Chamber Four

• After a week off, let’s get right to business. First: ereaders. Best Buy and Verizon are teaming up on one of the competitively priced iRex models. Read more here. The Hexaglot supposedly will have handwriting recognition, which would be awesome, if a little unnecessary, if it worked. Despite appearances, the Biblio is not primarily a phone, and the Cybook Opus finally ships. How much will you bet the AUO will be a POS with broken firmware and cheap plastic?

• Elsewhere in books, Google’s book battle has gone international, while Amazon’s has settled. Aptara and friends are working on a mysterious “solution” to iPhone books. Gormet threw in the napkin, and so did Philly’s libraries. I like what this guy’s got to say about ebook price points, though his bar may be a tad low. Disney books have gone digital, and Simon & Schuster “invented” the vook,  but nobody cares.

• Two of my favorite authors in a blender! Check out Nabokov’s notes on Kafka’s work. Also Kafka-related from Boing Boing, reading his work improves learning? UPDATE: Hilary Mantel has been named the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize.

• Finally, the fun. Levi Johnston finally uses protection? And while we can all chuckle at this quick Zelda animation, only true dorks can appreciated this apparent infusion of Mother 3 into Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends (bonus points if you know the answer to Tomato’s Bubble Monkey question).

That's an American hand

MobileRead’s been keeping track of the Sony Reader’s European march: the PRS-505 debuts in Germany tomorrow, and in Switzerland in early April (still no sighting of the 700).

Just in time, it appears, as new data suggests a whole bunch of Germans want to buy ebooks, over two million (Germans, that is), more than even generous estimates of Kindle sales.

It seems like more and more of a missed opportunity for Amazon. The Kindle has never been available outside the U.S., ostensibly because the whispernet isn’t set up yet. Despite tiny indications that Amazon’s working on this, I’m siding with the camp that says this isn’t changing any time soon.

The two million estimate is way high, as the analysis grants, but still, with the addition of the Sony Reader, that makes only three Kindle competitors (the other two are BeBook and CyBook) available in large swaths of the world. So why isn’t Kindle trying to spread its tentacles across the globe? …
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With the new iRex 1000S, you can take digital notes as if writing on paper. The catch? It's enormous, far from perfect, and nearly $900.

When my writing class started discussing ereaders last week, I mentioned that I actually had one, and the professor said something along the lines of, “But you don’t use it for serious books, right?”

When my Sony Reader PRS-700 bit the dust, and I decided to switch brands because of Sony’s lackluster warranty service, I found myself asking this question all over again. …
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