iRiver Story HD given to Science Fair Winner
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Every month we giveaway for a free e-reader and often they are used directly by the winner. A few months ago we awarded an iRiver Story HD Reader and it was given away to the winner of the Shidler Elementary in Oklahoma City Science Fair. Ryno Bones one of the teachers at the school filed this report.
“Some very interesting projects happened at the science fair this year. Our top winner experimented with layering different types of liquids. Second and third place prizes included gift certificates to the school book fair and we had four other students recieve gift certificates in a drawing.
Some of the coolest projects included a lava lamp made from oil, water, and alka-seltzer, dissolving candies in various substances, and the favorite of all the teachers, cakes cooked using eggs vs. egg substitute. In many instances the cleanup took longer than the demonstration, but everyone had a fantastic time.
Our school is an urban Title I school with 99% of students on Free and Reduced lunch program. We host a parent outreach reading night once a month, and this has been our highest turnout EVER! We are proud of all our fourth and fifth grade students and we had almost all of them in attendance. We hope this will be the first of many such events.”
Amazon Createspace Launches in Europe
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Amazon has just launched their seminal self-publishing service Createspace in the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe today. This will allow authors to publish their books and have them distributed all over Europe and North America.
Amazon Creatspace has been running since 2007 and allows you to make your book available to millions of potential customers by distributing through the Amazon ecosystem and your own eStore, and the Expanded Distribution Channel. Set your book’s list price and earn royalties. Upload completed book files, or use our free tools to prepare your content for publication. On-demand production of your book means you’ll never worry about inventory or minimum orders. The big draw on their program is the “Print on Demand” feature. It basically prints the tangible version of the book as people order it. So instead of buying 1000 copies of your book in printed format and hope it sells, Createspace will only print the books as people buy it
UK and European authors can now publish on Createspace and they can have their books, audiobooks and digital content all distribution in many different countries. This is a huge benefit for the local self-publishing scene and now makes digital publishing a bit easier. If you have any questions, check out our Amazon Europe frequently asked questions or contact Member Support.
Major Playbook Pirate Website is Taken Down
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Research in Motion has had piracy on its radar for a number of months. One of the largest concerns for the company in courting new developers for its BB10 platform has been piracy. The company has publicly stated on many occasions that Piracy is one of the things running rampant on the Android platform and they would do their darnedest to make sure their ecosystem does not turn into a cesspool. It seems that in conjunction with a major announcement that all App World purchases for the Playbook will be encrypted in the near future, a major Playbook pirate website was taken down.
This website has been running for the last four months and specializes in apps and games ripped off from the Playbook App World. Their main priority was popular games such as the entire Angry Birds franchise, but basically had every single paid app available for free download on their website. This website was a thorn in the side of RIM in order to appeal to more mainstream developers to make apps for their own ecosystem. The company has made no public comment if they were the owns serving the DMCA notice to the owner of the website.
RIM intends on implementing a new encryption system on their Playbook App World this July. In essence this will prevent people from pirating any new or exiting content from their store by disallowing anyone, but the purchaser from running in on their tablets. This will effectively nullify 3rd party websites that purvey pirated applications and games.
Many people were blissfully unaware that PBVN.Net even existed but remained a constant source of disdain for RIM in their quest to lure more developers. The Waterloo company now realizes that in order for their market share to return to former glories they need to lure major apps like Skype, Pintrest, Temple Run and many more on their platform. When we talked with representative from RIM they said that many companies they spoke with were unwilling to develop for the platform because of rampant piracy and the ability to sideload in your own apps. RIM has confirmed that they will not disallow the ability to load in your own Android apps but they are working hard on their new encryption system to prevent future cases of piracy.
Harry Potter eBooks now Available at Kobo
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Kobo has just landed a deal for the seven new Harry Potter eBooks. Kobo customers across the globe will have access to them in many different languages such as; English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish to begin with, and more languages on the way.
The eBooks themselves are not available for purchase with Kobo but instead you are redirected to the Pottermore website. Once you buy the books you can link your Kobo account to the purchase and then easily transfer them to your Kobo e-Reader or many of the Kobo apps on iOS or Android.
This new arrangement with Kobo is of a similar vein to the established relationship that Pottermore has with Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Sony and Google. All of these vendors do not physically sell the digital content but instead send you the main Pottermore website. This really marks the first time an author has a copious amount of control that major companies are bending over backwards and making their customers visit a 3rd party website to purchase these books.
The entire Harry Potter eBook series is doing tremendously well with a recent report citing that Pottermore raked in over five million dollars in sales in their very first month. The deal with Kobo is a solid one because they have their hands in more markets then most of their competition. This allows many users in Canada, Australia and Europe to easily read the books.
Michael Tamblyn, Executive Vice President Content, Sales & Merchandising, Kobo, commented: “We’re excited to bring together the extremely successful Harry Potter phenomenon and the always-enthusiastic Kobo eReading community. Fans have been waiting for years to see the Harry Potter series in digital and now that wait is over.”
In other Kobo news, their parent company Rakuten invested over 100 million dollars in Pinterest. The two companies will be working out an arrangement to get photo sharing on the Kobo Vox and integration into their other apps. Also, be sure to check out the official Kobo Blog where they talk about our website and our review of their new Kobo Instant Reader.
Author Jenny Lawson on Social Media, Blogging
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Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, was at the Barnes and Noble Peachtree location in Atlanta to give a reading and sign copies of her New York Times bestseller, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. Her humorous memoir has held the #1 spot for four weeks now and Lawson has been on the nationwide book signing tour for several weeks as well.
Lawson spoke with GoodEReader in an interview about the importance of establishing an online presence through social media outlets and blogging, as well as the rising popularity of authors having blogs as a way to put more content in front of their readers.
Lawson will be speaking at BookExpo America next month and the GoodEReader team will be on location in order to provide coverage of both the publishing event and the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) conference.
New Update for Transformer Prime Has Face Unlock Feature
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What if you could unlock your Transformer Prime device just by gazing at its front facing camera? Well, the latest update that Asus has made available will enable you to do just that. Version 9.2.1.24 has been unveiled on the 16th of May and has already made it to many devices. However, if some Transformer Prime users are yet to get the official notifications, they can still try and download the update manually by hitting the Software Update section under Settings.
Meanwhile, the face unlock feature isn’t the only thing that the latest update is introducing. Asus has also included a few other goodies, such as the ability to lock the system bar (which will prevent any unwanted tab press from making any untoward responses). This would come in handy during gaming. Overall, system stability is another plus that the update promises, along with some new options in the e-mail app.
The update is currently being rolled out for users in the US and Canada, but should make it to rest of the world soon enough.
via liliputing
Kindle Lending Website Lendle Put Up for Sale
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Lendle was one of the first ebook lending websites on the internet that focused on Kindle Books. The company announced today that they were putting their business up for sale and getting out of the Kindle segment.
Amazon initially launched their lending program a few years ago that allows users to share ebooks with their friends. Select digital book titles are flagged lending enabled and are allowed to be loaned out one time, for up to two weeks. Lendle has fulfilled over 70,000 loan requests and has 330,000 books available for loan.
The essence of the company’s service is to facilitate the process of posting and borrowing books. Often, when you have a Kindle, you might be the only one in your circle of friends that has an e-reader. Lendle provides a bright and vibrant community that posts reviews and shares content with each other.
The sale of Lendle will be absolute and will entail the brand, website, and all of the code. The admin team said in a company blog post that “Lendle means a lot to us. We’ve put over a year of our lives into growing a great community and implementing new features and we’ve done our best to put a unique spin on social-lending to ensure that Lendle stands out amongst the competition. Even so, there’s still a vast untapped market for social-lending that is millions of potential Lendlers strong, and we think a nimble and innovative home for Lendle can only lead to great things.”
There is no word yet on the price, but this should be a viable investment. Amazon is entering the publishing segment and actively marketing their own books published under their own banner. Undoubtedly a fair portion of these will be flagged “lending enabled” and allow users to lend books to each other.
Good e-Reader at Book Expo American 2012
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The entire Good e-Reader team will be in New York City at the beginning of June for Book Expo America! We intend on bringing you the latest industry coverage and product announcements that are going to be unveiled at the event! We have a ton of appointments lined up with major publishing and e-reader companies to find out what’s in store for everyone later this year. If you are a publishing company or wheel and deal in the e-Reader arena, we want to meet you!
Book Expo America is the largest event of its kind in North America and focuses on publishing, digital publishing, ebooks, and tons more. We have been attending this event for the last few years, and 2012 is going to be the largest yet! If you want to book an appointment with us, please use our contact form and give us your details or simply send me an email.
Plastic Logic Quits the e-Reader Business
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Cambridge UK based Plastic Logic has just confirmed it is getting out of the e-reader business. It intends on immediately closing down the USA development offices and continue to operate out of their Cambridge headquarters. The company has shifted its business model away from marketing e-readers that use their flexible display technology and instead will license it to other companies.
Plastic Logic CEO Indro Mukerjee says: “Plastic Logic has always been at its core a dynamic technology company. Having recently achieved significant milestones, including being the first in the world to fully industrialize the mass-production of flexible plastic displays, we are now well positioned to address a broader set of applications and markets throughout the world.”
The UK based company found it hard to compete in North America and scrapped plans to launch its eagerly anticipated QUE e-reader a few years ago. It recently launched the PL 100 e-reader last year to make a play for lucrative government contracts in the Russian educational system. The Plastic Logic 100 used a new technology that is neither LCD nor eInk, but instead is patented PlasticPaper. Because the base is not glass, the Plastic Logic 100 display is large, thin, lightweight, and uniquely shatterproof and rugged, which is especially important given constant use by students. The resolution is 1280×960 and has 150 PPI! It has a capacitive IR touchscreen interface that makes interacting with it easier than most touchscreen e-ink devices.
Plastic Logic plans on licensing various facets of their technology to vendors who want to use it in their products. Plastic Logic’s pride and joy is the flexible screen technology called “PlasticPaper.” There are no specific announcements in terms of who is signing on to license the technology, but you would figure some companies are lined up.
Is there a market for this type of screen technology? e-Ink Holdings currently has a dominant stranglehold on the market. Other companies are finding it very hard to compete in the e-paper segment. Mirasol only recently released its new screen displays, but only Eastern companies have signed on and the displays remain irrelevant in North America. Pixel QI also has superb e-paper that mimics e-ink but has higher resolution, and only a spartan amount of companies have ever signed on. Other companies completely go under without ever releasing a single product. Only yesterday Bridgestone scrapped its QR-LDD technology because it could not release products by itself and found no investment to release commercially viable products. The one thing Plastic Logic has going for it is that it owns its own means of production. It is quite easy to pump out a copious amount of screens for new clients, but will anyone take the risk and sign on?
Adobe hosted its Digital Publishing Summit in New York yesterday and brought a full complement of new features for its digital publishing devotees. The new design includes a content viewer for iPhone that will allow content creators to develop material for iPhone and iPod Touch users as easily as for tablet readers; another add-on includes the ability to let readers share content to social media sites directly through the article. Also included was an interface with Adobe Edge, which will let developers preview their content before sending it to DPS with Adobe InDesign.
One of the major announcements at Adobe’s Summit was the Meredith Corporation is another in a growing line of companies that will be using DPS to bring their content to tablet readers. Meredith publishes magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens and Parents, and will join other publishers like Conde Nast and Source Interlink in using Adobe to develop graphic-intensive digital editions for tablets.
“We’re excited to publish our leading brands to multiple channels using Digital Publishing Suite,” said Liz Schimel, executive vice president and chief digital officer, Meredith Corporation, in an article for EON. “With our tablet editions, we’re looking forward to delivering content that entertains and delights our readers on these new devices – and that also drives additional revenue and subscriptions.”
“As the number of tablets and mobile devices increases, so do the potential readers of our magazine, and we must be there to meet them on the devices they choose,” said Bill Marr to EON, creative director for National Geographic magazine and another DPS user. “Using Alternate Layout in Adobe InDesign CS6 in combination with Digital Publishing Suite will allow our staff to modify layouts quickly to take into account various screen resolutions and aspect ratios, while preserving the essence of the original design so our look and brand are consistent across the marketplace.”
UK Authors are petitioning the government to implement a policy for digital books that are loaned out by the public libraries. Authors are paid 6.05p every time their physical books are borrowed, up to a maximum of £6,600. This mandate is under the government-funded Public Lending Right scheme. At the moment ebooks and audiobooks do not currently pay the authors anything when patrons borrow them online.
The Guardian Newspaper in the UK conducted an interview with Nicola Solomon of the Society of Authors. She said that the current state of affairs with digital ebook lending was “terribly unfair” and said that “authors should be properly remunerated” for their work. “It’s very important to understand that authors do rely on PLR – it’s not just a nice little bonus. Many authors get PLR who are not bestsellers but do very well in libraries. People borrow very different books from the book they buy,” she said. “And authors can’t continue to write if they are not paid for their work.”
Authors have a legal right to the payments, she said, and could even consider going to court to recover them. “Since 1992 ‘rental and lending right’ has been a part of copyright protection. That means that authors have a legal right to equitable remuneration whenever their works are lent out,” she said. “The failure to make the payments means that the government and libraries are actually infringing the author’s copyright every time they make an ebook loan and authors would be entitled to sue for the losses caused by that infringement. We have no current plans to sue, and don’t know of any authors who are planning to do so – we would hope that the Government would recognise its legal and moral responsibility to make payments to authors particularly as ebook lending from libraries is becoming significant.”
Aluratek Releases New CinePad Android Tablets
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Aluratek is best known for its extensive line of e-readers that have been available on the market for the last three years. The company has just released two new models of their CinePad line of Android 4.0 tablet computers! They have both a seven and a ten inch model and both have some solid hardware and low prices.
The first model they have out is a seven inch version with a resolution of 800 x 480 and the official name is the AT107F. It features a five-point capacitive multi-touch screen. It is powered by a Boxchip A10 cortex A8 1 GHZ Processor and 512 MB RAM. You have around 4 GB of internal storage for your media, books, and music. You can elect to expand it via the MicroSD Card up to 32 GB.
There are a number of cool hardware features found on this model, such as a Mini-HDMI to give you hi-definition video on your television. It also has a speaker, microphone, WIFI, 3.5 MM headphone jack, and front facing webcam. It has a solid battery life via the 3.7V / 3000mAH battery, which should give you around seven hours of constant use. Finally, it is shipped with Android ICS and fully supports HTML5.
The 10 inch model is dubbed the AT110F and it has a bit better of a processor—the Amlogic cortex A9 1 GHZ edition. This model has a 10 point multi-touch display with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels. The RAM is also boosted on this model with a very respectable 1 GB. You can store way more media with the 8 GB of internal memory and support for 32 GB of microSD expandable storage. There is also a ton of ports and extras, such as micro-HDMI, USB, Bluetooth, WIFI, and VGA-Webcam.
The CinePad line of Ice Cream Sandwich tablets has been a long time coming and they finally have a solid line of tablets. The pricing structure is fairly solid, with the seven inch model costing only $149.99 and the ten inch edition is $219.99.
Photo courtesy of tablet-news.com
In the ongoing legal battle with Apple, one that has even been taken up by the U.S. Department of Justice, the first major motion of the proceedings was handed down today and ultimately denied. Apple filed a motion to dismiss that class-action suit brought by Seattle-based law firm Hagens Berman, but that motion was denied by Judge Denise Cote.
Apple’s motion was essentially filed on the grounds that the plaintiffs didn’t have evidence of their misconduct when they allegedly conspired with five of the Big Six publishers to set ebook prices artificially high. The lawsuit claims that this was done with the specific intent of forcing Amazon’s hand and causing the online retailer to raise the prices of its ebooks.
This ruling is in regard only to the civil suit filed on behalf of consumers. The DoJ has its own investigations and proceedings underway, as do several state governments. Three of the publishers named in the case have already signed deals with those states.
According to Judge Cote’s decision, Apple’s motion was denied under the Sherman Act; this ruling specifically addresses the alleged collusion that stemmed from Apple and the publishers working together to set the prices on ebooks. Due to the fact that parties involved in secret collaborations rarely put everything in writing, then inferences are allowed based on the actions and outcomes.
“We look forward to uncovering additional evidence in the discovery phase of this litigation,” said Berman in a press release about the motion today. “We litigated this case because we strongly believe that consumers were harmed by Apple and the publishers’ tactics and we will not settle without an effective plan to repay consumers for their losses.”
The purpose of the class-action suit is to recover some of the estimated $250 million that consumers overpaid following the supposed secret dealings between Apple and the publishers.
“Fortunately for the publishers, Apple was also terrified of Amazon’s pricing and the popularity of its Kindle device,” said Berman. “Rather than compete on merit, price and convenience, we intend to prove that the cabal simply tried to game the system.”
