Nate Hoffelder

Barnes & Noble might not be in a good mood today but Amazon is probably celebrating (so should B&N). The app analytics firm Localytics has just released a new snapshot of the global Android tablet market and Amazon has cleaned up.

According to the little bits of tracking code that Localytics' app developer partners have been inserting into their apps, Amazon can now claim a 33% share of all the Android tablets now in use.

In the world.

Localytics' data showed that the majority of Android were owned and used in the US (59%), and that nearly all of the Kindle Fires were also located in the US (89% of 33%).

These figures are far from a complete view of the tablets in use, but if you take them with a grain of salt then there are a few things we can learn. For example, Google is hot on Samsung’s heels. The Nexus 7 represents 8% of the Android tablets in use, while Samsung’s Galaxy family accounts for 9%.

And then there’s the surprising detail about the Nook hardware. These enhanced ereaders (NC, NT, HD, HD+) now represent 10% of all tablets in use. I will admit to being very surprised; this raises questions.

I wonder if perhaps B&N’s strategy of having frequent discount sales on refurbs may have boosted the number of tablets sold without actually getting the devices into the hands of the high spenders. The discounts pursued the budget market and the subsequent digital revenue could reflect that.

In any case, I don’t put all that much weight in this data. It doesn’t quite jive with other similarly inexact sources like Chitaka’s ad network. Chitaka reported earlier this month that the Kindle Fire, Galaxy tablets, and the Nexus 7 all gained market share after the holidays. The Nook family of tablets were generating so few impressions that they weren’t included in the chart.

You can take either set of data however you want, but I choose to be skeptical of both.

Samsung kept their thumb in one more pie this week when they released an update for the Samsung with Readers Hub 2.0.

According to the press release, Samsung’s ebookstore now features improved discovery and navigation as well as enhanced content recommendation systems. The app also gained new reading features more options so users can customize their reading experience. Highlighting and sharing are also mentioned as being new features, and that would be newsworthy of this were 2010.

Here’s something interesting: Samsung says that in addition to Epub and PDF, Readers Hub 2.0 also supports Epub3. I can’t verify the completeness of support, but if anyone could check I would love to hear what you think.

Readers Hub 2.0 also sells ebooks from Samsung’s global and local publishing partners, including bestselling titles, along with illustrated cooking books and interactive reading materials for kids. There’s even a publisher portal (a la KDP, Kobo Writing Life, B&N PubIt) which allows publishers to upload and sell ebooks.

This app ships on the Galaxy S3 and can be downloaded to other Samsung mobile devices from Samsung, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 (the screenshot).

Samsung has been dabbling in ebooks ever since they first unveiled a set of ebook readers at CES 2010 (in the heady days of the ereader bubble). Those devices never amounted to much but they were the start of Samsung’s interest in the market.

Funny story: I ended up being a volunteer hand model at the CES 2010 Samsung press conference. Even though I had never seen the ereaders before I knew more about them than anyone so I got to play with them while others shot video. It was fun.

Ever since Barnes & Noble announced lackluster holiday sales earlier this month I have been waiting fro the other shoe to drop. And now it has.

The WSJ reported this morning that B&N already has a long term plan in place. They’re ready to cope with their decline:

"In 10 years we’ll have 450 to 500 stores," said Mitchell Klipper, chief executive of Barnes & Noble’s retail group, in an interview last week. The company operated 689 retail stores as of Jan. 23, along with a separate chain of 674 college stores.

Mr. Klipper said his forecast assumes that the company will close about 20 stores a year over the period.

B&N has been opening an average of 30 stores a year (and closing 15) until 2009. Since 2009 B&N has been closing more retail stores than they have been opening, and in the past year they’ve only opened 2 stores.

B&N College is also performing poorly.  This B&N subsidiary operates college bookstores under contract to universities, community colleges, etc. In spite of the fact that they’ve signed a number of new contracts over the past few year revenues have still declined as often than they grew. At best B&N College is holding steady.

2009 was the year everything changed for B&N. That was the year they bet the future of the company on digital. They bought Fictionwise, reacquired B&N College, and launched the Nook.  Given that 3 and a half years later Nook revenues still account for less than 10% of overall revenue I would say that this was a bust.

And from what Mr Klipper says in the article, it’s pretty clear that B&N thinks the same. There are almost no mentions of the Nook platform in the article and none in the quotes. It’s all optimistic statements like:

Even with 450 to 500 stores, "it’s a good business model," says Mr. Klipper. "You have to adjust your overhead, and get smart with smart systems. Is it what it used to be when you were opening 80 stores a year and dropping stores everywhere? Probably not. It’s different. But every business evolves."

I wonder if B&N saw digital as a way to prop up the brick-and-mortar stores? That’s certainly what it looked like in the early years of the Nook Store. In 2010 and early 2011 B&N ran "More in Store" promotions where you could get free ebooks if you visited a B&N retail location.  That limited them to only attracting customers who live within a reasonable distance of their existing stores and ignored the many potential customers who don’t (basically everyone in the US with internet access and a credit card).

But that’s not B&N’s only misstep. They still have not integrated their online and brick-and-mortar operations, they’re still having issues with online customer disservice, and their digital sales are still hobbled by questionable business decisions. The Nook App Store is a "curated" app store with only around 8000 titles, thus limiting the value to customers, and B&N still doesn’t sell mp3 music.

Then again, B&N’s limited success in the ebook market (going by their lackluster revenue) isn’t entirely their own fault; they have in fact been a couple steps behind Amazon ever since shortly after the Nook Store opened in July 2009.

At that time B&N looked like a serious competitor in the US market, so Amazon responded by taking the Kindle international in October of that year. That gave Amazon hardware and ebook sales that B&N simply could not match in 2009. In fact, B&N is still struggling to expand internationally.

If it sounds like I am writing B&N’s epitaph, you’re not wrong. I don’t see a way forward for B&N. But you cannot hold that against me because frankly the article above doesn’t show that they have a plan either. Shrinking isn’t a long term solution but that’s about the only thing discussed.

images by karen horton, Ed Yourdon

The txtr beagle is getting a lot of attention lately as supposedly being the world’s smallest ereader, even though it isn’t a real ereader, but that no longer matters now that I have my hands on an even smaller device.

Meet the Trekstor Pyrus Mini. There are no English language reviews of this ereader yet, so I am going to post a rare first impressions post in order to give my readers at least some info.

Update: Rather than write a separate review, I’m adding more detail to this post.

This beauty is shorter, narrower, and thinner than the beagle, and it weighs in at only 111 grams, beating the txtr beagle by 17g and the K4 by 59g. The Pyrus Mini is being sold by trekstor, and it has a 4.3″ E-ink screen, 1.6GB of accessible storage, and a microSD card slot.

Yes, this ereader has a screen smaller than on a lot of smartphones. But what’s even better is that it has the same screen resolution as on the Kindle and the txtr beagle, and that lets the Pyrus Mini pack the pixels tighter than even the Kindle Paperwhite, Kobo Glo, and other 6″ ereaders ( 232 ppi vs 212 ppi).

It’s missing certain features like the Wifi, and that means you’ll need to transfer ebooks over a USB cable. But on the upside this ereader differs from the txtr beagle in that it supports several ebook formats, including Epub, PDF, FB2, PDB, and it can also display text files as well as jpg, gif, png, and bmp image files.

The txtr beagle, on the other hand, cannot display ebooks at all. That device is more of an image viewer and actually displays page images. It’s also limited to only carrying 5 books at a time, far less than the thousand or more that can fit into the Pyrus Mini.

I got my unit earlier this week. This review unit was given to me by Trekstor, and it replaces the two I bought but were subsequently lost by DHL.

I’ve been reading on it for the past few days and I like it. It’s a pleasant little ereader that is designed to be gripped in one hand. It has page turn buttons on the right edge, so I suspect it is really intended to be used in your left hand with your left forefinger over the buttons. But I could also use it right-handed.

The Pyrus Mini is a budget ereader, and you can tell that by the limited number of features. You’re limited to 6 font sizes, 3 margin options, and you can also change the character encoding (this enables support for other language/ font sets like Simplified Chinese, Turkish, etc). The screen can be set to refresh after either 1, 3 or 5 page turns. You can bookmark a page, search for a word, or use the table of contents.

That’s not much in the way of features, I know. But this ereader is still more capable than the txtr beagle, and you won’t have to buy a new Android smartphone in order to get it, which is going to be the only way you’ll be able to buy the txtr beagle. The Pyrus Mini currently retails for 49 euros. That beats the European price of the Kindle by 30 euros.

For a tiny little $65 ereader, it’s not bad. It’s so light that the weight is almost imperceptible. I’ve been carrying it around in the same pocket as my cell phone this week, and whenever I have been stuck in line I’ve pulled it out to read a few pages. The page turn speed is (I think) slightly faster than my Kindle Paperwhite, and that is whatsoever surprising. I expected it to be slower.

But this ereader is not perfect. I’ve noticed that it seems to turn itself off if left along for too long (over night, for example).

All in all, this is a better ereader than I expected for the price. If your desire is to carry around a real ereader while still keeping weight to a minimum then this is the gadget for you.

2 Weeks In: This is still a cute little ereader, but over the past couple weeks I’ve noticed the same couple bugs happening again and again.

This ereader likes to turn itself off at random intervals. I’ve picked it up after letting it sit for as short as half an hour and discovered that it had turned itself off. I have no idea why this is happening, but I can say that I could not find a menu option that would stop the Pyrus Mini from turning itself off.

The other bug is a quirk involving the page turn buttons. Sometimes this ereader won’t register that you pressed the button, but when you press it a second time it will then turn the page twice.

The Screen

Felix asked in the comments what I thought of the screen. With most ereaders it would not matter, but this ereader doesn’t have an E-ink screen. It has a screen which E-ink says is a knockoff. I can’t tell with the naked eye whether this is the same screen tech as E-ink’s but I do know that when I put it next to a KPW, this ereader has a very slight brown tint to the screen but is otherwise as white as the screen on the KPW.

Price: 49 Euros

Specs

• Screen: 4.3″ (800×600)
• Storage: 1.6GB, microSD
• eBook Support: Epub, PDF, FB2, PDB, RTF, TXT
• Image Support: jpg, bmp, gif, png
• Weight: 111g
• Dimensions: 85 mm x 128 mm x 9 mm

It’s been some 4 months since Macmillan announced they were considering how to begin offering ebooks to libraries, and today they finally released details of  the pilot.

Macmillan will begin their first ebook library lending program by the end of the Q1 2013. They plan to initially test the idea with 1,200 backlist titles from their Minotaur Books imprint.

The ebooks will be available via Axis 360, OverDrive, and 3M Cloud Library. Once purchased by a library, the titles can be lent for either 2 years or 52 lends, whichever comes first. All of the books in the program will have the same digital list price.

But do you know the kicker? Macmillan has managed to combine the limited checkouts of HarperCollins with the ridiculous prices of  Random House. Library Journal is reporting that each copy will cost $25.

So it seems Macmillan is officially joining the "I Hate Libraries" club. (Up until this point they had not sold ebooks to libraries at all, thus making them a non-voting associate member.)

Macmillan will be joining their fellow major publishers Hachette, Random House, HarperCollins, and Penguin, all of which restrict the availability of library ebooks (HarperCollins, Penguin) or charge ridiculous prices (Hachette, Random House). This exclusive club is ruled over by Simon & Schuster. S&S currently sells only a single ebook title to libraries, and that only made it through their gauntlet because it won an award.

Angry ranting aside, we’re now at 6 for 6. All of the major publishers have made it clear that they don’t actually want to sell their content in all markets to all customers. Why? I’m really not sure. Aside from the usual vague statements which translate to "no", I can’t recall that any of the major publishers has ever shown real evidence to support their business decision. All I have is guesswork.

source

image by Jeffrey Beall

Who are eBook consumers and what are their reading habits?

That’s what the following infographic tries to answer. Random House’s Research and Analytics team pulled together details on the US ebook consumer from research reports from Pew, Bowker, and Forrester.

More Infographics

More Infographics

source

The news this morning that Kobo had hired a new director for EMEA reminded me about some expansion plans from one of their competition. Those plans aren’t going so well.

Way back in June 2012 Barnes & Noble set an ambitious goal. Over the following 12 months, they planned to launch the Nook Store in no less than 10 international markets. It’s now 7 months later, so let’s look at what they’ve accomplished.

In late September 2012, Barnes & Noble launched the Nook Store in the UK. This was a solo launch with no local partner. B&N had been rumored in late 2011 to be courting Waterstones but that bookseller chain ended up signing with Amazon to carry the Kindle.  External details of the deal suggest that Amazon outbid B&N not because Amazon wanted a local partner but to keep B&N from gaining a local partner in the UK market.

And since September B&N has launched the Nook in exactly …  zero markets.

There are rumors of plans to launch the Nook in a variety of markets including Russia, Netherlands, Germany, and elsewhere (I think Brazil is a possibility), but no firm evidence has been uncovered nor has B&N made any announcements.

It’s now late January 2013, and that means Barnes & Noble has only 5 months left until their self-appointed deadline. I’m not sure that they’re going to make it.

I’m not trying to be hostile here, but launching 9 local bookstores is a massive undertaking any way you look at it: logistical, technical, or organizational. It took B&N nearly a year after the first hints about partnering with Waterstones before they launched the Nook in the UK. And even then it was delayed a couple times due to technical issues.

I’m not convinced that B&N has the ability to pull off 9 nearly simultaneous launches in the next 5 months. Sure, they might decide to wait until BEA 2013 comes around in May and announce the markets they will be launching in, but actually getting the local Nook Stores is probably out of the question.

And given the way B&N is hemorrhaging money in the Nook Media and seeing poor retail sales, I’m not sure they can survive a significant delay in their international expansion plans.

Update: This post was published in January, at a time when I was the only one who believed the rumor about Amazon buying Liquavista.

My post yesterday on Amazon and Liquavista hasn’t generated much notice in the blogosphere yet, but it has turned up a useful little video which IEEE Spectrum magazine shot a few weeks back.

Spectrum spent some time at Liquavista late last year and they got a look at Liquavista’s latest demo units. This video is going to give you a much better idea about the color quality and possible uses of Liquavista’s screen tech.

As you can see, this screen tech is visible outside and has been developed as a 9″ display, making it a serious possibility for notebook and tablet screens. Other improvements include better than LCD battery life and the fact that this screen tech can be made in LCD factories. FYI: There is an excess of LCD production capacity right now.

But it also doesn’t have nearly as good a color quality you would expect to see on current generation LCD screens, and I find that detail a compelling argument in favor of Samsung selling Liquavista to Amazon.

One of the commenters on yesterday’s post raised the issue of why Samsung would want to sell. As he saw it, there was little obvious reason for Samsung to want to part with the company when they could just as easily make Liquavista screens and sell them to Amazon.

Speaking in terms of the mindset of Samsung and the tech blogosphere, Samsung makes products which compete with Apple. That means Samsung needs to makes screens comparable or better than the screens Apple uses, and that’s something Liquavista’s screen tech cannot do. Why not part with the company?

Liquavista might be able to get their screens into construction, military, and other rugged devices, but that is a niche market that is already being cornered by Pixel Qi. With that in mind I would argue that the biggest market for Liquavista screens would be ereaders (the commercial uses are ancillary).

If the screens are cheap enough then they will make a very attractive alternative to E-ink screens. I could easily see Amazon wanting to buy Liquavista in order to keep everyone else from using these screens. At the very least I think Amazon would be willing to throw a lot of money at Samsung just to make sure they have a color ereader no one could match.

Spectrum via eReaders.nl

Amazon has long been rumored to be interested in making a color Kindle, but so far all the rumors have turned out to be hooey. Now I wonder if perhaps Amazon’s interest in Liquavista goes back far enough that it inspired all those rumors.

Remember last week when I reported that there might be a connection between Amazon and the screen tech company Liquavista? I didn’t have any proof last week, and I don’t have solid proof now, but I do have some evidence that is strong enough that I am going to go on the record and say that this deal is in the works.

Amazon is going to buy Liquavista from Samsung.

Last week I showed you that Amazon’s hardware subsidiary Lab 126 employed a screen tech person and a CPU architect, 2 interesting details that suggest Amazon is going to develop custom components for the Kindle hardware. I happened across this info while looking for a connection between Liquavista and Amazon, but I didn’t receive any proof until after I posted that story.

The next day a friend of mine, Martijn Joosse of eReaders.nl, got back to me with the business records I asked him to look for. There’s no paperwork that shows Amazon owns Liquavista (that’s how we proved Samsung bought the company), but there is a new registration for

• Amazon Development Center (Netherlands) B.V.

According to the records this company was formed as a software developer and a financial holding company. That doesn’t look like much, but once I started to look into the company things got really weird – so weird that it’s pretty clear that this is not one of Amazon’s usual subsidiaries.

For example, there’s no job listings on Amazon or any job site which mentions that location. Amazon is hiring lots of software people in Europe but none in the Netherlands. Of course, the company is only a few weeks so they might not be ready to hire people , but it does make you wonder.

And then there’s the location. This company is based at the Schiphol Airport World Trade Center. That is fairly expensive office space, and if this were really a software development office I would expect it to be located elsewhere in the Netherlands. This location is more suited to, say, a financial holding company owned by folks from Seattle where they could meet folks from Korea  and negotiate a deal concerning a Netherlands based screen tech company.

Edit: A reader pointed out that the address I found was most likely a mail drop, not an office. That makes things even stranger, IMO, given that the software developers won’t be able to fit inside the mailbox.

But that’s not the most interesting bit of detail about this business registration. No, the best part is that I can’t prove this company belongs to Amazon. It leads back to a faceless LLC registered in Delaware, and the trail dead ends in a faceless holding company called CSC (remember them?).

I can’t actually tell you for certain who owns the newly registered company in the Netherlands. But that’s okay, because we’ve been in this situation before.

When Amazon filed the FCC paperwork for the recently launched Kindle Fire HD tablets, they used a number of different faceless front companies to try to hide their connection to the devices. Someone is using that exact same trick to hide a connection between this new company in the Netherlands and whoever is really making the deal.

If this isn’t Amazon then it is someone who is as equally obsessed with secrecy and I can’t think of anyone who would copy this trick so carefully.

Amazon is buying Liquavista. Or at the very least they are buying part of the company (making a major investment) and plan to use Liquavista’s screen in the next Kindle.

Samsung bought Liquavista in early 2011, and quickly renamed the company Liquavista/SNRC (Samsung Netherlands Research Center). They’ve been funding research at Liquavista for the past couple years but so far as I know they have not actually released a device which used a Liquavista screen. This tech is going to have the same color qualities as LCDs while also being much more energy-efficient. It’s been under development for 10 years now and was supposed to enter mass production in 2010, 2011, and this year (it keeps getting pushed back).

From what I can tell Liquavista has not shown off any new demos since June 2011 2010. They were partnered with Freescale at the time and showed off a few demos at Freescale’s HQ in Toulouse, France. This was of course before Samsung bought the company.

Liquavista was at SID Display Week 2011 where Engadget shot this video:

The latest info I have is that Liquavista expected to have their screen tech in mass production this year. This deal could be a sign that the screen tech is ready, and that Amazon is so interested that they are investing in Liquavista.

But we won’t know for sure until Amazon makes it official.

I have long been a proponent of a paperless office but today I need to share my great secret shame: I am addicted to taking notes on paper. When I was at CES I carried around a laptop, tablets, camera, and still got my fix with a small notepad. When I attended B&N’s most recent press briefing I brought an 8.5×11 notepad.

I’ve had a 20 years plus fixation with paper notes, so I was particularly annoyed when I read an article in the Harvard Business Review last week:

I knew right away, when you walked in here with a paper notebook — a paper notebook! — I realized that this meeting was not going to be a good use of our time.

You’d make better use of your time if you took your notes in digital form, ideally in an access-anywhere digital notebook like Evernote that makes retrieval a snap. If you had that, I could shoot you the link of the book I want you to read, or the contact card of the person you want to meet. And if you planned to act any of the ideas or outcomes from this meeting, you would want to pop the follow-up tasks into your task management program.

Leaving aside the fact that even Evernote has conceded the value of paper notebooks when they helped develop a new paper notebook with Moleskine, I want to challenge any proponent of digital notes with matching the use cases and functionality of a paper notebook.

In my experience a paper notebook is a strong contender against digital notes in the categories of cost, battery life, screen space, durability and persistence, and it also comes in a close second for certain types of sharing.

I want someone to show me a digital note-taking platform that is as cheap as a 10 cent spiral notebook. I want to see the platform that can match the battery life of that notebook, the way I can tear a page out and share it with anyone in my physical presence, or the way that the effective screen size of that notebook can expand to cover

want to see the platform that can match the battery life of that notebook, the way I can tear a page out and share it with anyone in my physical presence, or the way that the effective screen size of that notebook can expand to cover 8 ,9, or 10 pages torn out and spread across my desk, thus enabling me to see vastly more content at once.

I want to see a digital note-taking platform that can match the persistence of the paper notebook.

If you think digital content will last longer then the joke is on you. Last fall I went through my old files and threw away a lot of my college notebooks. Some of those notebooks had been languishing in my attic for 10 or more years and yet I still had them.

Don’t even think of asking me for the digital files from that era. Thanks to the vagaries of dead computers, a stolen laptop, and time, I can’t reliably put my hands on any of my work which is more than 4 years old. I doubt I am alone in that.

And I doubt I am alone in that.

I’ve taken notes on cash register receipts. I’ve taken notes on business cards. I’ve even taken notes on my hand and arm (being white and male is good for more than just societal acceptance). No digital note-taking platform can even come close to fulfilling those use cases.

Anyone who says that digital notes are hands down better than paper is either a fool or selling something. The author of the above article falls in the latter category; she’s shilling her new book Work Smarter with Evernote.

'Nuff said.

image by Wm Jas

Do you recall the story about the Kindle hiring spree from a couple weeks ago? Amazon was (and is) hiring a lot of new people to develop more Kindle products, but they were also hiring all sorts of corporate positions as well with the apparent goal of building up Lab126 so it could stand on its own 2 feet.

That was an interesting piece of news, but it’s dwarfed by the information I just uncovered today. Amazon is not only developing new consumer products; they are also developing original components to put in their next Kindle hardware.

Earlier today a confidential source tipped me to a rather interesting connection on LinkedIn. I cannot see the connection myself, but I was told that Tony Slack, the CTO at Liquavista, was now directly connected to Carolin Fischer. She’s the HR Manager for Mergers and Acquisitions at Amazon. That raises some interesting questions does it not?

Could this be a sign that Amazon is investing in Liquavista?

Liquavista is a screen tech company owned by Samsung which is working on a replacement for LCDs. Their tech is going to have the same color qualities as LCDs while also using low-power. They’ve been working on it for 8 years now but have yet to release a product to the market. That was supposed to have happened in 2010, 2011, and 2012.

Amazon could be looking at Liquavista for screens for the next Kindle hardware.

Yes, but it could also simply mean that those folks spoke briefly at some trade show and later connected on LinkedIn. That happens a lot and is in fact much more likely to be true. And given that I have not found any other connection I’m not going to get too excited about the possibilities.

Besides, I found something just as interesting. I might not be able to show that Amazon is working with Liquavista, but I can show that there is a high probability that Amazon is developing their own screen tech and CPUs.

I was rooting around on LinkedIn, looking at Lab126 employees and I found a couple recent hires that tell me a lot about Amazon’s hardware plans.

I might not be able to show a connection between Amazon and Liquavista, but I did find the profile of Jerry Chung. He’s been the manager for display hardware at Lab126 since May 2012, and before that he was a manager at Pixel Qi, Apple (he managed screen tech development), and Sipix.

And then there is Siamack Haghighi. He’s a system and chip architect at Lab126, and before Amazon hired him in June 2012 he held similar positions at other companies.

There are over 1,000 Lab126 employees on Linkedin, and I’m sure that if I looked through all the profiles I would find other profiles which confirmed my conclusions. But I’m not sure it’s necessary.

Amazon has screen tech people. They have chip designers.

Those are pretty good signs that Amazon is working on custom components for their next generation Kindle hardware. They’ve moved beyond simply designing the device to designing the components that go into it.

On a related note, I think we now know why Amazon hasn’t bought Texas Instruments' Omaps CPU division. It was widely rumored in October 2012 that Amazon was interested in picking up the division, which TI had planned to simply shut down.

Three months later that deal still has not happened and today I think I found out why.  Amazon already has their own chip people in house working on the chips Amazon plans to use in the next Kindle hardware. They might not see a need to take on an entire development team whose attention was divided among several different TI customers.

And given that in November TI laid off 1,700 people from the Omaps division, I would bet at this point Amazon could simply hire the folks they wanted rather than buy the entire division.

We could also look at that lay off as confirmation of a sort. Amazon might be one of the ex-TI customers which are developing their own chips, so TI isn’t keeping the staff around anymore.

In any case, the next Kindle hardware is likely going to surprise us.

It looks like this is shaping up to be the week of the dueling digital reading surveys.

On the one side we have a report from Scholastic which say that 46% of kids are reading ebooks, while on the other side we have a new report being sold by Digital Book World which claims that 54% of kids in the US are reading ebooks.

I wonder which one has the better data?

I’m not sure. I can’t compare the reports because although the Scholastic report is freely available the one from DBW is not. The only public data from the DBW digital reading survey are a few bits here and there and there isn’t much context. But what I can see in the press release tends to make me question the accuracy of the unseen report.

For example, DBW asked parents what their kids are reading and got a response of 54% read ebooks. Scholastic asked kids the same question and got an answer of 46%. Which do you think is more accurate?

For this particular figure I tend to go for the Scholastic report because I can recall how many times my mother only thought she knew what I was doing. And given that the DBW press release indicates that 1,300 parents were surveyed but does not mention if any kids participated, I think that’s a good reason to stick with the Scholastic report.

The DBW report would best be looked at as not a survey of what kids are reading but a survey of what their parents believe they are reading. That nuance could result in a discrepancy between what is occuring vs what the survey reports.

There’s an old rule about gadgetry which states that no matter what you buy something new will come along in a few weeks which will be better, faster, and prettier. The Nexus 7.7 is going to make you feel that way about whatever Android tablet you just bought.

According to some recently leaked specs on a Korean website, Google’s next Android tablet is going to be the Nexus 7.7 and be built by LG.

This tablet is rumored to have the new Tegra 4 bajillion-core CPU with 2GB of RAM, a 7.7″ screen with a resolution of 1920×1200 (294ppi). The other rumored specs include front and rear cameras, with the front-facing camera being 5MP.

It’s supposed to ship with 8GB of Flash storage and retail for $299. There’s no word on what version of  Android it will run nor when it will be released, but my guess is that Google will unveil it at Google I/O in May. It might run Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie (assuming it is done in time).

Okay, I can see the rumors about the screen size and the CPU being true but surely that detail about the storage is wrong. 8Gb is not nearly enough storage in this day and age. If Google actually announces it then they’ll be laughed off the stage.

Mike Cane thinks that the Nexus 7.7 will have a card slot, but I don’t. Google doesn’t like them (or at least someone does not). So I’m guessing this tablet will have a minimum of 16Gb of storage.

Assuming it exists at all. This could just be fiction.

But if it’s not fiction, would you buy this tablet?

source

via

Here’s one of those stories which I didn’t think were important at CES. As you can see in the video, I was wrong.

About a month ago Ectaco announced their second doomed large-screen ereader, the Jetbook Color 2. This ereader is the first to have the Triton 2, the newest generation E-ink screen. At that time neither E-ink nor Ectaco were willing to share specific details on the technical specs for this screen but it seems that E-ink changed their mind for CES 2013.

The following video shows Sriram Peruvemba as he talks about the new screen. It has an improved color filter (it lays on top of the grayscale E-ink screen) as well as a frontlight. The Triton 2 screen is also thinner than it’s predecessor.

The tech looks cool but it’s probably never going to see much use. LCD screens are simply too good at color, and now that they’re cheap and are found on tablets with decent battery life there isn’t much of a market for color E-ink any more.

And then there’s the screen resolution issue, which i think is the real reason Amazon and the other major ereader makers never adopted the Triton color screen.

The Triton screen gets its color from a filter layer which sits on top of a regular grayscale E-ink screen. In order to provide the standard RGB color pixels, the filter assigns one of the grayscale pixels for each color (and reserves a 4th pixel for white/black). This effectively cuts the screen resolution by 75%.

A color E-ink screen has a much higher resolution grayscale underneath it. The Jetbook Color, for example, has a screen resolution of 1200×1600 but in reality it can only display color at a resolution of 600×800 (and that’s on a $500 device with a 9.7″ screen). If you gave the KPW a color E-ink screen the resolution would drop to 512×379 or less than you could get on the average smartphone.

Do you see why Amazon went with an LCD screen for the Kindle Fire? It’s not that Amazon could not buy color E-iink screens; the screen tech could have been made 4 or 5 years ago.

It just wasn’t worth it.