Archive for the ‘e-books’ Category

Foxit eSlick E-Reader Nears its End

Smaller e-readers are dropping like flies as yet another device maker has announced it will get out of the e-reader hardware business.

Foxit has said it will “cease development” on its eSlick device that was once touted for being among the cheapest in the market and offering excellent support for PDF files. Instead it plans to offer its software to other digital books providers, says Foxit in a press release.

The death of the eSlick comes on the heels of similar news about devices from companies such as Audiovox and Plastic Logic. Price cuts by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, extreme competition and a shift in consumer interest toward more multi-purpose tablets have taken their toll on e-readers.

In contrast, Amazon’s newly revamped Kindle sold out in just days after its launch a week ago.

Since Amazon introduced the first generation Kindle in 2007, e-readers became one of the hottest consumer products. The category attracted more than a dozen companies, all of whom bought a black-and-white screen from E Ink, packaged it into a plastic casing and competed for consumer attention.

Mostly Kindle clones, many of these e-readers were near-identical in how they looked and the features they offered. Smaller e-reader makers also had to contend with Apple’s iPad, which launched in April. The iPad took away some consumers who were looking for features beyond just the ability to read digital books.

Meanwhile, Amazon stormed into a price war dropping the price of the Kindle 2 to $190 from $260 in response to cuts from Barnes & Noble on its Nook e-reader. A latest version of the Kindle with only Wi-Fi capability costs $140, now $10 cheaper than a similar Nook version.

This price war took its toll on smaller e-reader manufacturers. Foxit, which once claimed to have among the cheapest e-reader in the market, has now been left behind. It’s e-book reader with a 6-inch black-and-white E Ink display now costs $200.

For a small company like Foxit clearly cutting price on the eSlick to beat the Kindle is not a sustainable. Not surprisingly, Foxit says it will now focus on licensing its PDF and ePub technology to companies in the e-book market. As e-book sales grow, it is becoming clear that the e-reader category will have just three major brands: Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony, and a rival to take them all on: the Apple iPad.

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Photo: Foxit eSlick (knuton/Flickr)

Posted: August 3rd, 2010
at 9:16pm by Priya Ganapati

Topics: Foxit, Kindle, Media Players, amazon, death, e-books, e-reader, eSlick, shake-out

Gadget Lab Guide: How To Un-Cripple Your International Kindle

screen-shot-2009-10-28-at-30933-pm

You bought one of Amazon’s International Kindles and now you regret it. Not only can you not access the web (apart from Wikipedia) but you can’t even buy from Amazon’s full range of Kindle books. Worse, your local newspaper probably isn’t listed, and if it is, it comes without pictures, and if you want to read your favorite blogs, you’re completely out of luck: not even the for-pay option is available to you.

Fear not, poor non-US buyer, because we’re here to help. Here’s how you can un-cripple your “International” Kindle.

First, you’re going to need sources for your books and other content. Thankfully, there is an internet, and while nobody but Amazon will sell you DRM’ed content that works on a Kindle, there are plenty of alternatives. Google books and the Gutenberg Project you know already, and these are great if you like Jane Austen, and they’re free.

But if you want newer titles, things are more troublesome. E-books are currently mired in the same foolish protection schemes as music was a few years back. The answer is, sadly, piracy, and while we don’t recommend it, Google or BBS is all you need to track almost any title down.

And then there is free content. Many newspapers publish everything online, and there are some great long-form blogs suited to e-books. There is also Instapaper, the beloved “read-later” service that clips and reformats web pages for, well, reading later. Instapaper has a little known beta service which will mail your clipped articles to your Kindle, stripped of junk and nicely formatted, once a week. You’ll have to pay Amazon’s data charges, but as these are text files they’re rather small, so it won’t cost much. It is also the best way to make your own, custom newspaper.

So, you have a lot of legally acquired but poorly formatted books, along with the addresses of your favorite blogs and newspapers. How do you get all that onto the Kindle?

Calibre is a clunky piece of software with looks that only a mother could love. It is also very powerful, kind of like an iTunes for e-books, and runs on OS X, Windows and Linux.

The first trick is file conversion. Amazon’s own service works well enough, but you have to mail in the files and wait to get them back. It also has trouble with complex documents.

Calibre can crunch pretty much everything into a format your Kindle can read. It’ll rescue hideously formatted text files, adding paragraph and page breaks where none could be seen before, and it will even squish pictures down to a smaller size. For most people, the presets will be enough, but you can dig in and get your hands dirty with regular expressions and advanced options.

And once you are done, you can retrieve cover art and metadata from the internet and add keywords for easy sorting. Is this starting to sound familiar?

From there, you can send books direct to the Kindle (or other reading device — most are supported) and even delete old ones. It really is like iTunes for books.

Calibre’s best trick, though, is its “Fetch News” feature. This works just like podcasting, only it is for text (and pictures). Choose from a built-in list of newspapers and magazines (Wired.com is in there) and it will scrape the site at scheduled intervals and crunch the articles into an e-reader friendly form. When you plug your Kindle into the computer, Calibre sees it and automagically sends the new issues across. They are formatted just like the newspapers you might buy from Amazon.

Dig a little further and you can add custom sources. Plug in the URL of a newsfeed, choose persistence and schedules and you’re good to go. Calibre will grab any new items and package them up into an e-newspaper for you. It can even grab your feeds from Google Reader or Instapaper (and it does a better job that Instapaper’s own solution).

It’s far from polished, and under the hood the Python scripts which go out and do the dirty work sometimes cause your computer’s fans to spin up like leaf-blowers, but it works, and it is almost ridiculously powerful. It is also free and open-source, and exactly the kind of thing we will likely never see from the likes of Amazon, Sony or Apple due to licensing restrictions.

For the small inconvenience of plugging your e-reader in every morning, you can turn it into what it should have been all along: The all-media reading device found in a million Sci-Fi novels.

Product page [Calibre]

Product page [Instapaper]

Instapaper on Kindle [Instapaper Blog]

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Posted: October 28th, 2009
at 11:04am by Charlie Sorrel

Topics: How To, Kindle, Media Players, drm, e-books

MSI Confirms Plans for Nvidia Tegra-Based eReader in 2010 [EReaders]

That rumor about an MSI eReader looks good-to-go: their chairman acknowledges a reader with Tegra graphics is coming, but they’re ironing out some problems at the moment. Meanwhile, Asus also has some some cool-sounding readers in the works. [DigiTimes]

Posted: October 27th, 2009
at 7:09am by Danny Allen

Topics: 3G, Ebook, MSI, MSI book reader, MSI ebook reader, asus, e-book, e-books, e-reader, eReaders, readers, rumors

Tire maker Bridgestone shows world’s first flexible e-book reader

bridgestone_e_paper_flexible

Tire maker Bridgestone isn’t the first company that comes to mind when thinking about electronic paper, but the company has been experimenting in this field for quite some time now. Today, Bridgestone claimed that it has developed the world’s first flexible e-book reader [JP]. The device, which is pictured above, uses electronic paper (instead of, say, an LCD) and will display the content on the screen even after you turn it off.

Bridgestone says the prototype has a 10.7-inch-screen, is just 5.8mm thick (Kindle 2: 9.1mm) and can display color pages. The device can be bent to some extent since the circuit board and the electronic paper are flexible.

First tests with end consumers will begin in spring of next year, but Bridgestone already said it doesn’t plan to commercialize the e-book reader at this point.

bridgestone_e_book

The company also unveiled another device that features a 13.1-inch e-paper (touch screen) that can display up to 4,096 colors, communicate with cell phones and comes with a reaction rate of 0.8sec (that’s how long it takes to refresh a screen). It’s pictured above.

Posted: October 27th, 2009
at 6:40am by Serkan Toto

Topics: Headline, bridgestone, cgjapan, e-books, e-paper, e-reader

Kindle For PC Could Trigger E-Book Piracy

amazon kindle for pc

Barely one year and 11 months after the launch of the Kindle e-book and Amazon is set to allow to to read the books you have bought on your computer. Like Kindle for iPhone, Kindle for PC will let you download and enjoy your DRM’ed Kindle titles when you don’t have the Kindle with you.

You will have access to your bookmarks and annotations, although it doesn’t look like you can actually add notes to your books, which a PC keyboard is surely better suited to than the chiclet buttons on the Kindle. You’ll also be able to browse the store and buy books from within the application.

This is welcome, although we guess not particularly exciting. The real winners will be those who keep textbooks on their Kindles and use them for study — you’ll have one less device to juggle while you work. But this raises questions: Will you be able to copy and paste sections? We doubt it, as then you could pirate the books far too easily.

And this is why we think it has taken so long for Kindle for PC to arrive. Once you have text on a computer screen, it will take somebody precisely five minutes to figure out how to save it into an open, unprotected format. In fact, we worked it out already. A screen capture plus some Optical Character Recognition software will do the trick, exploiting the always-present analog hole.

So finally, the obligatory whine about DRM, this time combined with the publishers’ insistence that Amazon can’t sell all Kindle titles to all markets: Scrap that DRM now, before you trigger a healthy, easy to use and free alternative — pirated books. Learn from the mistakes of the music and movie industries and remember — text files are tiny compared to ripped DVDs. They will be traded.

Launch date and price to be announced.

Product page [Amazon]

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