A couple of videos are going around today that purport to show an iPad 2 dummy. Supposedly a case manufacturer was given a dummy in order to work on a case and they "accidentally" brought it to CES.
Yeah, right.
I’ll grant you that there might be an iPad2. And I’ll grant that a case maker could have a dummy. But that dummy will be in a locked room somewhere behind at least 2 layers of security. I doubt you could even get a camera into the room, much less bring the dummy to CES.
Did you know that before the iPad was launched, there were app developers that the closest they got to an iPad was looking at it over a streaming video? Seriously, that’s how secretive Apple are. This level of goof would never happen.
PWC have released the results of a study today that summarizes the current state of the ebook and ereader market. PWC polled over 1000 online users in the US, UK, Germany, and the Netherlands. I’m still reading it myself, but I’m intrigued by some of the results.
One of the questions in the poll was on whether you’d heard about ereaders. I’m a little surprised that the market penetration varies much between countries.
Some of the poll results are rather obvious, though.
First, a little background. OPDS is an ebook transfer standard. Technically it will work with any type of electronic publications, but in this case we only care about using it to download Epub ebooks from various ebookstores and free ebook sites. For example, Fictionwise support the standard, and so do Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg, Munsey’s, and a number of other sites.
I have to admit that I didn’t know Webscriptions supported it; at least, not until I came across a mention on the ThreePress blog. Liza discusses this support in terms of getting free Bane ebooks into Ibis reader, but it’s actually a lot bigger than that. With the same amount of work you can also access your Baen ebooks from inside quite a few different apps, including:
Stanza
Ibis Reader
FBReader
Aldiko
Bluefire
I’ve never moved all my Baen ebooks into Aldiko before. The old import process took too long to process ebooks when you have a hundred or more. But now I will. Here’s the link, in case you’re interested:
http://www.baenebooks.com/stanza.aspx <- all Baen ebooks
http://www.baenebooks.com/stanza.aspx?feed=free <- just the free ebooks
Kirjavälitys and MPS Limited are pleased to announce the launch of Finland’s first online eContent platform. The platform, powered by MPS’ online eContent platform, will host, sell, and distribute eBooks from Finnish publishers to both Finnish customers as well as international markets.
Publishers who wish to sell their eContent through Kirjavälitys’platform will be a part of the eContent site and thus be connected to Finnish Web-shops and Kirjavälitys’ own Web-services for bookshops, libraries, and schools.
Following the success of a conference on eBooks that Kirjavälitys held in September, major publishers joined the project in order to launch their eBook offerings in the New Year. Content will be available in PDF and ePub formats and the site will operate in both Finnish and English to make it accessible to a wide international market.
MPS will provide all participating publishers with a complete solution that includes conversion to ePub and secure DRM, as well as content hosting, eCommerce, and distribution through MPS’ eBook hosting platform, ContentStore.
The project went live on 3rd November with a few key titles and will be fully up and running by the end of January.
Rajiv Seth, MD and CEO of MPS, commented: “Kirjavälitys’ online platform looks set not only to add momentum to the spread of eBooks in Finland but also to help make Finnish literature available to a wider audience. We are delighted to be a part of this exciting project.”
Tuula Pelkonen-Tiri, Service Director of Kirjvälitys, added: “Kirjavälitys perceives that cooperation with MPS is a great opportunity to launch supply, distribution, and sales of the digital content to the Finnish market.”
MPS Limited will be exhibiting at BETT 2011 in London between 12th and 15th January at booth D130. To book an appointment with MPS or for more details, please get in touch with David Robertson at [email protected] or +44 (0) 20 7843 4861.
You might recall that a month ago I posted that the Kobo Wifi was available in Taiwan in partnership with the local publisher Swinden. I’ve just heard today that Kobo are looking to expand beyond Kong Kong, into other Asian ebook markets.
Kobo’s first target is Taiwan. They’ve already begun discussions with several publishers, distributors, and hardware suppliers. Kobo have successfully signed one publisher, so far. Cite Publishing Group is actually a conglomerate of 40 publishing imprints in Taiwan, and is also part of a larger media company with extensive interests Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China.
I’d say if the deal with Cite goes well the rest of Cite’s sister companies will also sign up.
I downloaded, tried it, and then disabled the toolbar. I’m going to stick with a Print to PDF plug-in.
I’m sure this toolbar works great but I don’t like that it has all these buttons which clutter up my screen. I use less than half the sites linked to on the toolbar (Foxit Messages, CNN, Foxit Products, Youtube, Foxit Messages, Facebook, weather, games, celebrity, personas), and the ones I do visit are already bookmarks.
Update: I’ve now used the toolbar for over a week and it’s really not worth installing. Compared to other PDF printing options, it’s slow. Also it doesn’t provide any extra features to make up for lack of speed.
From the press release:
Foxit today announced the release of a brand new product – Foxit PDF Creator Toolbar 1.0, a free browser plug-in which enables users to conveniently and efficiently create high-quality PDF documents from different file formats.
The Foxit PDF Creator Toolbar integrates the Foxit PDF Creator with the ASK Toolbar. Foxit PDF Creator uses Foxit’s cutting-edge PDF conversion technology. The integrated Foxit PDF Creator Toolbar enables a one click PDF creation from the toolbar. The toolbar is also a great way to Foxit’s latest news as well as instant online services. Backed by Ask’s powerful search engine makes web browsing fast and easy.
"Foxit is constantly looking for ways to empower our PDF users with more features at a better value." said Alex Alexander, Assistant Vice President Corporate Marketing, Foxit Corporation. "We are always looking for different product offers that will improve the user experience of our 100 million Foxit Reader user base."
Foxit PDF Creator Toolbar is small, fast and accurate for converting most common office files, to reliable PDF files while retaining the look and feel of the original documents.
You might recall that about a month ago I reviewed the Next2, an Android tablet/ereader from E-Fun. Their product reps were in Vegas because of CES (they weren’t an exhibitor), and I managed to catch a few minutes with E-Fun reps right before they left.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that my pictures didn’t come out very well. But it was fun to see the Next2’s better and bigger siblings.
The Next4 and Next 6 both have capacitive touchscreens, Wifi, and accelerometers. The Next4 has a 10″ screen (1024×768), 8GB Flash, and runs Android 2.2. The NEXT6 has 7″ screen (resolution?) and runs Android 2.1.
Like the Next2, they’re tied to the Borders ebookstore. But since they’re open tablets you can also install other reading apps. Retail will be $250 (Next6) and $350 (Next4) and they’ll be available next quarter (hopefully).
It’s been a while since I had it in my hands, but I really think the Next6 is simply an updated Next2. That might be a good thing; the Next2 wasn’t all that bad of a tablet. And the Next4 was a monster, but you kinda expect that. I’m hoping the video performance will be better than on the Next2; it would be great to do real 720p on the 10″ screen.
Thanks to the Kindle-Nook price war this year (and the recession), you’d expect the smaller ereader companies to cut back on their expenses. That’s why the ereader selection was paltry this year (though I’d say it was the price war and not the recession, myself).
But not Gajah. They’re doing so well that they actually had 2 booths this year; one in South Hall and the other in North Hall. One was in the ereader tech zone had had just ereaders and tablets and the other had their full product line (gadgetry of various kinds). The tablets are pretty nice, too. Both have 7″ screens, and they should be in production shortly. One runs v1.5 and the other runs v2.2. I shot a video of the one running v2.2 (BK 7009) which is at the end of the post.
They will be in production in march.
I’m only going to show you a few of the ereaders, basically just the ones that are actually new. All have either a 5″ or 7″ LCD screen and none have Wifi or a touchscreen. The quality of the screen might differ, though. The pair of 5″ ereaders in the third picture are much the same device with only cosmetic differences separating them from my Elonex 500EB. And the 7″ ereader in the 4th picture has only cosmetic differences from the Elonex 700EB Gajah lent me.
All the following ereaders (except the Kindle clone and the tablets) are currently in production.
Gajah also brought a couple ereaders with 6″ E-ink screens. The Kindle clone is only a mockup, though.
I like all their ereaders, but I just love what they did with the interface on the BK 7009 Android tablet.
Hanlin was at CES again this year, and this time they brought their mainstay V3 (6″ E-ink) and V5 (5″ E-ink), 2 Kindle clones I remeber from last year V60 (6″ E-ink) and V90 (9.7″ E-ink) as well as 4 new ereaders.
The recently announced A6 and A9 ereaders with Sipix screens did make an appearance. I have an A6 and I’ll post a review when I can. Here’s a set of side by side photos of the Sipix and E-ink screens, all of which are available now. If you’d like to buy one you’ll need to find one of Hanlin’s local partners.
They also had the V60C and V90C on hand. These 2 were just announced in the last few days, and they have the new color E-ink screen. These 2 should enter production in the next few months.
I did get a chance to go back to the Hanlin booth and shoot another video. Since I don’t have any experience with their ereaders, I didn’t do anything more than try to show you the refresh rate. If you can’t see the color screen, try watching the video in HD. Apparently the colors get messed up when Youtube dowgrades the resolution.
I was digging through my video library last night when I came across a video that mentioned this ereader. Back in November 2009 someone used their smartphone to record part of a Creative presentation at a trade show. The clip shows a tablet like device with some annotation, video, and media abilities. The video isn’t very good, but it does show some interesting possibilities.
It occurred to me that this particular device is the epitome of the ereader market in 2009. A company decided to go outside their usual market and started developing an ereader. A little info is leaked to the press and everyone gets really excited. Nothing is officially announced, but the media get into a frenzy anyway.
Now that was 2009, you have to admit.
Unfortunately, the Mediabook was never released (or even announced). You can’t really say it was cancelled; it never really existed. But I think we ever saw it because of either the iPad launch and the Nook/Kindle price war. Either event changed the market enough that the Creative Zii Mediabook never made it out of the lab. Which means the Creative Zii Mediabook is also the epitome of the ereader market in 2010.
Interesting, isn’t it?
TBH, I don’t think the Mediabook died completely. I think the current Zii tablets (7″ and 10″) are probably based on a lot of the same work as the Mediabook. I think they’re too similar to be a coincidence.
This was a surprise and a joy. RockChip had more tablets, ereaders, PMPs, an other gadgets than both Marvell and Freescale combined. I mention those 2 companies by name because they’re Rockchip’s direct competition. Like Marvell, RockChip makes CPUs and can help design the entire gadget.
What they had in their booth at CES was a collection of gadgets (tablets, ereaders, PMPs, a netbook), some that were both available for license and some that were currently being sold by a partner. It was a little difficult to find just one gadget, but I did. They had a Kindle clone that is being sold by Newsy, one of their partners in China. It has a 7″ LCD screen and runs Android v2.2. Oh how I want it.
The open source Epub editor Sigil has just been updated. Improvements include:
added a small "Donate" button to the toolbar and a related entry in the Help menu
added a .desktop file for the make install target (courtesy of Richard Gibert)
this time *really* worked around a Tidy bug that added blank lines to the start of <pre> and <style> elements (issue #655)
updated ZipArchive from 4.0.1 to 4.1.0
fixed a regression crash bug with loading extremely rare HTML content documents that have an internal DTD subset
added a workaround for a crash bug caused by invalid epubs that use obfuscated fonts but with incorrect UUID URN key syntax (issue #709)
integrated the FlightCrew epub validation library; a new toolbar icon triggers epub validation and displays the results (issue #28)
fixed a rare input truncation problem when the input file contains a unicode nbsp and also specifies standalone="yes" in the XML declaration (issue #677)
This is my favorite Epub editor, and now that it has an integrated Epub validator it’s even better.
I finally made it to the Marvell booth Saturday night to get a look at the green and white wonder boy.
The XO-1.75, with its 8.9-inch touchscreen, will start shipping in the second quarter of this year to countries around the world trying to bring schoolchildren into the computer age. It looks the same as the existing 1.5 and 1.0 machines; it has the same Pixel Qi display, Flash storage, and keyboard (actually, there are 2 keyboard options) The only difference is that it replaced the x86 CPU with a Marvell Armada running at 1GHZ.
Actually, that’s not completely true. Replacing the CPU means they had to redesign the entire motherboard; it’s not as simple as swapping just the CPU. But you won’t be able to tell that without cracking the unit open.
OLPC had the hand crank generator on hand; you can use it to recharge the 1.75 in about a couple hours. BTW, I asked about why it wasn’t included with the XO-1. Apparently the demo unit kept getting broken, and it took too much time to charge the XO-1 (because of the x86 CPU).
I don’t cover it copyright, piracy, and related issues much because I have something of a radical view. But this time I’m making an exception. An idea has jelled in my mind that is so out in left field that I want to share it. I was reading a piece in The Observer today and it inspired me it write this post about copyright.
Everyone says that copyright law exists to protect and reward creators, but I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just an excuse. If you look at the way it exists now (and how it gets expanded), you can see that it protects the middle men, not creators. I also think that’s why copyright was originally invented. Here are 3 questions that I’ve been pondering for some time.
How does a creator benefit from a copyright 70 years after his death? (He doesn’t, but corporations do.)
If the Big Media who bribed Congress into extending copyright last time around really wanted creators to benefit, then why not just give creators a bigger cut? (This one’s obvious; there’s nothing in it for Big Media.)
If copyright is needed to protect creators, then why is the fashion industry thriving without it? (They are.)
So let’s take this a step further. If copyright now doesn’t exist to protect creators, what makes you think that is the real reason why it was created? We all know that the first copyright statutes was written as a reaction to the printing press, a mechanical form of reproduction. But content was being created for millennia before the printing press. If protecting and rewarding creators were the reason for its existence, then what took so long?
I think copyright was really invented because someone saw a business opportunity in making copies of a work. And what better way to make a profit than to get the government to grant you a monopoly?
I don’t think it was ever about the creators, in spite of the platitudes. I think it was about the middle men all along. What do you think?
Yesterday I mentioned that Netronix and Pocketbook were both here at CES. I was a little surprised because one of the important stories from last CES was that the 2 companies had merged. As I understood it, Pocketbook & Netronix were going to contribute their ereader divisions (they do other things, too) to a new company and share ownership. I don’t know how they were planning to split it, but I do know that all the ereader stuff was going to be carried on under the name Pocketbook Global.
I now have confirmation from a contact with Pocketbook. The companies did indeed split up. They’re still partners in that Pocketbook currently license several Netronix designs, but they’re not one company anymore.
I was told that the reason for the split was quality control issues. I don’t think this had to do with production , but design. I believe Foxconn do the actual mass production – once the bugs are worked out of the design. So I would guess that Netronix were having trouble working the bugs out.
TBH, we really should have figured this out a while ago.Do you recall when Pocketbook announced the 60x and 90x ereaders? Those ereaders were designed by Foxconn, not Netronix. The fact that Pocketbook went outside the company for the new designs probably should have been a tip off.
Then again, maybe not. Companies change their minds all the time.
