(Neal-Schuman, 2005) and the editor of the PDAs @ the Library column, Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries. Her first PDA was a Handspring Visor.
According to the Audio Publishers Association, downloads have grown sharply, rising to 9 percent of audio book sales in 2005; that is a 50 percent increase over the previous year. Audible .com, which pioneered downloadable audio books nine years ago, also sells them through iTunes and Amazon and has a membership model similar to that of NetFlix; its membership has grown 54 percent over the last year, to 345,200. Going exclusively to a downloadable format saves publishers the expense of duplication, packaging and distribution. And the savings are often passed along. Audible’s full-price version of “The Audacity of Hope” by Barack Obama costs $20.97 (although various discounts are available), while the CD version retails for $29.95;
undiscounted, unabridged versions of Michael Crichton’s “Next” are $34.97 by download and $49.95 on CD.
So what's not to like? Well, this isn't a book you'll blithely toss on the couch or the floor at chapter's end. At $350, it's not cheap, particularly when some used tablet PCs or discount laptops -- which provide much more functionality than the Reader -- could come in around that figure. It also has no color, which the manga and the digital photos seem to cry out for. There's no way to input or search data, so it's not going to have any multifunction uses like some PDAs. (There is bookmarking and a History utility to cover some of those functions.) There's no wireless access, so it must be tethered to a computer for file management. There's no backlighting, so real in-the-dark reading isn't possible. No display of video. No touch screen. And I miss the sound of a page turning.
I gave three of my colleagues a sort of Malcolm Gladwell Blink test by handing them the Reader and asking for their instant impression. Two out of three ooohed and aahhhed, and the other was immediately turned off, saying, "I'd never want to read a book on one of those things." My own feelings are an amalgam of theirs: Having used the device for many hours, I found it to be a comfortable, pleasing way to read, after initial hesitance. And it's a sharp-looking, techno-wow device with a durable feel. Its size, its screen, its general "thingness" were all appealing. But I love the feel, heft and smell of books, the tangible touch of the page, seeing their spines on the shelves.
...What we can't report, at least not yet, is a confirmed MSRP or when it is actually going to go on sale. Sony wouldn't tell us. But we did manage to get a first-hand look at the final production version of the device, as well as snap a whole slew of pics (and score some screenshots of the Connect Reader software client and Sony's eBook Store). Tech specs are more or less the same as when they announced the Reader at CES this past January -- a 6-inch E Ink display, enough battery life for 7,500 page turns, support for DRM'd BBeB and unprotected PDF, TXT, RTF, and Word files -- but the big news is that this thing will in fact support RSS feeds. Sort of. You can pick from a very limited list of feeds that have been specially formatted for viewing on the Reader (Engadget among them!), you just sync them to the device just like you do with an eBook.
A few days ago I got a mail from the developer who ported an emulator that lets you use real PC apps on a Palm. It’s the Palm OS port of the well-known DOS emulator DOSBox. It doesn’t only emulate an x86 CPU but also a DOS environment, so you can’t install another x86 operating system. But you can run many DOS apps / games in this DOS environment, even Windows until 3.11 and maybe even Windows 95 / 98.
This version is the first alpha release and very buggy, of course. (more...)
Even when they haven’t come littered with ads, e-books have been slow to catch on with scholars, students, and the reading public. Why haven’t they made more of an impact? According to David H. Rothman, author of the blog TeleRead, e-books just aren’t very consumer-friendly.
“In the past few decades, at least 20 clashing e-book formats have popped up, including the infamous Microsoft Reader,” Mr. Rothman writes for Publishers Weekly, “and no format has performed strongly enough to crush the others.” As a result, even high-priced e-book-reading devices often cannot display certain formats of digital text. Until the e-book industry develops products that can be more widely used, Mr. Rothman writes, consumers are likely to be frustrated. —Brock Read
Until now, Google only allowed people to read the out-of-copyright books online (and only snippets of copyrighted works). To search the database of available full titles, go to books.google.com and click the “full view books” option when searching. This new move contradicts earlier statements by Google that scans of out-of-copyright books would not be made available for printing.
(more...)