Before we get to the links, a little site promotion: I was Christmas shopping for books today and I wanted to get a mystery novel for my grandfather. Where did I look? Why the C4 Book Reviews section of course. Give it another peek, maybe you’ll find some gift ideas of your own. Also, check out our Best Books of 2009 feature, which will be updated Mondays through January. Well, enough of that…
- I walked by a SonyStyle store the other day, and I have to admit they’re doing a good job of pushing their Readers in brick and mortar stores (I’ve also seen them in Best Buy stores amongst others as well). And while they have a decent selection of models, I’m not sure these themed Readers are quite necessary. In other ereader news, the Aiptek Storybook inColor is pretty neato looking, though I still don’t think an LCD ereader is ever going to really fly. The Aluratek Libre has a nice pricetag, but the same LCD concern still applies. (Before you poo-poo me, electronic ink–in our opinion–really does make a huge difference. Here are my initial impressions of the tech from last spring.)
- The COOL-ER is getting a hardware upgrade, making it marginally cool-er in the eyes of the other wallflower ereaders. And there’s lots of Applet Tablet rumors floating around this week, but I’m not going to link to any, beacause I’m sick of them. We’ll discuss an Apple Tablet and its secondary ereader abilites only when (if) it actually gets announced. Here’s a review of the Sungale Cyberus, which also doesn’t look all that impressive.
- Amazon’s Jeff Bezos took a weird shot at the Nook’s sharing feature. While he’s right that it’s definitely not ideal, it’s a lot more than Kindle’s DRM allows. There’s also a rumor afloat that Amazon, in their benevolent hearts, lose $2 per ebook. The logic on this seems fuzzy at best, and I don’t buy it one bit. Also on the list of things that weren’t well enough thought through, Simon & Schuster will be holding their ebook releases until 4 months after hardcovers go on sale. Good plan guys! HarperCollins has a similar plan, and a similarly dumb explanation. Here’s a nice counterpoint.
- I came across a lot of cool stuff around the web this week. The bookish part of me finds something alluring about Altered Books‘ poetry. I also really like the experiment going on over at One Sentence. The NH part of me really likes this redneck twinkle light display. And this animation by Pascal Campion is pretty mesmerizing.
- My video this week? Well I really like the lyrics in the first, but the octopus in the second is pretty amazing.
Which book did you end up getting for your grandfather?
I took Nico’s recommendation on Dark Places.
That should be interesting. Hope he’s got a taste for violence.
Before you shell out the money for one of these fun devices, you should be sure of what you are getting yourself into. There are a lot of expensive models out there that have way more functionality than anyone really needs, and if you are like most average readers, you will do fine with a less expensive one. You can purchase an ebook reader that is much less expensive and still get everything that you need.
yeah, so check out our ereader comparison, where we say exactly that: http://chamberfour.com/ereader-comparison/