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.
Disney’s got an ebook service up and running, so you can read all the Pooh Bear and Hanna Montana ebooks you want for $90 a year. Penguin and Eggmont have signed a deal with EA to bring children’s books to Nintendo’s DS handheld. Wynken de Worde has a nice piece up about the building wave of ebooks. This book’s cover art is hilarious, as is the existence of this toy.
Here’s another cool thing I came across concerning ereaders on Nintendo’s DS handheld. It looks to be an ereader for comic books only. This one’s a homebrew (read: will void your warranty) program and probably has less funtionality than the lackluster comic readers on the iPhone anyway, but it’s nice to see even homebrewers and hackers getting aboard the ebook wagon.
This was announced a couple of months ago, but I thought I’d share it here: apparently there is an ereader program coming for Nintendo DS. It looks like it will contain the usual suspects of public domain titles, but even so, a prepackaged 100 books will save a lot of downloading and organizing headaches–ask Nico how’s his 100 free classic downloads from Sony went. I’m a little concerned that the slightly fuzzy resolution of the DS will make this less than satisfying, but the blurb and screen shots seem to imply a fair amount of features (including the ability to download additional books–no word yet on pricing or availability for the DLC) that may make this little collection worthwhile, even if not as an everyday ereader. Right now it’s only announced for the UK, but we’ll grab an import when it’s ready to see if it is worth anticipating a release on our side of the pond.
