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Rumor: Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Design Revised
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The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 has made some small enhancements that will have a little bit more appeal. One of the main additions is a new slot that would house the stylus, a nice development especially for the forgetful types. The Stylus pen itself has been slimmed down to make it easier to write with and to fit the new slot. Further, the stylus itself might have been revamped to include erasing functionality.
Unofficial sources are pointing out that the Note 10.1 has received a solid hardware upgrades — the original dual-core chipset is being scrapped for the new Exonys quad-core CPU. Most of Galaxy Note 10.1′s competitors sport the quad-core chipset and it would be really silly of Samsung to continue with a dual core processor if adding two extra cores can boost performance even more.
Samsung had revealed the Galaxy Note 10.1 during Mobile World Congress held in February and has since been portraying the device as one that would be able to handle mobile computing needs of professionals, students or the business people alike. However, price or the exact release dates have always been kept under wraps.
In the end, it will be worth mentioning once again that all of the above are rumors at best though we hope to com across the official statement soon enough.
via slashgear
Hachette Launches ChapterShare Facebook App
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Hachette has just launched an innovative Facebook App called ChapterShare. This will allow you to read samples of upcoming books directly on the social networking website. You can then pre-order the books or share the books with your friends.
James Patterson and Michael Connelly are the first two authors that Hachettte is promoting with their new Facebook App. The samples are severely lacking at this point and only consist of two paragraphs from both authors upcoming books. The one cool thing about the samples is the direct links to pre-order the books. They have links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks and Indiebound.
I love seeing big six publishers try different things and this new program is the first of its kind on Facebook. The future of ChapterShare will be reliant on how many pre-orders and sales they get from the books.
Genius’ Kids Designer II Tablet
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There is a new kid on the tablet block and the tablet too is meant for use by the children everywhere! Named Kids Designer II, the tablet from Genius breaks new ground in the tablet segment with its unique design that makes the entire device resemble the color palette of an artist. The main display area is made up of a 5 x 8 inch display. The tablet is aimed at the 3 to 8 age groups.
Pre-loaded in the tablet will be games and a other apps that the company claims will boost the child’s creativity and learning abilities. There is also a stylus included in the package that which will come in handy for the little minds to dive vent to their drawing and writing sills. These apart, large volume keys dominate the front of the tablet that otherwise is quite uncluttered. The tablet is currently available in the US and Canada for $64.99.
Asus Releases Tool to Unlock Transformer Pad Bootloader
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Asus has made available the tool required to unlock the bootloader on the Transformer Pad TF300 device. This will be a welcome relief for many who are keen to install custom firmware on the device. With the bootloader unlocked, there is no stopping users from installing other versions of Android, or maybe even other operating systems if they wish.
However, there is a small price to be paid for all the freedom that comes with an unlocked bootloader; the standard company warranty will be deemed null and void. Asus will only continue to provide all the software assistance as long as the bootloader is intact.
Surely, this won’t deter many out there who have been waiting eagerly for Asus to release the unlocking tool. With the Transformer Pad Infinity next in line, a similar sort of thing is also expected for the new upcoming tablet.
via android police
Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 310 Launched in India
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Samsung announced the availability of the Galaxy Tab 2 310 in India, making it the first tablet offering from the Korean manufacturer to sport Android 4.0 right out of the box. The 7 inch tablet has been priced at INR 23,250 and is inclusive of an attractive data plan from Tata Docomo that will provide 3 GB of data over a period of three months completely free.
Specs wise, the tablet that is also known as the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, sports a 1 Ghz dual core processor, 1 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of internal memory. There is a microSD card slot for more storage with power coming from a 4,000 mAh battery unit. The tablet is both Wi-Fi and 3G enabled, while the 7 inch PLS display packs in 1024 x 600 pixels.
Coming to contents, the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 packs in plenty of it, what with the tablet coming pre-loaded with readers, games and movie hubs. So while the Games Hub provides access to all the latest games to be played on the tablet, the Movies Hub will make available more than 500 movies or 2,500 music videos. Similarly, the Readers Hub opens up more than “2 million ebooks, 3,500 magazines in 25 languages, and more than 2,000 newspapers in 51 languages.”
Refer to the press release below for more info.
Trajectory Launches 120 Graphic Novels for the Kobo Vox
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The Kobo Vox sure has been getting lots of comic book loving with the recent additions of Marvel and Darkhorse. Trajectory is adding more graphic novels exclusively to the Kobo Vox.
Classics Illustrated is the name of Trajectory’s new digital publishing initiative. The series features the world’s greatest stories by the worlds greatest authors including: “The Last of the Mohicans,” “War of the Worlds,” “The Pearl Princess,” “Treasure Island,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “Huckleberry Finn,” “Alice in Wonderland”, “Jane Eyre” and hundreds more. Most people know these popular literary works by the books they read, but now people can read the comics!
We’re thrilled to offer Classics Illustrated titles to our customers around the world,” said Michael Tamblyn, EVP Content, Sales and Merchandising, Kobo Inc. “With the Kobo Vox multimedia eReader and the Kobo eReading app for iPad, we are opening up a new way to enjoy classic works of literature.”
Readlists is a new online program made by Readability that allows you to do some amazing things with blog posts. You can now easily convert a number of your favorite blogs into an offline ebook that can be read on the Kindle and many other e-readers.
The new Readlists program gives you the unique ability to gather your favorite blog posts and save them on your e-reader. One of the more innovative features is that you can share the book you made with your friends or the general internet. When you are finished adding blog posts, you can use the “send to Kindle” feature or send it directly to your iOS device. If you don’t have any of these you can download it in EPUB format and manually copy it to your e-reader.
Sure there are programs out there like Zite, Pulse, and Google Currents, but they are designed with tablets in mind. Readlists plays well with your dedicated e-ink readers and gives you a better experience than just saving RSS Feeds. Check it out today and let us know what you think about it.
Overdrive Updates Their iOS and Android Apps
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The Overdrive Media Console has just received a major update to its line of iOS and Android apps. If you love getting ebooks from your local library, this is an app you would want to install on your tablet or smartphone.
The Android version of the updated app features dynamic home-screen widgets that let users play audiobooks right from the home screen or resume reading ebooks with a single tap. It finally gives you the ability to read books in landscape mode with multiple columns of text, offers bold font choices, and debuts an in-book image viewer. You can download it from our Good e-Reader Android APP Store or get the Playbook version.
The iOS version of the app incorporates several new e-reader features that give the user more control over text justification, line spacing, page margins, and font selection. Optimized graphics support the iPad Retina display. You can find OMC 2.4.2 for iOS in Apple’s App Store.
Amazon.com’s annual awards for new authors, the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards, have been carefully whittled away from the thousands of entries in each of the two categories—fiction and young adult fiction—to come to a final six submissions. Three authors from each of the two fields received word today that their entries had been selected for the final phase of the competition.
Initially, the entries were selected for advancement based on what amounts to the pitch, much like an author would use to attempt to hook an agent or publisher. After the first round, books were reviewed by professional reviewers before being chosen to go forward in the competition.
At this stage in the contest, which is sponsored by Amazon, CreateSpace, and Penguin Group, the three finalists from each category will be judged and voted upon by Amazon readers while a panel of experts in the fields will weigh in on the books, people whose own credentials include literary agents and widely recognized bestselling authors. The two winners chosen by the voters will each receive a publishing contract from Penguin and a $15,000 advance on sales.
“This year’s ABNA contest saw thousands of submissions from talented writers around the world,” said Nader Kabbani, Director of Independent Publishing, Amazon, in a press release today. “According to the judges and editors, the quality of the entries continues to climb, making the contest more competitive each year. The finalists this year are among the best yet and Amazon.com customers will have a challenge picking a favorite.”
The nominees for the finalists spots are as follows: The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill, Grace Humiston and the Vanishing by Charles Kelly, A Chant of Love and Lamentation by Brian Reeves, Dreamcatchers by Cassandra Griffin, Out of Nowhere by Rebecca Phillips, and On Little Wings by Regina Sirois.
Scholastic’s Digital Apps Bridge Summer Academics
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One of the great educational concerns with the upcoming summer vacations months is the amount of knowledge that students lose during their time off from school. Teachers have often bemoaned the loss of instructional time at the beginning of each school year to trying to bring the students back up to speed after so much time away from the classroom.
Scholastic, the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s reading content, is working to bridge the end of one school year with the beginning of another by offering free reading apps and digital learning games aimed at providing an incentive for students to self-teach during their vacations. Deborah Forte, President of Scholastic Media, spoke to GoodEReader about the importance of this kind of content for younger readers.
“Scholastic has always been about being relevant and supporting the needs of our customers. We offer through all of our digital content and physical content experiences that promote literacy. It could be through an app or a game or by way of a book,” explained Forte. “We’re coming from a different perspective [than other digital publishers] because we’ve always been coming from a digital space with apps, games, and software, in addition to the publishing. When we see some of these apps that say that they are book apps but they have nothing to do with reading, that’s a concern. We don’t want the market to get confused, particularly for younger children’s digital experiences. There is a lot of confusion given the amount of content out there for children about what is truly a book for reading and what is a game.”
Some of this summer’s highlighted offerings include the Storia digital reading app, an all-inclusive marketplace for children’s content that carries the Scholastic brand. It works across the different platforms as a curation process for finding and enjoying digital app books.
“Storia is a very useful tool to help connect the right book with a child. It’s not the only tool that Scholastic has, because for ninety years we’ve been curating books for different ages, interests, and reading levels. We’ve been doing that largely in print, but now we’re doing it digitally. Storia is connected to a robust digital ecosystem that will provide that kind of access in a safe environment for parents, teachers, and kids to be able to match the right book with the particular child.”
Scholastic recently hired a larger ebook editorial staff and brought on Jenny Frost in the position of senior vice president of ebook strategy, a move that Forte cites as more evidence of Scholastic’s commitment to digital content development to improve reading ability and encourage a love of reading in students.
PlayBook 4G Gets Past the FCC
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We all knew that a 4G version of the PlayBook has been in the making for the last few months and soon the tablet may be seen on store shelves. The tablet has just received the necessary FCC certifications, however, as usual, details of the tablet have been kept under wraps and the only thing we know of the tablet right now is that it is both NFC and Bluetooth capable. The PlayBook is not likely to sport anything radical, apart from being 4G ready, which again has led many to speculate if the tablet might be too little too late. An affordable price point for the 4G PlayBook can ensure the tablet remains in contention.
via allthingsd
Tom Malek, Vice President of Learning Solutions for textbook publisher McGraw-Hill’s higher education division, wrote a thought-provoking guest post for Forbes.com, which columnist Janet Novak shared with the full-disclosure statement that she is, herself, the mother of two college students. Malek’s post is an explanation of why he believes college students should be required to purchase digital textbooks.
Wait. Required? That’s interesting, since this post was published almost simultaneously with the news that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt may be filing for bankruptcy. Requiring college students to use ebooks is going to save the textbook industry?
Actually, that’s not Malek’s point. His post is actually exploring the conundrum of digital textbook adoption: if college students are so technologically inclined and are in the generation of students who grew up with computers in their classrooms from preschool and up, why do they still prefer print?
Many people have speculated that it comes down to price, and for many college students it does. Print textbooks can be resold after the semester for even a few dollars and used textbooks can be a huge savings. Other thrifty student simply loan and share textbooks between classmates and roommates, a system of, “You buy the math book, I’ll buy the English book, and we’ll share.”
But what Malek is suggesting is taking away the option to purchase anything other than ebooks; he’s also suggesting removing the option to share a textbook with a classmate by having the bursar’s office automatically bill the students for their digital textbooks when they enroll in the class (although the charge won’t appear until after the deadline to drop the class). Malek’s stance is that not enough students are purchasing ebooks to make it worth the publishers’ while to produce cost effective digital editions, so the only way to give publishers the incentive to produce lower cost ebooks is to force students to purchase them. He states that in the pilot programs where this has been implemented, the faculty members have been very pleased because now they know that all of their students have access to the book.
“While it’s taken significant advancements in technology to make the idea of an e-book even possible,” stated Malek in the Forbes post, “it’s taken similar amount of innovation on the part of many to bring them into the hands of students. Publishers and bookstores have done much to make this happen by switching to more flexible business models, but this shift really would not be possible without universities recognizing the incredible value that e-books can provide. By working together, we’re making progress toward a goal that’s far more important than driving adoption of e-books: making college more affordable and improving student performance.”
Unfortunately, forcing supply-and-demand by requiring students to buy a product isn’t the way to increase digital sales. If that were the case, all citizens could be forced to read on an e-reader and there would be no need to print a book ever again. The only honest way to encourage adoption of digital textbooks is to make e-versions superior to their print counterparts in terms of price, searchability, and annotation, something the publishing industry hasn’t done yet.
Esquire to Release “Fiction for Men” eBooks June 12th
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Esquire Magazine is branching out from its monthly publication into the world of digital publishing. Open Road Media will be helping out with the digital aspect of the business and share their knowledge of distribution channels. The main premise of this new venture is to write books strictly for a male audience. You can expect the first book to be released on June 12th and new books every few months.
The first ebook being released is a short story compilation by authors Aaron Gwyn, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Jess Walter. The launch of this new venture is coinciding with the companies June and July issue of the magazine which features stories by Stephen King, Joe Hill, Lee Child, and Colum McCann. These issues will be on the iPad and print version of Esquire.
Esquire is basically looking to expand into a new digital venture due to the success of their iPad application. The magazine world is stagnant in the dwindling number of subscribers and the slow exodus of advertising partners.
The digital version of their ebooks, according to David Granger (editor-in-chief of Esquire) will be “plot-driven and exciting, where one thing happens after another.” Plus, it also deals “with passages in a man’s life that seem common.”
