Basically, nobody wants to shut up about the new Apple tablet (supposedlydubbed the iPad–consider it nominated for this week’s dumbest new ereader name award). It’s slated to be revealed today, so I’m not going to bother parsing out the rumors. This one bit about pricing strategies and the coming battle between Apple and Amazon is interesting though. Not sure where B&N is in all this. I guess they probably shouldn’t have f-ed up the Nook launch so badly. Perhaps they are waiting for a boost from Apple? If you’re foolishish enough to get a first generation iPad (thus ignoring Apple’s track record of vastly superior second gen devices), here are some other fun uses for it.
Amazon has quietly laxed their DRM policies. So quietly that hardly anyone has noticed. In what could be an enourmous shift, Apple will allow iTunes users to store libraries in the cloud, rather than their harddrives (hopefully it doesn’t require a .Mac subscription). Besides fighting with China, Google is also in a tiff with its old buddy Apple. This may lead to Apple dumping Google integration from their devices and adopting Bing, which is of course owned by–Mac geeks are fainting left and right over this, I’m sure–the evil Microsoft. Regardless of Google’s early success (maybe) with Android’s apps, Apple is still the undisputed ruler of App-land.
It’s kinda old news, but apparently colleges are being sued for using ereaders in classrooms because blind students can’t use them. How using a braille edition to supplement a Kindle (which reads books–poorly–out loud) is less fair than if the other students use deadtree, I do not understand. It won’t help the blind, but if you’ve no backlight on your ereader and can’t figure out how to turn on your lamp, try this dongle. This Boogie Board doodle toy isn’t an ereader (and probably isn’t much use to anyone not a basketball coach) but it does seem pretty cool, and uses no power at that.
We’ll be posting on Friday about some of the many changes we have planned for our second year. There’s a lot of good stuff planned, and we’ll be getting bigger and better as time goes on. Check back Friday for that.
Some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
Confused about ereaders? After CES pooped a thousand of them, it’s getting a bit crowded. Gizmodo has a guide to the major players, and news of a couple new Asus entries that will be available “this year” (meaning 2012). There’s a Samsung ereader, and a big newspaper reader called the Skiff, and probably another few dozen will come out this year. MobileRead has a guide to articles about there being too many ereaders. If you’re new to ereaders, let me provide a base camp for your shopping expedition: if you want a device to read books on, start by looking at the Sony PRS-300; if you want to read newspapers and magazines, start by looking at the Kindle. You might not wind up with those (they both have serious weaknesses, as do all ereaders), but they’ll provide a good baseline for comparison. And remember to breathe.
The publishing landscape is changing. The Wall Street Journal freaked out Friday, saying that the Web makes it impossible to get noticed from the slush pile. The Rumpus says there’s still plenty of slush (via), but then we’ve got to worry about piracy and people hating DRM, the Guardian is picking out the horsemen of the book apocalypse, and it’s starting to sound like ebooks are ruining publishing. Calm down, please (publishing is jittery and excitable), and let me posit another theory. Roughly 60,000 novels are published in English in the U.S. every year (via). For the sake of a conservative estimate, let’s cut that figure in half. Then we’ve got 100 novels a day (remember, that’s just in English, in America). Say 90% of them are obviously not your cup of tea. Soooo… haven’t been to the bookstore for a week? Enjoy sifting through 70 novels (67 of which, just guessing, are crap) to find your next read. Bookstores have become the new slush piles, and that is killing the book much more than the Web, or ebooks, or libraries, or anything else. Anecdotally, authors are now reading to handfuls of disinterested cupcake enthusiasts, literally, desperately trying to sell a couple dozen books. This is not good.
Random of the week: My favorite parts of the Leno/Conan debacle have been Maureen Dowd’s evisceration of Jeff Zucker, this video of Leno’s ‘04 torch-passing speech, the fact that “I’m with Coco” on Facebook has more than a thousand times as many fans as “I’m with Leno,” and Leno laying down and taking it while Kimmel destroys him on his own show (embedded below). Sometimes it helps to watch a meaningless battle with a pretty clear villain, just to take a break from unknowable tragedies like Haiti (give here).
Nico covered a lot of ereader news last week thanks to CES, but there’s still stuff worth looking at. Samsung is jumping in the pool with a competant competent looking entry. You can buy an Alex at Borders, eventually (and for $400), as well as buy Borders on Alex. The Liquivista is a color ereader that avoides LCD. The Skiff can bend, and the Cool-er doesnt want to be left behind. Rumors of the Apple Slate (or whatever it will be called) are still everywhere. The COPIA uses Linux (and this news site doesn’t proof their headlines). The enTourage eDGe has a few too many capital letters oddly placed, but the merging of tablet and ereader is interesting, though it looks a bit clunky. And please, let’s not allow the moniker “dualbook” to catch on. This week’s nominee for dumbest ereader name: Ubiq’s QuokkaPad.
1-6-10. Looks weird. Anyway, here’s some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
CES 2010starts tomorrow. I’m most excited about, predictably enough, a couple of ereaders: the Spring Design Alex, and the Plastic Logic QUE. Presumably both will premiere tomorrow, and hopefully they’ll be selling by the weekend. Among the questions in my mind: First of all, how much will they cost? Are the Alex’s dual screens useful or gimmicky? Is the QUE’s touchscreen as awesome as it first looked? And lastly, how much will they cost? If I had to guess, I’d say QUE-$500, Alex-$350.
There are a few pieces of pre- or non-CES news floating around. First of all, there’s the new iRiver ereader, which might or might not be laughably expensive. And everybody’s jumping on the Wall Street Journal’s story that the Apple iSlate is coming in March for one cool grand. Sooooooooo… wait till April and get it for $700? There’s also the Skiff, the biggest ereader in the world, and the new Cool-er, the smallest (that is, the smallest with a six-inch screen and an overinflated price tag—but it comes in green!). I’m still waiting for a netbook with a detachable, backlightable E-Ink screen. It’s a few years away.
To get excited for the coming year from a, you know, reading perspective, here’s the Millions’s list of books to watch for in 2010. I’m looking forward to Robert Stone, David Mitchell, and Ron Rash, whose last novel, Serena, was among the best books I read this year. Salon does the same thing for January, though with sadly only four fiction books on the list.
So, this op-ed in the Times, it’s a publisher saying that the role of the publishing industry is basically to have good taste, to find and polish excellent books for people to read. He says, “A publisher — and I write as one — does far more than print and sell a book. It selects, nurtures, positions and promotes the writer’s work.” There have been a lot of responses: at E-Reads, Booksquare, and Salon, among many others. My own response is a little shorter: When there’s more than 70,000 books about vampires on Amazon, maybe publishers should do more selecting, and less promoting and positioning (not to mention less worrying about William Styron ebooks).
Random of the week: Did you see the Burj Dubai/Khalifa opening? Think Bellagio fountains plus explosions plus helicopter shots. They might have spent more on fireworks than the Empire State Building cost to build.
Here’s our last links update of the decade. First though, we’ve updated our eReader Comparison page as well as our Best Ways to Get eBooks, so check them out. Both will be seeing quite a few more updates in the coming weeks and months as much is happening with ereaders and ebook sellers. In fact, we’ve got a lot of changes planned for C4 in the near future as well; we’ll be posting on many of them at some point in January. Also, be sure to check out our Best Books of 2009 series if you haven’t already. We’ll be continuing the series through January.
We’ll have some Christmas reading recos tomorrow, and then we’ll be back on the 28th with a new installment of our Best Books 2009 series.
In the meantime, here’s an extra-long installment of news about books and ebooks from around the web.
OverDrive released an Android audiobook app Monday (via). You can get it here. I’ve tried it, and it’s awesome. You can download mp3 audiobooks from you local library straight to your phone. Once you have the app installed, just check out the book from your library on your phone’s browser, and OverDrive automatically loads it. You can then download the audiobook in parts. Transferring audiobooks from your computer isn’t supported with Android devices (at least, on Macs)—it goes through iTunes for some reason—but it’s not necessary. This is still in beta, but I didn’t get so much as a hiccup in my few days using it. The Android app only works with mp3s—no WMA books (sadly, since the vast majority are WMAs, for now)—and an OverDrive smartphone app is also available for Windows Mobile.
Barnes & Noble’s Nook is turning out to be more popular than they’d expected. More news of shipping delays has surfaced, along with customer service snafus. Although, if you don’t get your Nook by Christmas, you get $100, so things could be worse. Meanwhile, switch11 at the Kindle Review has posted a quick hands-on comparison of the Nook and the Kindle. If you can’t guess from the title of his blog, switch11 leans heavily toward the Kindle in ereader comparisons; however, he seemed to like the Nook, especially for its clearer font. Personally, the features and mixed reviews of the Nook, combined with the hamfistedness of its rollout, have me more excited for Spring Design’s Alex ereader, which—so far—seems a lot like the Nook, only better. Maybe this update will help. (Update: it didn’t help much.)
Macworld has reviewed seven major ereaders—find the roundup here. Surprisingly, their favorite was the Sony PRS-600, the Touch. They dinged the PRS-300—which you can get extra-cheap these days if you’re a student or teacher—for not having a dictionary or image support. If you don’t care about those things and you read mostly novels, the 300’s your best bet, in my opinion. Macworld finds the Kindle’s controls kludgy, and while whispernet’s great, you’re going to be spending most of your time reading, not downloading books.
Here’s a couple of anti-DRM pieces. One by Cory Doctorow (via), one by switch11 (see above). Also, David Pogue’s DRM experiment has found (unscientifically) that lack of DRM has no effect on sales. And, the scary Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement threatens to be a DMCA for the whole world (that’s bad).
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.
I’m only recently back in the country, so this might be a bit strange since I’ve been out of the loop for two months. In any case, here’s some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
The Barnes & Noble Nook: We’ve learned a few things from the “nook,” primarily that nobody takes it seriously when you try to uncapitalize your product’s name (and, really, it does look silly). We’ve also learned that people loveloveloveto talk about which gadgets are going to “kill” other gadgets. So is the Nook a Kindle-killer? I could care less; there’s room for more than one device. In reality, the Nook and the Kindle are roughly 95% identical. The Nook has the touchscreen interface, which Engadget says isn’t all that hot, while Gizmodo likes it despite the interface hiccups. CNET says the perks (like lending books to friends) make it a worthwhile device. The big difference in my eyes is that the Nook does Adobe ePub, which means library ebooks, though I’m guessing they won’t work over wireless. We’ve also learned that Amazon isn’t the only one who has trouble filling ereader orders. Oh, and also… remember Borders? I’d say they have about 2 years of financial solvency left. It’s going to be like a brontosaurus dying.
Something called Opium, which is evidently a funny lit mag, has launched an iPhone app. Sounds promising; their interview about it was pretty funny. They publish quick stories and daily content—so far, no word on price.
Canada’s version of the RIAA, the CRIA, has been viciously hoisted by their own petard. For decades, they’ve been using songs for anthologies without compensating the artists, roughly 300,000 times. That’s piracy! In fact, it’s worse than piracy, because they’ve been profiting on their theft. Now they’re getting sued for $20,000 per song (actually a deal compared to the RIAA’s $80K per)—that works out to $6 billion. Ouch. And, ha ha.
Sony’s proprietary BBeB format is deadas of Friday. They’re adopting ePub as planned, meaninglessly rebranding their “eBook Store” to be the “Reader Store,” and rolling out a new 3.1 version of their desktop software. Which was necessary. Very necessary. I’ll give 3.1 a shot and let you know how it goes. Next on Sony’s docket: the Reader Daily Edition, with wireless. Something tells me it might be a Kindle-killer…
It’s the end of the year, so everybody’s doing best book lists, including us (you can keep track of our Best Books of 2009 series here). Sam Jordison at the Guardian’s books blog has a different take: here’s his hilarious post about the worst books of the decade. It’s good therapy, Dan Brown has a starring role—seriously, 80,000,000 readers?
Random of the week: “Mark the Spot” is an official AT&T iPhone app that lets customers tell AT&T where their coverage is thin, and detail specifically how they suck (dropped call, etc.). I’m guessing Mark the Spot won’t be making a cameo on those Luke Wilson commercials anytime soon. Pretty hilarious.
Wow, been a while. Here’s a healthy collection of links to make up for the last few weeks. And if you’re sick of my style, fear not: Nico is back and will be helming next week’s edition.
Good news for Amazon and bad news for everyone who wanted one in 2009, the Nook has apparently been delayed until January 11. Sony’s having trouble getting stuff out the door for the holidays too. The second ereaders started running Android we all saw it coming: the rise of the clones… and clones… and clones… and clones. The Nook and the Alex showed a fair bit of innovation this (next) year, so lets hope other companies keep up with experimentation and competition–or at least something not-white.
For videos, Pigeon Impossible is a really cool animation (which I won’t embed here because it’s better when bigger). Also, check out this cool, literary video:
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REVIEW: Hell;
from May 26th, 2009--
"I’ll come right out with it: the language of this novel is great, phenomenal in fact. The book is saturated in detail, but not in the soggy paper towel sort of way."
