s in landscape mode), making reading slightly more awkward. The onscreen UI is also indicative of it being made by a smaller company; it works, but you have to conform to the interface rather than the other way around.

Being able to play audiobooks in MP3 format off the SD card is better than straining to understand text-to-speech with the Kindle 2’s robotic voice. And listening to music while reading is good, but you have no playback controls unless you get out of your book and into the file. It’s really mostly intended for audiobooks, I believe. And it’s more half-baked than anything.

You load eBooks onto the player via mini USB or onto the SD card, but it’s not quite compatible with Macs. Transferring files via OS X will get you four blank folders (the metadata files that Macs deposit on external drives) that you can’t seem to ever get rid of. Also, the battery meter is somewhat finicky and fluctuates up or down depending on its mood. There’s also no great auto-sleep mode like the Kindle has.

Where They Get You: The books. The Host, by tween vampire novelist Stephenie Meyer, costs $20.79 on coolerbooks.com, but only $9.99 for Amazon’s Kindle. Other, older and less popular novels, are more on par between the two stores. You do get 25% off of the list price if you own a Cool-er reader.

The coolerbooks selection is also smaller than Amazon’s, housing none of Ian Fleming’s Bond books, one of which I’ve found used in the photos anyway. (Amazon has them all for $9.99 each.)

Good For Piracy: But the upside is that the Cool-er supports native PDF format documents, like the Kindle DX, so you can load on downloaded and torrented eBooks with ease. But if you really wanted to pirate books onto the Kindle 2, it’s just a matter of using calibre to transcode the books into a compatible format beforehand, so it’s not that huge of a benefit.

Versus Other Players: It’s not as capable as say, a Kindle 2 or the touch-capable Sony PRS-700 reader, and it’s not as cheap as this lousy Ectaco jetBook reader at $170, so it’s kinda just right there in the middle.

If it were $199, we’d recommend this to people who just want to read, and don’t care about all that extra stuff like touchscreen or downloading books directly to the device before your plane takes off. But it’s $250, which is only $50 cheaper than the Sony. If that $50 is very important to you, go with the Cool-er, otherwise we’d recommend either the Sony or the Kindle 2.

I really, really wish this reader were $199, because it’s not a bad reader, it’s just not as good as what’s out there now. [Cooler]

$50 to $100 cheaper than more popular eBook readers

UI is only so-so, and page controls are slightly awkward

Feels plasticky, lighter build means easier reading

Not as polished as Kindle 2 or Sony’s PRS-700, which may be worth the extra $50 to $100

This week’s Gadget Lab podcast zones in on multimedia players, starting with the new Cool-er e-book reader — a lighter, slimmer and cheaper alternative to Amazon’s Kindle. Then Danny Dumas weighs in on Sony’s new Series-X Walkman player. No, it doesn’t play cassette tapes; it’s actually an MP3 player with built-in FM and Slacker service.

Treading into the software world, we discuss the latest iPhone App Store drama. Apple rejected Me So Holy, an iPhone app that edits your mug to resemble a portrait of none other than Jesus Christ. Perhaps someone at Apple was offended? And in other App Store news, the new SlingPlayer iPhone app, which streams video from a Slingbox player plugged into your TV, can only work on Wi-Fi! Why? Because AT&T doesn’t want iPhone users hogging its 3G service watching TV.

Other than crippling SlingPlayer, AT&T neutered the Nokia E71x smartphone by removing a really cool button we loved in the phone’s predecessor: a toggle button. Danny tops off the podcast with an emo rant about the loss of this wonderful feature.

This week’s podcast features Dylan Tweney, Danny Dumas, Priya Ganapati and Brian Chen, with audio engineering by Fernando Cardoso.

If the embedded player above doesn’t work, you can download the Gadget Lab podcast #74 MP3 file.

Use iTunes? Subscribe to the Gadget Lab Audio Podcast in iTunes. Do it now!

Like video? Aim your browser at the Gadget Lab Video Podcast — available on iTunes and right here on the Gadget Lab blog.