And now it is reportedly going to be released for the 2013 Fire HDX tablets.
Update: Nope. Amazon informed me on Friday that this was an error. "We inadvertently sent the message about the update to a small portion of our tablet customers who have earlier versions of Fire tablets, and we are following up with them to apologize for the inconvenience," a spokesperson told me in an email. Only the 2014 Fire HDX 8.9 will be getting the update.
Earlier today a Fire HDX 7 owner posted a screenshot on MobileRead which shows a notice from Amazon promising an update for their tablet:
I am still waiting for additional detail (and confirmation) from Amazon, but this sounds like great news for Fire HDX tablet owners. Amazon had previously said that Fire OS 5 Bellini would only be released to the newest generation Fire tablets, and last year’s models.
Amazon started rolling out the latest Bellini update in early December, although they have yet to update the Fire HD7 and Fire HD6 tablets which were released last year.
Perhaps last year’s models will be getting an update at the same time as the 2013 models?
Google rolled out a blue light filter feature for Google Play Books a few days ago. You can now install the latest version of GPB for iOS or Android and use Night Light, as the feature is named, but I don’t think there’s any hurry to do so.
I installed the new Google Play Books Android app last night, and tested it while I was trying the Fire tablet’s new Blue Shade feature. And frankly, I’m not impressed.
Google’s feature is so simple that it strikes me as a "me-too" addition rather than a planned feature.
Night Shade is an automatic filter that adjusts with the time of day. There’s a single switch to toggle it on and off (look in the font/formatting menu) but no way to adjust the color, strength, or what have you.
You can just turn it on or off, and that’s it.
When you do turn it on, you won’t see anything for most of the day, but as the evening progresses into night your screen will look more and more like the screenshot at right.
Both screenshots were taken with a white background; I didn’t think to try the other backgrounds, sorry.
That’s not much of a blue light filter, so if you’re reading on Android you’re really better off using a different app.
Android has quite a few apps in this department, and the best one by far would be Twilight. It’s the only blue light filter that has been recommended to me, and now that I have installed it I can see why (it’s so good I’m about to upgrade to the paid app).
Twilight lets you enable or disable the filter manually, or set your own schedule, or set it to automatically change with the time of day. You can also adjust the color temperature and intensity.
It’s a great app, and well worth the $3.
But if you’re reading on iOS, your options are much more limited. There are a double handful of web browsers with integrated blue light filters, but ebook apps are still thin on the ground and Apple won’t let anyone modify system setting like screen color (so a system-wide solution like Twilight or F.lux is out).
As I explained in my post on reading at night, many ebook apps for iOS, including Kindle, iBooks, Aldiko, Google play books, and Kobo, have a night mode where the text and background are inverted (white text on a black background).
Some readers swear by that mode, but if you really want a blue light filter on on your iPhone or iPad, your best bet would be to buy a pair of glasses that have been tinted to block blue light, use the GPB app, or wait for Apple to add this as a core feature of iOS.
I have no evidence to back it up, but I am expecting that to happen with the next major update if only because Apple will want to copy Amazon (Google will have a similar motivation with Android).
The NYTimes has discovered the promise of ebook apps (enhancements, embedded multimedia content, etc), but unfortunately they have yet to grasp the pitfalls.
Writing for this august publication, Alexander Alter profiled a new ebook app publisher last week. Metabook is a developer along the lines of Byook or Vook (in its original form), and the NYTimes lauds Metabook for, well, existing.
Landing a new work from Mr. Lamb is a major coup for Metabook, which was founded last year and specializes in multimedia, interactive storytelling. With an original novel by Mr. Lamb, author of best sellers like “I Know This Much Is True” and “We Are Water,” Metabook is establishing itself as a serious player in the growing marketplace for book apps.
Metabook has yet to publish a single title, but they feel they have a blockbuster in Wally Lamb’s I’ll Take You There, which will be published next year exclusively as an app on iOS.
Yes, the novel will not be released as either a print book or as a more traditional ebook; anyone who wants to read it will have to fork over their money and buy an iDevice before buying the app.
The NYTimes sees this as a bold move rather than a foolhardy one, and they also make the mistake of misjudging how long the idea of enhanced ebooks and ebook apps has been kicking about:
Mr. Lamb is the latest fiction writer to venture into the realm of interactive, multimedia book apps, an area that is still relatively new terrain for novelists. When the first wave of enhanced e-books arrived a few years ago, most stuck to areas like nonfiction, science, history and current affairs, where add-ons like interactive graphics, audio and video clips and enlargeable maps and photographs could help deepen readers’ understanding of the topic. Interactive children’s books have become another booming genre, with everything from Dr. Seuss to an app based on Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians series. But when it came to adult fiction, interactive bells and whistles often seemed like noisy distractions that pulled users out of the immersive experience of reading a story.
There’s much to dislike about this piece, and it would be easy to write it off as a puff piece lacking in context and perspective. But it also includes a couple details which quietly predict limited success for Lamb’s novel, if its predecessors are anything to go by:
A few months ago, the British novelist Iain Pears released his genre-bending novel “Arcadia” as an experimental app that allows readers to toggle through 10 different characters’ story lines. It has been downloaded more than 20,000 times, outselling the hardcover edition of the novel.
Eli Horowitz, a former editor and publisher at McSweeney’s, has also found an avid audience for his interactive digital novels. His serialized app “The Silent History,” which he co-created, has been bought and downloaded more than 30,000 times.
Just so you know, Arcadia is a free ebook app which was widely profiled this summer, including in The Guardian, and The Silent History got even more attention when it was published in 2012.
And yet in spite of all the publicity, these two apps only sold about as many copies as a respectable mid-list novel (source, source) published in the US. And to make matters worse, one of the apps is free while the other costs $2 and earns most of its revenue from in-app purchases.
Edit: a reader reminded me of Touchpress, a leading app developer that recently decided to get out of selling apps. After five years and millions of apps sold, Touchpress is pivoting its business model to brand sponsorship.
So what does that tell you about the market for ebook apps?
It tells me there isn’t one, or at least there isn’t a market large enough to justify the six-digit advances that Metabook is paying authors.
This publisher plans to produce a dozen titles a year, and currently employs fifteen people, but something tells me that Metabook is going to have about as much success as Vook, a startup which launched in 2009 with the same general idea. Enhanced ebooks didn’t work for Vook, and four pivots later Vook is now Pronoun, a services company.
To be fair, Metabook could succeed where Vook failed.
But even if the time has come for ebook apps, they’re still being released in a market where few developers are making any money through app sales. Consumers have become conditioned to not buying apps, so much so that many developers have turned to either adverts or in-app purchases (see The Silent History) to make a living.
For better or worse, that is the market that Metabooks is getting in to.
When COP 21 begins in Paris, the world’s leaders will review the climate framework agreed in Rio in 1992. For well over 20 years, the world has not just been thinking and talking about climate change, it has also been writing and reading about it, in blogs, newspapers, magazines – and in novels.
Climate change fiction is now a recognisable literary phenomenon replete with its own nickname: “Cli-fi”. The term was coined in 2007 by Taiwan-based blogger Dan Bloom. Since then, its use has spread: it was even tweeted by Margaret Atwood in 2013.
Here's a new term: "Cli-Fi" = SF about climate change. Coined by Dan Bloom re: POLAR CITY RED: http://t.co/AkwFn3OE
It is not a genre in the accepted scholarly sense, since it lacks the plot formulas or stylistic conventions that tend to define genres (such as science fiction or the western). However, it does name a remarkable recent literary and publishing trend.
A 21st-century phenomenon?
Putting a number to this phenomenon depends, partly, on how one defines cli-fi. How much of a novel has to be devoted to climate change before it is considered cli-fi? Should we restrict the term to novels about man-made global warming? (If we don’t, we should remember that narratives about global climatic change are as old as The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Biblical story of the flood.) If we define cli-fi as fictional treatments of climate change caused by human activity in terms of setting, theme or plot – and accept there will be grey areas in the extent of this treatment – a conservative estimate would put the all-time number of cli-fi novels at 150 and growing. This is the figure put forward by Adam Trexler, who has worked with me to survey the development of cli-fi.
This definition also gives us a start date for cli-fi’s history. While planetary climatic change occurs in much 20th-century science fiction, it is only after growing scientific awareness of specifically man-made, carbon-induced climate change in the 1960s and 1970s that novels on this subject emerged. The first is Arthur Herzog’s Heat in 1976, followed by George Turner’s The Sun and the Summer (published in the US as Drowning Towers) in 1987.
Author Ian McEwan
At the turn of this century, Maggie Gee and TC Boyle were among the first mainstream authors to publish climate change novels. In this century, we can count Atwood, Michael Crichton, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ilija Trojanow and Jeanette Winterson as major authors who have written about climate change. The past five years have given us notable examples of cli-fi by emerging authors, such as Steven Amsterdam, Edan Lepucki, Jane Rawson, Nathaniel Rich and Antti Tuomainen.
Creative challenges
Cli-fi is all the more noteworthy considering the creative challenge posed by climate change. First, there is the problem of scale – spatial and temporal. Climate change affects the entire planet and all its species – and concerns the end of this planet as we know it. Novels, by contrast, conventionally concern the actions of individual protagonists and/or, sometimes, small communities.
Added to this is the networked nature of climate change: in physical terms, the climate is a large, complex system whose effects are difficult to model. In socio-cultural terms, solutions require intergovernmental agreement – just what COP21 intends – and various top-down and bottom-up transformations. Finally, there exists the difficulty of translating scientific information, with all its predictive uncertainty, into something both accurate and interesting to the average reader.
Still, cli-fi writers have adopted a range of strategies to engage their readers. Many cli-fi novels could be classified as dystopian, post-apocalyptic or, indeed, both – depicting nightmarish societies triggered by sometimes catastrophic climate events. A future world is one effective way of narrating the planetary condition of climate change.
Post-apocalyptic visions of society
Some novelists are also careful to underpin their scenarios with rigorous climatic predictions and, in this way, translate science fact into a fictional setting. Kingsolver, who trained as an ecologist, is the best example of this – and Atwood and Robinson are also known for their attempts at making their speculations scientifically plausible. Also, cli-fi novels, particularly those set in the present day or very near future rather than in a dystopian future, tend to show the political or psychological dimensions of living with climate change. Readers can identify with protagonists. To some extent, the global community is represented in fictional everymen or everywomen. Or, often, it is through such characters that science is humanised and its role in combating climate change better understood.
Can cli-fi lead to change?
Dystopian Margaret Atwood: a cli-fi proponent.
Could cli-fi affect how we think and act on climate change? The paradox is that the harder cli-fi tries, the less effective it is. Many writers want to inspire change, not insist on it: the line between literature and propaganda is one that most novelists respect. Literature invites us to inhabit other worlds and live other lives. Cli-fi at its best lets us travel to climate-changed worlds, to strive there alongside others and then to return armed with that experience.
In Paris, the UN will seek a global agreement on climate action for the first time in more than 20 years. There is plenty of climate change fiction out there to help provide the mental and psychological space to consider that action.
A new listing for a waterproof Kindle Paperwhite has turned up on Amazon this week, just in time to miss the peak beach-going season here in the US. The product itself has been around for a couple years now, but this is reportedly the first time it has been listed on Amazon’s site.
For $240 you get last-year’s Kindle Paperwhite, an ad-free reading experience, and a promise that it will work at depths of up to 200 feet.
The waterproof KPW is not sold by Amazon but by Waterfi, a company that provides an aftermarket waterproofing service for mobile electronics. In addition to the Paperwhite, the company carries Fitbit, iPods, Nike Fuelband, and waterproofed headphones in its store, and it also offers a custom waterproofing service.
Rather than seal the case (like the Kobo Aura H20), Waterfi protects the internal electronics with a nanocoating that is both waterproof and non-conductive.This makes it possible for water to get into a devices case without impacting performance or shorting out the device.
It comes at a price, though. Waterfi’s service adds an additional $100 to the price of the Kindle Paperwhite, and it’s not even the newest model. The description suggests that Waterfi is still selling last year’s model, the one with 4GB of storage but without the 300ppi screen found on the third-gen Paperwhite.
But if you need to use your Kindle at extreme depths or in extreme weather conditions, it could be worth it.
Just don’t leave it submerged for too long; one reviewer noticed that an overnight dunk resulted in a nonfunctional frontlight. On the other hand, Waterfi is boasting of a new waterproofing process so they might have fixed that problem.
When Scribd culled its romance catalog a couple months back, I predicted that the ever-popular SF&F category would be the next to go under the knife. I was wrong.
Scribd quietly announced on its blog late Friday night that it is imposing a quota on audiobooks. Starting 20 September, subscribers will be limited to listening to a single audiobook per month, and they will also have the option of buying additional audiobook credits for $8.99.
Scribd also promises that they will offer "a rotating catalog of thousands of audiobooks for unlimited listening" which "are being made available through special arrangements with publishing partners".
The subscription cost will remain $9 a month, and the ebook access is not being curtailed at this time. Scribd is merely taking steps to make their audiobook catalog less attractive to subscribers. (Scribd wants subscribers to pay $9 to listen to a second audiobook, when you can often buy an ebook+audiobook bundle in the Kindle Store for not much more.)
This is the second time that Scribd has cut back its service in the last couple months, and it is also the second time that one of Scribd’s bold moves has backfired.
Scribd’s first mistake was in signing an exclusive deal with Harlequin and then actively recruiting romance readers in late 2014, only to discover in June 2015 that romance readers inhaled so many novels that they were draining Scribd’s coffers.
Scribd’s second mistake was when they signed a deal in November 2014 with Findaway to add 30,000 audiobook titles to Scribd’s catalog. To give you an idea of how bold that was, Kindle Unlimited had around 2,300 audiobook titles at the time (4,500 now).
As I suggested at the time, KU carried fewer audiobooks because they had a higher unit cost:
I would bet that Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited with only 2,300 audiobook titles because audiobooks usually cost 4 times or more than the price of an ebook. This suggests that an unlimited audiobook subscription plan is simply unsustainable at Scribd’s $9 a month or the KU’s $10 a month.
Both of Scribd’s bold moves made the service attractive to potential subscribers, but they came at too high of a price. Rather than just draw in paying customers, Scribd attracted the type of customer it does not want – those who would use the service as it was intended by consuming as much content as they can.
And that’s a problem for Scribd, because it has committed to paying its suppliers (authors and publishers alike) a cut of the retail price each time a book is loaned.
That is simply an unsustainable model for access-based services of any type, beit ebook, music, or video.
At this point it’s clear that there are two sustainable payment models for access-based services. The first is to pay suppliers a tiny fraction of the retail price, and the other is to limit payments to a finite pool.
Pandora and other streaming music services have gone with the first model, and so has Germany’s Skoobe. (According to Matthias Matting of Self-PublisherBibel.de, Skoobe pays indie authors between 20 cents and 60 cents per loan.)
Amazon, on the other hand, has been using a funding pool to pay authors and publishers ever since Kindle Owner’s Lending Library launched in late 2011.
In light of today’s news, that doesn’t seem like such a bad model, does it?
Having successfully transitioned from author to brand, the famed James Patterson is now trying a new business model: not writing at all.
He’s offering a unique opportunity for a single individual to pay $294,038 for the privilege of destroying the next Patterson-branded book. The package includes a first-class flight to an undisclosed location, two nights’ stay in a luxury hotel, a 14-karat gold-plated binoculars, a five-course dinner with Mr. Patterson, and a complete autographed set of the Alex Cross series, including the books Patterson wrote himself.
And at the end of your trip, you’ll get to read Private Vegas, shortly before watching it be wiped from this Earth.
I don’t know about you, but $300 thousand sounds like a good deal if it keeps the next Patterson book out of circulation, so much so that I am about to go launch a crowd funding campaign to raise funds.
Who’s with me?
No, wait – scratch that idea.
Apparently I misunderstood the story in the NY Times; the $300 thousand only give you the privilege of destroying a single copy, not the book itself. My bad.
Yes, Patterson is offering some rich fan the opportunity to spend a lot of money to blow up a single copy of Private Vegas (and no, Patterson won’t be holding it at the time).
Why?
According to the NY Times:
Susan Holden, managing director of the promotion at the advertising agency Mother New York, said she asked Mr. Patterson that very question.
“He said to me that he wouldn’t be surprised if one in his circle of friends might be interested,” Ms. Holden said. “He’s a super down-to-earth guy, but he runs with a billion-dollar crowd, so for some person that’s a huge Patterson fan, this could be chump change and could be funny.”
Patterson is also offering a promotion for those with tamer interests. Starting Wednesday at noon, Patterson’e website at selfdestructingbook.com has been giving away codes which will enable a limited number of fans to read for free. It’s only open to US residents, apparently, and the codes will expire after 24 hours.
Edit: A reader pointed out a connection I missed that renders this story even more absurd. As you may recall, about a month ago Patterson released this video where he uses the allegory of a book burning to represent how book culture is being killed off in the US:
And now he’s literally destroying a book. The irony is delightful, no?
With the first festivities kicking off tomorrow night, the annual orgy of gadget excess that is 2015 Consumer Electronics Show promises to be even bigger than last year.
I’ll be there to cover it (I came perilously close to not attending this year), and this is what I will be carrying around in my gear bag.
To start, let me cover what’s not in my bag: I don’t have a 4G hotspot, and I don’t have a backup battery. The latter has never proven useful, and so far I’ve managed to avoid the need for the former. Sure, that runs the risk of not being able to post, but that’s never been a serious issue.
But I do have a new laptop.
Dell Inspiron 15 5000
For the past couple years I carried around a Lenovo u410, a 4 pound macbook clone with questionable battery life. I would be carrying it to CES 2015 if not for the hinge breaking.
And since I don’t have another laptop or even another computer to work on while the Lenovo clonebook is away getting repaired, I’ve had to replace it.
My new primary work laptop is a 5 pound monstrosity with a Core i7 CPU and a 15.6″ screen. It’s far more power than I need, but it was on sale, met my needs, and came with an onsite repair warranty.
While it is about twice as heavy as the better ultrabooks (Brad Linder’s laptop weighs 2.4 lbs), it also costs about half as much. I browsed Win 7 laptops for a few weeks before buying, and found that each time you reduced the weight by a pound you added another $300 to the price. And since I don’t travel much I can’t justify paying the higher price for the lower weight.
FYI: The sound is terrible, so I would not recommend this model.
HP wireless mouse
As always, I am going to be packing along a wireless mouse. It’s the same one I use at home, and what can I say other than it is easier to use than a trackpad. I also have a full sized USB keyboard, but that will likely stay in my hotel room.
Notepad and pen
For some things, paper is still the best.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5
This is the one item not in the photo because it’s what i used to take the photo. This is a semi-pro camera which I bought 3 years ago. It has far more settings than I need and still works as good today as when I got it.
Alcatel OneTouch Pop Icon
For the first year ever, I will be carrying a smartphone. I used to make do with a flip phone, but when the last one konked out on me I decided to go crazy and spend $250 on a budget smartphone. It came with a year of service, 1.2GB data, and 1,200 minutes.
It’s not much of a smartphone, no, but then again I don’t need much.
Pocketbook InkPad
More of my time will be spent over the next week simply getting from one venue to another (as well as waiting to get in, waiting to get on the monorail, etc) and so I will be carrying this 8″ ereader to keep myself entertained during the downtime.
I’ve said before that I like the InkPad, and I still feel that way. As someone who has been a reading on tablets since they were called PDAs, this is one of the two ereaders I have reviewed this year which have tempted me to read on an ereader (the other is the Boyue T61, a Chinese Android ereader).
Fire HD
And last but not least, there is my 2013 Fire HD tablet. I’m still not completely sure I will be carrying this tablet during the day or even bringing it along on the trip, but I have packed it.
Part of the reason I am thinking of leaving it behind is that I want to reduce the number of distractions which might keep me from getting work done. (This is also why I haven’t installed any games on the new laptop.) The Fire HD is an entertaining toy but it is also a time suck.
I am pleased to report on an update which adds improved support for the ePub3 ebook format.
Late last week Mantano released a new version of their reading app for Android, iPhone, and iPad. In addition to bug fixes and a couple new reading features, the Mantano app also gained support for Epub3.
According to the changelogs, the app now uses the Readium SDK to add partial support for Epub3 features. Both fixed layout and reflowable ebooks are supported, as well as embedded sounds, animations, and videos, but little else in the way of Epub3 support is listed. The one other new feature mentioned is pop-up footnotes, something which iBooks has supported since 2012.
Other new features in this update include improvements to the highlights and bookmarks functions; text selection and highlights are now editable in PDF and EPUB 2 (in the iOS app), and that app also has an annotations panel. There is also a mention of improved annotations support for the Android app, but it’s not clear what that means.
The app also boasts a night mode and custom reading themes. Readers will also have the option of opening Epub3 ebooks in either Epub3 or Epub2 compatibility modes, which should prove useful should they encounter an ebook which has features from both formats.
Please note: The new features have only been added to the paid versions of the Mantano app; the free version in Google Play hasn’t been updated since February.
For the past week I have been playing with an early release of Bluefire Reader for Windows. This app has been under development for well over a year, fortuitously giving it a chance to launch into a market where Windows users have fewer and fewer options for reading Epub ebooks.
The app offers all of the customization options and reading features we have come to expect from the leading apps. In addition to line spacing, justification, text size, and margin width, readers can choose from a variety of fonts and color themes, including a night mode.
When reading, the text automatically adjusts to offer a multi-column mode on wide screens (just like the late NookStudy). Depending on the font size and the width of the app window, you could see up to 3 columns of text. As you progressively increase the font size the app automatically switches to a double column and a single column mode.
In terms of annotation, BFR4W offers both highlights and notes. The annotations in a book can be found via the annotations menu, and they can also be exported (much like what Amazon enables with the Kindle platform).
Speaking of menus, there is of course a library menu, and inside each book you’ll find a TOC and a book info menu. Each of these menus is based on a book’s metadata, so they may not be available for every ebook.
Other reading features include search, a dictionary, bookmarks, copying text, but not TTS. (BFR4W should work with your existing Windows screen reading app but I don’t have this feature enabled and can’t confirm that detail.) And there is even an option to sync your reading position, annotations, and bookmark with your other Bluefire apps. I have not tested that, though.
All in all BFR4W is not the most feature rich Windows reading app but it does have a number of advantages over its competition. NookStudy might offer similar DRM support and a lot more annotation options, but it is also tied to the Nook platform and is at risk of B&N deciding to kill it. Bluefire Reader for Windows, on the other hand, does not require that you log in to any server in order to use it.
And of course Bluefire Reader for Windows bests the Kobo and Kindle apps by offering support for Epub. The Kobo app can’t read ebooks bought elsewhere, and Amazon continues to leave out any auto-conversion ability from the Kindle app (its deceased relative, Mobipocket Reader for Windows, had this ability).
This is an okay app, and I plan to keep it around for the inevitable EOL of NookStudy. I won’t be switching to it immediately, but that is largely because I am someone who holds onto apps until they are dead before I abandon them.
On second thought, I notice as I get to the end of the comparsions that Bluefire Reader for Windows loads significantly faster than NookStudy. If I switched now it would save me the time I will spend waiting for NookStudy to wake itself up.
iPad users, rejoice. The best Epub app for iDevices was updated yesterday with a bunch of new features. The app has new themes, a new font, and (finally) integration with Dropbox. It also unfortunately supports the new Adobe DRM, and you just know that’s going to come back to haunt users.
The Bluefire Reader app now supports the Open Dyslexic font. This font was created to help readers with dyslexia, and it offers subtle visual clues which help dyslexics recognize each character. You can see an example at right.
The app also features updated themes, including support for a new sepia mode for PDFs. And last but not least, readers can now store their ebook libraries in Dropbox and download them directly into the Bluefire app. What’s more, the Bluefire Reader app now syncs your reading location across BF apps on multiple devices. Early reports suggest that this feature is not working perfectly, but it is bound to improve.
In related news, Bluefire recently revealed that they are also working on a Windows reading app. It too is based on the Bluefire platform, and it is the app I referred to last night in my rant about Windows reading apps.
You can find the updated iOS app in iTunes. The Bluefire Reader app for Windows is due out some time in the next week.
Scribd and Oyster are the two leading competitors in the subscription ebook market, and they announced news this week.
In addition to Oyster’s new app for Android, it also released a new version of its app for iPad and iPhone earlier this week. And in related news, Scribd has signed a deal with the literary site Connu for exclusive content.
Calling itself a " hub for contemporary short fiction", Connu launched via a Kickstarter campaign in 2013 with the goal of publishing new and original short fiction. It publishes a new story 5 days a week which can be read in its app for iDevices or on the Connu website.
Scribd’s deal with Connu adds Connu’s 30 most popular stories to Scribd’s catalog of over 400,000 titles. Scribd will be featuring a new story every week in Scribd Selects, and readers can also browse all thirty stories on Connu’s publisher page.
And in related news, Oyster has also rolled out an update for its app for iPad and iPhone. According to the changelog, the new features include a new reading theme, significant improvements to the existing themes, new options for night mode, and more:
New book detail view includes a beautiful redesign with a dynamic complementary color system, and many more related titles and recommended sets on every page.
Editor’s notes for our top titles written by our editorial team.
New “read time” feature lets you know approximately how long it will take to read a book before you start it. It’s kind of like magic… actually it’s just math.
All of our reader themes have gotten a nice facelift with new typography, a refreshed color palette, and small refinements throughout.
Introducing Wythe: a new high contrast reader theme featuring a news-text font that’s well-suited for outdoor (especially beach) reading.
All reader themes are now available in night mode.
You can find the Oyster app in iTunes. The app is free, but the service costs $10 a month (with a free trial). You have to sign up before you can use the free trial.
Amazon’s on again off again flirtation with large screen ebook readers appears to have cooled off once more.
There’s been no announcement from the retail middleweight, but news is circulating today that the Kindle DX is out of stock at Amazon.com with no mention of when it will return. The Kindle DX is still available via 3rd-party retailers, but none are listed as being fulfilled by Amazon, so I doubt that the device is coming back.
And that’s a shame, because I had been hoping Amazon would release a new KDX with a higher resolution screen, more features, and other improvements.
Originally launched in May 2009, the Kindle DX was Amazon’s first bid to enter the academic market. The KDX was the first Kindle model to directly support PDFs, and Amazon hoped that the KDX’s larger 9.7″ screen would work as an adequate replacement for paper textbooks.
Unfortunately for Amazon, the pilot programs they arranged showed just how wrong they were. As part of promoting the initial release of the Kindle DX, Amazon convinced a number of major US universities to launch digital textbook pilot programs based on the ereader, and they did not go well.
The pilots pretty consistently showed that the Kindle DX is too slow and too feature limited to work well with textbooks. Universities as diverse as Reed College, UVA, and Princeton (as well as several later pilots like the one at the University of Washington) all reported that students didn’t care to use their digital textbooks on the Kindle DX. Sure, E-ink is a great for reading, but it’s not so good at the meta-activity of studying.
Students commonly needed to make a lot of annotations and then access them quickly, and the KDX simply couldn’t match the speed of a student with a pen in their hand. The students who participated in the pilot programs also reported that the Kindle DX couldn’t turn the page fast enough nor jump around inside a textbook as quickly as they needed. And then there’s the issue of having only one screen to display several textbooks for a course, but that is a problem all ereader share.
But even before the pilots were done, the Kindle DX effectively was banned from any widespread deployment. In 2009 the National Federation for the Blind sued several universities on behalf of visually impaired students who couldn’t use the Kindle DX.
The universities were sued for failing to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. This law specified that the disabled students were to be given equal access, and that has long been interpreted to mean that schools and institutions can’t buy new tech if the visually impaired cannot use it.
Those suits weren’t settled until mid-2010, but naturally that put the kibosh on large-scale adoption by schools and libraries.
A second-gen Kindle DX was released in 2010. It had a faster screen and more features, and even though Amazon released a firmware update in early 2011 the Kindle DX has largely been ignored. So far as I know it doesn’t even support KF8, Kindle Print Ready (Amazon’s own PDF format), or the Kindle fixed layout spec.
This is the second time that the Kindle DX has been discontinued. Amazon first retired the ereader in October 2012, only to launch a comeback tour in May 2013. And now, nearly a year later, it has been retired again.
The grandaddy of all modern ebook readers shipped 10 years ago this week in Japan.
The Sony Librie was certainly not the most successful ereader, but it paved the way for all that came after. Its influence can be seen in everything from the keyboard on the original Kindle to the 6″ screen found on most ebook readers today.
Weighing in at 10.6 ounces, the Librie sported the first commercially available 6″ E-ink screen, with the now standard 800 x 600 resolution. It had a keyboard, page turn buttons, a paltry 10MB internal storage, and a card slot for a Sony Memory Stick. It was powered by 4 AAA batteries, and read Sony’s proprietary BBeB ebook format (later used on the Sony Readers).
Retail was a not too unreasonable 41,790 yen (about $410). While that is damned steep by today’s standards, computers and other electronics cost 3 and 4 times as much back then as they do now.
The Librie never amounted to much, and this was probably due to the lack of available content and the DRM. This ereader was tied to an ebookstore where the ebooks were rented and not sold, and they expired in 60 days. (The lack of tools to make your own ebooks probably didn’t help either.)
But in spite of the Librie’s lack of success, it still influenced all the ereaders that came after it. It used a 6″ screen which was developed by E-ink, Sony, and Phillips (and manufactured by Toppan).
I was told by a contact at Toppan that this screen geometry was chosen because it closely resembled the dimensions of a standard size for paperback books in Japan. Sony funded the development just so it could be used as an ebook reader, and it is not unreasonable to say that without Sony’s funding this particular screen geometry might never have existed.
Without the Librie there would have been no screen for the Kindle to use when it launched in 2007. Sure, there’s a chance that Amazon might have funded the development of an E-ink screen for the Kindle, but your guess is as good as mine what the Kindle would have look like.
Jeff Bezos is famous for saying that Amazon will only get into a market when they know that they can outperform the existing players. I would not be surprised if the original spark of the idea of a Kindle with an E-ink screen was ignited when someone at Amazon looked at the Librie and said "we can do better".
Sure, it has been widely reported that Bezos influenced the design of the original Kindle so it looked more like his Blackberry, but the original idea of having a 6″ E-ink screen and a keyboard?
That was probably influenced by the Librie.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Amazon would have used ebooks to disrupt the book industry at some point, but I also think that without the Librie Amazon might have taken a very different path.
The Librie was not the only ereader on the market during that era, so if it had not existed Amazon would still have been inspired by other devices – like the Rocketbook, for example. This was launched in 1999 by Nuvomedia. While it didn’t amount to much, later models based on the RocketBook were still on the market in 2004, 2005. Those devices had a 5.5″ LCD screen with a touchscreen and stylus.
If the Librie hadn’t existed, Amazon could well have decided to give the first Kindle an LCD screen. Battery life would have been terrible, but if the alternate Kindle still managed to keep all of the features then I for one would not have cared.
So folks, if you like the screen on your ereader, and if you like the weeks or months of battery life, and if you like the option of comfortably reading outside, then tonight I would raise a glass to the Sony Librie.
P.S. In case you’re interested, I missed the anniversary of the press coverage by 3 days.
The ever enigmatic Google rolled out a new update for the Play Books Android app and it has a lot of bloggers scratching their head.
The new version of the GPB app (3.1.23) reportedly doesn’t have any new features. In fact, the only change that has been identified is that readers can no longer upload PDFs from the app. They can still upload Epub from the app and they can upload both PDF and Epub via the Google Play website, but for some reason Google has disabled this one feature.
Google added the upload feature a couple weeks ago, and that’s what has everyone puzzled. Why add a feature just to remove it 11 days later?
This is just a guess, but perhaps the feature wasn’t working too well?
I haven’t tested this feature myself but I have been reading user reports. A number of people have reported that tyhey cannot upload ebooks. There was a comment left on this blog, and there also several reviews which complained about this option:
Yeah, the download–>upload–>download model is just weird. And it’s slow! I tested a book last night, and it stayed at “Processing” for hours. Okay, I admit, I tested it on a Brandon Sanderson door-stop sized book, but still…
Not able to upload my PDF file to Google Play Books even after disabling QuickOffice. Still not able to discard my PDF reader.
EPUB and PDF’S still won’t upload on mobile! Just wish it wasn’t so cumbersome to upload them. If I download them on my phone I want to add them on my phone and read right away. Still can’t upload directly from my device, even though last update says I can it doesn’t work.
Upload doesn’t work. Would’ve stopped me from using other apps, you missed out.
I would bet that the upload function is more likely to choke on large files than small files, and since Epubs average significantly smaller than PDF the latter format was probably the source of a greater volume of complaints (or error messages returned from Google’s servers). It would not surprise anyone to see PDFs that hit 50MB in size (or more), but a 50MB Epub file is still the exception (textbooks, mainly, and other enhanced ebooks).
You can find the app in Google Play. But I wouldn’t download it; there’s no need. Instead I suggest that you wait until the next update.
![kindle-wet-500x500[1]](https://the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/kindle-wet-500x5001.jpg)
![120B42C8d01_pic0007[1]](https://the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/120B42C8d01_pic00071.png)
Adobe isn’t the only company which is ![Open-Dyslexic[1]](https://the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Open-Dyslexic1.jpg)
on again off again flirtation with large screen ebook readers appears to have cooled off once more.![4218749166_a8efec4611_b[1]](https://the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/4218749166_a8efec4611_b1.jpg)
![kindle_640[1]](https://the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/kindle_6401.jpg)
