E-ink has managed to be the most exciting and biggest letdown at SID Display Week this year.

They’ve just unveiled a new screen tech that promises to offer the sharp color that the Triton 2 color E-ink lacks in no less than 3 colors, but unfortunately it is also limited to exactly 3 colors.

The Spectra 3 Color Display is the second new shelf label tech that E-ink is showing off this year. It’s based in part on Sipix screen tech that E-ink bought last year, a detail which the following chart made clear and which was confirmed by E-ink’s reps.

This is E-ink’s first practical example of a screen that uses more than simply black and white: it adds red to the mix. The screens I saw really were as red as the image at right, but sadly that is the only shade of red that this screen can show.

The downside to the Spectra screen tech (and the reason it’s only being offered as a shelf label) is that this screen can only show black, white, or red.

But what this screen tech cannot do is show pink, gray, or any shade in between. Spectra is no more and no less than a 3 color display, in much the same way that a Pearl E-ink screen is a 16 color display (16 shades of black, white, and gray).

Update: I’ve just come across an animated GIF that shows the red, black, and white ink capsules in action:

While I’m sure that E-ink would like to develop a variation on this screen tech that could be used for ereaders, they were not willing to even guess when that might happen. But they did say that it will be available as a shelf label later this year with screen sizes measuring from 2″ to 6″.

So when you see this video, don’t get too excited over the fact that this 6″ screen has a resolution of 1024×758:

When it comes to business models, Stephen King is no stranger to experimentation.

Back in 2000, long before the Kindle brought the digital book market to life, Stephen King published one of his novels as an online serial. In 2009 he published one of his stories as a Kindle exclusive, and earlier this year he released an essay as a Kindle Single.

So when I read this morning that King was only going to allow a print edition of his latest novel, the only detail that surprised me was his explanation.

The next Stephen King novel, Joyland, is about to hit store shelves. The book is a murder mystery set in a Southern theme park in the 1970s, and according to the press coverage this book will only be available in paper (apparently at the request of the author).

"I have no plans for a digital version," King told the WSJ. "Maybe at some point, but in the meantime, let people stir their sticks and go to an actual bookstore rather than a digital one."

This is an interesting idea, isn’t it? It seems that King wants to support real bookstores, so he has decided to refuse to support digital stores. That’s why he’s not going to allow even the paper copy of the novel to be sold online.

No, wait, Joyland is available for pre-order on Amazon.com and elsewhere. (And as pidgeon92 reminded me, even the Audible audiobook is up for pre-order.) It’s just the ebook edition that cannot be bought. Apparently Amazon selling the paper book at a steep discount isn’t a threat to physical bookstores.

If it sound strange to you that King is blocking the ebook while still allowing Amazon to sell the paper book, you’re not alone. When I reported on this story last year I was under the impression that King didn’t like the ebook edition because he wasn’t a fan of ebooks (for this book, at least). In fact, he made a statement to that effect in the press release.

I thought his reasons would be similar to that of Audrey Niffenegger, the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. She is opposed to ebooks on aesthetic grounds and because she is concerned about conservation:

I am not opposed to the existence of e-books; I know lots of people are wildly enthusiastic about them. But I have spent my life working with books as an art form and I am devoted to physical books. E-books in their current incarnations are still imperfect and they threaten the arts of book design and typography. As a book conservator I am also nervous about the digitization of books: will they be readable one hundred years from now? Or will thousands of books simply vanish as platforms and programs change?

Now it seems this is just a misguided attempt to help physical bookstores. Sadly, this is probably going to fail at its intended goal, but at least it will test whether piracy is useful as a promotional tool.

JK Rowling was the first to test the idea with the Harry Potter series. The ebook editions weren’t released until years after the series had ended, and there is little sign that she was negatively affected by piracy.

I don’t think piracy will affect sales of King’s new novel, but we’ll have to wait and see.

image by robinrkc

Update: Yahoo issued a press release Monday morning that confirmed the news They promise not to screw it up:

Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.

With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of the fastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent on site each month.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer seems to have decided that the best way to revive that firm’s flagging prospects is by buying up smaller startups. The latest company to feel Yahoo’s half-nelson affectionate embrace is the blogging service Tumblr. According to the WSJ, Yahoo’s board has approved the acquisition:

Yahoo’s board has approved a deal to acquire blogging startup Tumblr, people familiar with the matter said Sunday.

Yahoo has agreed to pay $1.1 billion in cash for the company, one of the people said. Tumblr would continue to operate largely as an independent business, the people said.

Before you read too much into this, it’s worth noting that none of the coverage includes a confirmation from Tumblr, nor has Tumblr mentioned the deal on their staff blog. Also, this is all based on unnamed sources who talked to the WSJ, so there’s no real evidence that the offer to buy Tumblr has been approved or even formulated.

And even if this offer is real, I’m not so sure that Tumblr will take Yahoo up on it. The userbase is uniformly hostile to the idea,  and that means that selling out to Yahoo could cause the service to self-destruct.

But the deal could still happen. Tumblr is beginning to look worried about the lack of revenue, and this deal would resolve that issue – in the short term, at least. But based on how Yahoo has cared for Flickr and Delicious, I don’t have high hopes for Tumblr’s long term prospects. Both of those sites are like Tumblr in that they are driven by user-generated content, but both have been neglected by Yahoo (here, here). Many expect Tumblr to suffer the same fate.

A new news reader has just come across my desk, and based on the few minutes which I could get it to work I think this could be a serious alternative to Google Reader.

CommaFeed is a free news reader service that is strictly browser based at the moment. As you can see from the following screenshot, it offers a clean and minimalist alternative to the more colorful Feedly.

Or at least it is supposed to offer a cleaner alternative to Feedly; I can’t get it to work with any consistency.

One of the nicer features of CommaFeed is that it will let you integrate your Google Reader account, which I did. Unfortunately, the service wasn’t really intended to work with an account that follows over 2k RSS feeds, and I keep managing to break it. But this is probably a problem that is unique to me, so the service is probably worth a look.

Here’s what the developer had to say:

When Google announced Reader shutdown, I started to work on a clone. It is now available. It’s simple, bloat-free, and it’s open-source. Say hello to CommaFeed.

CommaFeed currently has around 1,000 users (so said the developer in a tweet this morning), so this service probably isn’t a serious threat to Feedly with its millions upon millions of users. But this could be still be a good alternative for someone.

You can try it on the website, and if it fits your needs there are Firefox and Chrome plugins. CommaFeed is also open-source, so running your own version is also a possibility.

Please let me know what you think.

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Amazon has long touted the online book community Shelfari as a site where members can assemble virtual bookshelves, contribute details, and generally be bookish. While this is all true, Amazon is also hiding a number of secrets on the site.

Earlier this week I learned that at least one of Shelfari’s members isn’t a person; it’s collection of computer programs and it has been quietly adding book details for some years now. But more importantly, that collection of computer programs is now adding details to ebooks because those ebooks are selling well in the Kindle Store.

Tell me, have you spent time on Shelfari? Members of that site probably already know this, but it was only this week that I learned that Shelfari will let you see the activity of active users. You can see the ebooks they have on their virtual bookshelves, comments, and you can even see the data that they have added to book descriptions.

Take this member, for example. The user X-Ray/Shelfari is credited with adding an incredible amount of information to various book descriptions, including:

• 900 thousand character names,
• 700 thousand location/settings,
• 491 thousand first sentences, and
• 4.8 million author and contributor entries.

And that’s just a tithe of what X-Ray has been doing.

Now, some might say that all this data was added by Shelfari employees, and that is true for some details, yes. The book summaries might have been written by a person, and I can certainly detect the presence of a real person signing off on some edits, but a lot of the edits were generated automatically. There’s the 2.7 million edits where duplicate book pages were combined, or the 3.3 million changes to the Dewey Decimal classifications of various books. While these edits might need the approval of a real person, it is a near certainty that they were suggested automatically.

And those aren’t the only book details that are added automatically.

I was tipped to this story by an author I know, Carmen Webster Buxton. She is a member of Shelfari, and a couple days ago she got an email notification that several dozen character details had been added to the listing of one of her books (scroll down). The details added to her book were all character names, without any other info or explanation, and they were all added in a single clump by the user X-Ray.

Now, Shelfari has been automatically adding details like this since at least 2010, so at first glance today’s news isn’t much in the way of news. But have you considered why this ebook was X-Rayed?

Carmen thinks, and I have to say that I agree, that this particular book was X-Rayed by Shelfari (that’s what we’re calling it) because it was seeing a fair amount of activity in the Kindle Store. Karen tells me that The Sixth Discipline has been downloaded 14 thousand times in May alone, and we are pretty sure that is what triggered the X-Ray.

Amazon is now using the sales data from the Kindle Store to select which KDP titles are X-Rayed by Shelfari. The Kindle Store is also lending a copy of the ebook so it can be X-Rayed, and the resulting data is then fed back into the Kindle Store so it can be used in the X-Ray feature which Amazon launched in late 2011 (that is what happened with Carmen’s book). This is now a closed loop whose only outside influences are sales stats from the Kindle Store.

There is a synergy here that is both obvious and elegant once it is explained, but it’s also an idea that only Amazon thought to implement. And that, in case you were wondering, is why they are winning the ebook market.

If you are an author who is selling ebooks through KDP, it might be a good idea to check to see if your more successful titles have been X-Rayed by Shelfari. There’s a good chance this has been going on for a while now, and you might want to check to make sure it didn’t make a mistake.

Has anyone encountered this X-Rayed by Shelfari feature?

The venerable weekly political magazine The Nation has just released the first ebook in their new publishing imprint.

State of the Union, Nation Essays features the selected essays of the late Gore Vidal. This essayist wrote regularly for The Nation over a span of nearly 5 decades, and in the words of The Nation this collection "exemplifies his critical vision, from provocative pieces like Some Jews and the Gays to the famous Requiem for the American Empire.”

The ebook is available now for Kindle, iBooks, and in other ebookstores. It costs $10, and is likely a sign that The Nation is planning to adopt a distinctly different pricing policy from other media organizations that have ventured into ebooks.

According to the press release, the eBookNation imprint is going to include both newly published titles by current writers as well as collections of essays and articles from The Nation's Digital Archive, a vast catalog of nearly 150 year’s worth of the leading commentaries on progressive politics and culture.

The next title to be published will draw from the essays of the columnist and political commentator Molly Ivins.

eBookNation is also going to be used to promote previously published ebooks by The Nation’s current writers.The website currently mentions a dozen titles, including the recently released The Art of Controversy by Victor Navasky, NixonLand, and The Mind-Body Problem: Poems by Katha Pollitt.

eBookNation

If you have ever doubted whether agency pricing resulted in an increase in ebook prices, I have a chart that should interest you.

The US Dept of Justice filed new docs this week in their case against Apple and its 5 co-conspirators. The filing is titled Plaintiff’s Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, and this 103 page PDF lays out the arguments that the DOJ plans to make should this case go to trial.

The filing includes details on how the DOJ believes the conspiracy came about, and it includes emails that the various publishers sent to each other as well as other evidence.

Mixed in with the dry legal arguments were a number of charts which were created by Richard Gilbert. He’s the Emeritus Professor of Economics at Berkeley University, and his charts show how the average price of ebooks increased when the 5 publishers adopted agency pricing.

The above chart is drawn just from Amazon, but since the prices of the agency ebooks were the same across the market that is not so important. But it is still worth noting that the average ebook price for Random House and the non-majors probably does not reflect the pricing at other ebookstores; those 2 lines reflect wholesale pricing and not agency.

Still, the chart shows a steep increase, does it not? There is a table later in the filing that shows that ebook prices at B&N similarly increased as a result of agency.

According to the filing, here is how the data was generated:

To measure the change in price attributable to the shift to agency, Professor Gilbert

calculated the weighted average price of all Publisher Defendants’ titles in a one-week period shortly before, and another one-week period shortly after, the effective date of the Apple Agency Agreements. Measuring the difference between the two periods, he found that prices increased by 18.6% at Amazon and by 19.9% at Barnes & Noble in the weeks following the move to agency.

The data in the above charts comes as no surprise to anyone who was buying ebooks at the time, but it does also stand as a reminder just how customer-unfriendly the Agency eBook Model really was.

PDF

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The Chinese gadget maker Onyx might not have a major market share but they do have a number of innovative engineers. I have just come across a month-old mention of Onyx’s newest ereaders, and they are a sight to behold.

Onyx is about to release not one but two new ereaders, and they both run Android. According to the product page, one even has a 4G chip built in.

I don’t have any solid info on when these devices will hit the market or how much they will cost, but I can share the specs.

The Boox R65 is running Android 2.3 on a 1GHz CPU. It also has 256MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, a microSD card slot, and Wifi. The 6″ screen has a resolution of 1024×758 as well as a frontlight and IR touchscreen.

This ereader supports a broad range of formats, including PDF, Epub, FB2, txt, and more. According to the specs it will support TTS, and it can also play MP3 and WAV files.

Onyx hasn’t released any specs on the battery life, but I do know that this tablet weighs in at 248g, which is about 50g less than the Kindle Paperwhite. There’s also no information on whether this tablet will ship with Google Play, but it will be an open device. As we saw in the video I posted a little while ago, Onyx plans to offer this as an Android tablet and that means you will be able to install your own apps.

I don’t have much info on the Boox C65, but I would expect that this tablet will also be an open device. As you can see, it looks quite different from the R65, but it has the same CPU, screen, frontlight, and general features as the R65. It too is running Android 2.3.

But instead of an IR touchscreen, the C65 has a capacitive touchscreen. And assuming the specs aren’t in error, the C65 also has 4G chip inside (in addition to the Wifi).

To be honest, I’m not sure whether we can trust that detail. The listing for this ereader also shows that it weighs under 200g, or less than the R65. I would think that the addition of a 4G chip would also require a larger battery. Sure, the 4G would be turned off most of the time, but a bigger battery would still be a good idea.

Update: A reader has found a second set of specs that shows that the r65 has Wifi. There’s no mention of 4G connectivity. Thanks, Cookie.

But we can set aside the question of whether this tablet has 4G because there is a bigger issue here. Both of these tablets run Android 2.3. That is a woefully out of date version of Android, and it will limit what can be done with these tablets. A number of apps already require a newer version of Android in order to use all the features and that situation is going to become even more common as years go by.

If you are thinking about getting one of these tablets and using it for a year or more, you’re probably going to want a newer version of Android. I would. If nothing else it would give me the option of installing the newest apps, and IMO that is the whole point of buying an open device.

Boox C65

Boox R65

For the past four months I have been saying that Amazon was in the market to buy Samsung’s screen tech company Liquavista, and today I do believe the rumors have come true.

New filings from the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce reveal that Samsung no longer owns Liquavista. As of 29 April, the new owner is listed as a faceless LLC registered out of Delaware.

That company, Haverl LLC, has no presence online or products on the market. In fact, the only noteworthy detail that I have found is that Haverl LLC leads to a holding company called CSC.

This pattern of a faceless LLC leading to a holding company should be familiar; it’s the same trick that Amazon used to hide their FCC filings last year.

Update: Amazon has confirmed the news:

We are always looking for new technologies we may be able to incorporate into our products over the long term. The Liquavista team shares our passion for invention and is creating exciting new technologies with a lot of potential. It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the possibilities and we look forward to working with Liquavista to develop these displays.

This deal hasn’t been announced just yet by any of the parties involved, so I don’t have any info on the price paid. But past rumors indicated that Samsung was willing to sell Liquavista for under $100 million. That is probably less than Samsung has invested in the company since buying it in early 2011, but even if they took a loss this is a good deal for Samsung.

Samsung’s hottest gadgetry at the moment are their smartphones and tablets. Those devices have to stay ahead of a tight market, so they use cutting-edge high quality and high resolution screens. It’s been pretty clear for a while now that Liquavista’s electrowetting screen tech won’t be able to achieve the same high quality as the screens that Samsung is using now, so it makes sense that Samsung would want to cut their losses.

Liquavista got its start way back when battery life was still a serious issue for mobile devices.  This was one of a number of screen technologies that traded screen quality for battery life, but now that battery life is not such a serious problem for most devices there isn’t really much of a market for Liquavista’s screens.

The only market left for Liquavista screens is the ereader market, and I’m pretty sure that is why Amazon bought Liquavista.

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A Catch-22 dogs those of us who most often read e-books visually but also want to hear them when we’re exercising or driving.

The usual e-bookware doesn’t always come with or work with text to speech capabilities. Even if it does, we can’t control the aural part as closely as we’d prefer.

I myself like the Moon+ Reader Pro Android app, and I’m in love with the added-on “Amy” voice, a British-accented delight from another developer, Ivona, now an arm of Amazon. But I can’t revisit already-viewed text quickly enough while I’m hearing audio by way of the Moon-Ivona combo.

A special read-aloud program isn’t the ultimate answer, either, since I’ll then be stuck with a weak app for general use. Even based solely on text-to-speech performance, in fact, this category of software can disappoint.

Enter the Voice Dream Reader app for iPads, iPhones and iPod touches. At $10 it’s more expensive than the average app but provides enough value to justify the cost.

Winston Chen (family photo below), a Boston-area man and a middle-aged IBM alum, created VoiceDream during a year’s stay on an Arctic island where his wife was teaching. Voice Dream is not a full solution to the above dilemma. But it comes enticingly close, letting me e-mail notes and snippets and enjoy some other important features of a full-strength reading app for general use—while at the same time giving me more precise control over the spoken text than other TTS alternatives do in the iOS world. Significantly, more book-like paging is on the way as an alternative to the existing scrolling.

A list of Voice Dream’s glories is here. The app even includes its own Web browser, as well as the ability to find and download Project Gutenberg books with minimal fuss, and Chen tells me he’s open to working with the Digital Public Library of America by way of an API, which could mean similar capabilities. Voice Dream even hooks into Dropbox’s search feature. And print-impaired people using Bookshare can also benefit from integration.

The list of positives goes on and on. I still pang for the charming “Amy” to show up in Voice Dream despite her Amazon connection and the risk that the company’s monopolistic tendencies will overcome a genuine chance to earn goodwill. (Hey, Bezos! You can do the right thing.) But meanwhile, VD—there, I said it; sorry!—offers a built-in Acapella speech engine and a free “Heather,” an American-accented voice. You can still hear the robot in “Heather,” but she is almost as good as “Amy” (herself not quite 100 percent human-sounding). At least 60 voices in 20 languages are available for a few dollars each: “English, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Czech, Catalan, Polish, Turkish, Greek, and Arabic.” More languages and other major enhancements for Voice Dream, as both a visual and audio reader, are on the way, including a mode to enjoy books one page at a time rather than scrolling.

Already Voice Dream is living up to its name for members of the accessibility community, in addition to those without disabilities.

Not everyone likes everything in the app, to go by the reviews of the paid version in the Apple app store, even if the average rating is a respectable four-star plus. Still, compared to other iOS apps that allow aural reading from a wide variety of books, this one shines. vBookz EPub and VBookz PDF, for example, as far as I can determine, will not let you take notes, and Blio won’t allow you to export your notes to email, your printer, or other destinations, as Voice Dream does.

Mind you, the other products are far from losers; Blio offers multimedia capabilities, for example. But if you especially value accessibility mixed with annotation- and sharing-related features—“musts” for truly superior software in such areas as the upper grades in K-12—then Voice Dream is the champ. vBookz and Blio can’t seamlessly pick up items for reading from Instapaper or the Web (the screenshot shows the Voice Dream library filtered to display only Instapaper items—double-click for a better view). What’s more, those rivals lack Voice Dream’s rich selection of dozens of optional voices, selling for just a few bucks a throw.

Furthermore, Voice Dream’s promo says it can read ePub, PDF (though some complain it isn’t true to the appearance of source PDF—which would be a nice option, if Chen could offer it, even if it meant that TTS wouldn’t work while you were in that mode), Word, RTF, Apple Page, PowerPoint, .txt, and HTML.

Given Voice Dream’s obvious merits for nonDRMed books such as public domain titles, librarians and educators should not just try the app (a mere $5 for institutions buying 20 copies or more, and no cost for a demo with very limited read-aloud capabilities) but also provide Chen with detailed  feedback. No, I haven’t any financial ties with the company, direct or indirect, and if I run across an alternative better than Chen’s, I’ll talk it up. I’m just eager to see a good and socially useful product succeed.

Chen estimates that 30 percent of the app’s users are blind, 50 percent suffer from dyslexia or attention deficit disorders and the like, and 20 percent lack any print-related disabilities. I myself suffer from a minor disability, my difficulty seeing light-weight fonts against a white background; and I resent the persistent indifference of Amazon and many other hardware and software vendors to needs of people with similar challenges. Voice Dream to the rescue, at least for nonDRMed texts read on iOS devices!

Selections within Voice Dream’s rich assortment of fonts should please not only the contrast-challenged but also a much larger group, the millions with dyslexia, in the United States and elsewhere. As for those with attention issues, a focused reading mode—shown here—displays just a small amount of text at a time for greater concentration.

Of more importance for me, Voice Dream provides excellent control over both the written and spoken versions of the text. Want to revisit a previous paragraph on your screen without interrupting the audio reading? Voice Dream makes this a snap in either the full page mode or the the focused reading one, and it moves quickly even within long books. In other words, this app excels for people with dyslexia and others whose enjoyment and comprehension of books could benefit from simultaneous visual and audio presentation of text. The yellow in the above screen shot jumps from spoken word to spoken word, so users can associate the actual texts with the spoken sounds. If you are not disabled in the least but want to read Henry James closely, Voice Dream could still be of interest.

An Email Q & A with Winston Chen (edited)

Q. Am I missing something, or is there no way to go into a paging rather than scrolling mode?

A. I’m almost finished with this new feature, but still working on perfecting it. It’ll work the same as scrolling, except it stops at page boundaries. I really want to avoid doing the left-right page flipping that most book readers want to emulate.

Q. What about the ability to pick up bookmarks and notes and highlights from machine to machine, even across platforms? Via Dropbox you could implement that capability if it isn’t there already. Perhaps if there are no legal issues, you could even make the syncing compatible with that of a great Android app, Moon Reader.

A. Synching across devices is easily the most requested feature. The problem is that Apple iCloud synching for the kind of database I used is currently unreliable for bi-directionary synchronization. Until Apple fixes it—which I’m hoping for [with] iOS 7—turning this feature on would be a bad idea.

Q. I truly truly loathe DRM but am wondering if you could arrange with Adobe and/or OverDrive and other library vendors for VoiceDream to be usable with library books. OverDrive, of course, is the main show.

A. I have not reached out to Adobe yet, but I plan to.

Q. How many people are now using VoiceDream?

A. Voice Dream now has 20,000 customers for the paid app and 110,000 customers for the free app.

Q. Will you be expanding to platforms beyond iOS? Which ones? When?

A. The next platform is probably Android. But I haven’t committed to it.

Q. What would you do if Amazon dangled a nice offer in front of you? I was among the first to discover Stanza, and I pounded the table for it when I owned TeleRead—only to see it vanish down Amazon’s maw. Can you assure us that you won’t sell your company, at least in the next five years? And not to Amazon? More recently I talked up Ivona on the LibraryCity site and elsewhere, and then sure enough…

A. I’m aware of Stanza, which I still use despite all. I don’t have any wish to sell the company. This company gives me such fulfillment that a lump of cash cannot fill. My main market and future focus remains building tools for people with learning disabilities, primarily for education. I have no intention to be a general purpose eBook reader, even though some people use my app that way. [Oh, but Voice Dream is so close now to being an acceptable GP reader, especially with paging on the way! – D.R.]

Q. Are there any personal reasons for your interest in Voice Dream? Do you have any reading-related disabilities? Anyone in your family?

A. I knew nothing about reading disabilities until after the first release of the app was out. But I quickly moved the product in that direction when I realized that for these people TTS is not just a nice-to-have but a life-changing tool. Then, it was a matter of keeping close to my customers, listening to customers, and making my product better for my customers.

Q. Is it possible that angels should take more risks on one-person app shops like yours, given your success? Or could it be that the real reason for your success is that you were more interested in serving humanity than in making a buck?

A. Since I started working on this app, I couldn’t get away from it. I believe a good profession needs to (1) produce decent income, (2) have enjoyable day-to-day work, and (3) makes a positive impact on society. I’ve always believed that the best jobs in the world have all three and have them in balance. That pretty much sums up my vision for Voice Dream.

I’m working on some very exciting features for the next release which should be out in a few weeks:

-Personal Pronunciation Dictionary

-Adjust default speech rate, pitch and volume for each voice

-Speech rate in the voice settings now overrides the default speech rate for the voice used.

-More navigation options: rewind or fast forward by sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, highlights, bookmarks, 15, 30, and 60 seconds.

-Footer indicate page number, percentage, chapter name, and current navigation unit for rewind and fast forward.

-Additional voices: Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

-Sort by Add Date, Title, Author and Size for articles in the Home screen

-Option to scroll page by page in addition to free scrolling

-Two finger double-tap to play/pause

More on the future of Voice Dream

I asked Chen if he would also add the ability to adjust line-spacing, a more-than-just vexing omission from the current Kindle Fires. No luck. In fact, he says I’m the first to request it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised since so many users of text to speech programs have low expectations. Anyone else care to speak up, maybe in the comments area of this post? Fortunately Voice Dream’s present line-spacing is close to optimal for me. But I truly, truly believe that Voice Dream fans should have that choice.

Another possibility for Voice Dream, as I see it, might be additions within the existing “Advanced settings” menu leading to all kinds of customizations without confusing novices, who could simply ignore them. Chen says that might end up on his list.

Returning the topic to libraries, I asked Chen if he would sell Voice Dream to the DPLA, the innovative Douglas County library system in Colorado, or another noncommercial library organization to distribute to users, maybe even as FLOSS, short for free and open-source software. He is willing to strike library deals, but with a limitation—the product could only be used with content from the respective library collections involved. Same for deals involving publishers’ collections. Otherwise, he says, that would be the same as selling the company, which, in the interest of control over the app, he doesn’t want to do. Too bad. Whatever Chen has in mind, it is not genuine FLOSS. I myself could envision talented developers like Chen getting large up-front payments for their products, if they beta-tested well, and then additional money could come later on, with the understanding that the developers would hang around to develop new features and oversee user support. Fees might also reach the developers as the user base grew. The advantage of a pure FLOSS approach instead is the possibility of tapping a larger pool of talent, with the main developer still influencing the evolution of the product.

At least, thanks partly to the existence of the DPLA—extremely API-oriented—companies like Voice Dream will have a head start in the library world even if they market primarily to individuals rather than libraries directly, and I’d hope that Douglas County’s e-book-tech initiative and any others would take the same open approach. The proprietary DRM issue will remain for public libraries, so that’s still a complication. But as noted, Chen is trying to overcome it. In the end, perhaps one scenario would be for libraries to evaluate Voice Dream and other products and promote the acceptable ones on their sites and take small cuts. Maybe they’d be sold under different brand names from the usual offerings and include library-related optimizations. Just a few thoughts. Who knows how this will shake out.

Some good news is that a free “Lite” version of Voice Support is available from the Apple app store and includes everything in the paid version but the ability beyond more than a few hundred characters at a time. So you don’t even have to gamble $10 for at a meaningful look at Chen’s baby in action. If you value accessibility blended with powerful sharing and annotative capabilities, go for it and share your own reactions with us.

An update written around 7 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, May 11—mostly on Voice Dream’s potential for education

In the “first edition” of this post, I asked readers for any corrections. Winston Chen kindly pointed out two typos, and he also give me his own thoughts on the quality of the voices.

“Bridget is shockingly good and in my view just as good as Amy from Ivona. Paul is the best male American voice from any TTS company. They’re my best-selling voices. And, to my knowledge, no other mobile TTS reader offers NeoSpeech voices. They’re the same voices used in Kurzweil for $1,500 a seat.” I bought “Paul” and will still “voice” my preference for “Amy” over him and the already-purchased “Bridget,” but they’re both excellent by today’s standards of TTS for consumers, and this is strictly subjective anyway.

Hello, TeleRead and LibraryCity visitors—your own thoughts on the inflection, general pleasantness, and other traits of the various voices?

About the review in general, Chen said: “I really appreciate your deep insights, some of which other reviewers failed to pick up. For example, how I handled the interaction between the visual and the auditory. It took me a long time to work out the complex logic for a satisfactory solution. In other words, the feeling of fluidity was actually very hard to achieve. With the new release, it’ll get even better. For example, it’ll save visual and speech locations independently.”

My Sister The Retired Teacher, meanwhile, weighed in with her own take when I took my iPad with me to lunch at her house. Dorothy taught special-education kids among others during her many years in the classroom, and, in fact, she holds a Masters degree in this field. She liked Chen’s efforts. Read-aloud books are hardly new, but Dorothy appreciated Voice Dream’s ability to work with any title in the common formats it supports, not just with a particular book or collection.

Dorothy offered her own suggestions for Voice Dream. First, since the needs of children and other readers vary, users should be able to choose between (1) just words being identified in distinctive colors when spoken, (2) lines being marked instead, and (3) a mix of the two other modes, Voice Dream’s current approach. She felt that some readers with special needs might actually find the word-level identification to be too much of a distraction. Anyone else’s thoughts on this?.

Second, Dorothy wanted default colors used for identification of spoken words to be closer together and for the app to avoid the bright yellow, since stark color clashes might upset some children with attention challenges. While readers can adjust colors, she thinks that a quieter approach would be better to start out with. Here again, I’d welcome others’ reactions. Perhaps the solution would be a choice of themes—canned color combos for different kinds of readers—even if I myself very much like Voice Dream’s current default mix.

Third, after trying out Voice Dream’s dictionary, Dorothy also called for the ability to increase the size of the font with young children’s needs in mind. No problem as a future change, I’d hope.

Fourth, Dorothy called for continuous scrolling rather than Voice Dream’s jumping ahead by the page. She felt that would be less jarring to young reader-listeners.

And fifth, she was concerned that even with different voices used, Voice Dream sometimes pronounced two words as one.

Inaccurate aural spacing does not bother me too much as a reader-listener if it isn’t too common and too serious; but people learn to read in part by listening and processing the information not just word by word but also syllable by syllable. So if Voice Dream and its voices and other TTS products can improve in that respect, it’ll increase their value to young children. Yes, even Ivona’s Amy has her own pause-related quirks. At the same time, parents should remember that the most accurate TTS voices in standard U.S. or U.K. English or other varieties still can’t replace the warmth and interaction of old-fashioned reading to a daughter or son. Parents, not just teachers, ideally will discuss stories with young children and ask questions on such matters as the motives and actions of characters within the material. I’m confident Chen would agree with this standard tenet of early-childhood education.

Despite the concerns above, I see Voice Dream as an incredibly useful way to impart information—on a variety of subjects—to older children who need it or who, like me, simply enjoy a book while exercising.

Encourage text reading constantly? Help students overcome text-related learning disabilities? Yes! But should all other learning cease until students are perfect readers? Some may never be and could more or less live as if in the Jules Verne novel where the telephone-delivered news replaced printed newspapers. I hate the possibilities of In the Year 2889, one reason I’m grumpy when librarians are agnostic about the value of text vs. other media, given the efficiencies of words on paper or on the screen. Not always, but so often, they’re the best conveyors of facts and emotions. But I’m also a realist about individuals and see Voice Dream-style programs as an essential way for e-libraries to better serve millions of the print-impaired and help keep books alive, however people enjoy them. The current DPLA has given some attention to presentation issues, but not nearly enough, considering all the complexities here, one reason why I favor intertwined but separate public and academic systems online. The former would care more about presentation issues for the masses, including K-12 students and people in the lower socio-economic groups, two frequently overlapping categories, alas. Besides, the separate organizations could still share a common technical services organization in close touch with leading researchers on and off the campus.

Stay tuned. I’ll give Winston Chen a chance to reply to Dorothy and me. Meanwhile a big thanks to both of them, especially since the education-related issues raised here about text to speech are generic, not just limited to Voice Dream.

Close to 9 p.m.: A quick response from Chen to Dorothy’s reactions

“I just read through your update. Your sister’s suggestions are spot-on. I already added the ability to disable word highlighting and line highlighting, so there’ll be four modes: no highlighting, word highlighting only, line highlighting only, and both word and line highlighting. While she has a point about the word highlight color being too strong, I’m not going to tamper with those defaults. That has a way of infuriating customers like nothing else.”

This Creative Commons licensed post originally appeared on LibraryCity.org.

Sony has been researching flexible E-ink screens for the past several years, and today we finally learned why. They’ve just unveiled a behemoth of a writing slate, and they plan to bring it to market this year.

Sony hasn’t revealed all the details on this unnamed ereader, but I do know that it is a prototype. It’s equipped with a flexible A4 sized screen just like the ones that Sony teased in years past (more details at the end of the post). The screen measures 13.3″, and has a resolution of 1600×1200. The writing slate also comes with 4GB of storage, a microSD card slot, Wifi, and a 3 week battery life.

This is going to be strictly a writing tablet, and we can tell that from the touchscreen.  The press release describes it as an electromagnetic induction panel, and assuming that my technical source is correct,  this touchscreen is not fingertip friendly. It will only work with the included pen, and that means that most stylus(es) are out as well.

Update: But apparently this tablet also has a second touchscreen component, which in the original Japanese is described as optical. That sounds like it could be the IR touchscreen from Neonode. Cool. That means that users will be able to type on the screen.

I suppose that is not such a bad idea given that users will rest their hand on the screen while writing, but it is a little disappointing that we won’t be able to type on the screen or conveniently browse the web.

According to the press release, the supported file formats include PDF, PDF, and more PDF. No, your eyes do not deceive you; this slate does not support Epub or any other  format. It’s not clear why Sony chose to limit the support so, but this writing slate doesn’t even support basic office formats like Word, powerpoint, or excel (nor their open source equivalents).

That’s going to limit the usefulness of this slate, and given that it will likely have a high price when it ships the lack of support could kill user demand.

This slate is going to go through field trials at several Japanese universities later this year. Sony expects to release it commercially by the end of the 2013 fiscal year. That would seem to be around the beginning of May 2014 (based on recent press reports).

The Screen

I have to say that I was surprised to see the news today. Sony has been teasing us with a flexible E-ink screen for at least 3 years now,and I never expected to actually see a prototype much less one that is going to go into field trials.

Sony has shown off early prototypes of the 13.3″ screen several times, and they even teased us with a flexible color E-ink screen at one point:

They’ve never explained why they were working on the screen, and in fact Sony’s research confused many in the screen tech industry. They could not see a reason why Sony continued to sink money into the project, but more importantly it seemed that Sony didn’t know why they were investing in the research.

I guess that impression was wrong.

source

 A new digital magazine publishing service debuted today with the release of the first issue of The Loop magazine.

TypeEngine promises to make it easier to publish digital magazines for the iPad and iPhone. The service was founded by Jamie Smyth, the CEO of The Smyth Group, along with designer Daniel Genser.

For a low monthly fee, TypeEngine can be used to publish weekly, bimonthly, or monthly issues of a digital magazine. This service supplies all the functions needed to publish a The Magazine type of digital magazine in iTunes, including everything from creating an issue, adding media, and previewing an issue.

I first learned about TypeEngine a couple months ago, and I’ve been keeping my eye on it ever since. It’s my bet that this service could have as great of an affect on digital magazine publishing as WordPress did on blogs and web content.

Subcompact publishing has been a hot idea ever since The Magazine launched last October, with a half dozen different publications launching to cover a diverse number of topics. All those digital magazines had very little in common, but one detail they did share was that the creators had to sweat both the technical details of building an app and distributing content as well as creating and editing content worth paying for.

TypeEngine is designed to remove one of the headaches, enabling publishers to devote their entire attention to the content. That is going to put publishing a digital magazine within reach of talented writers with all levels of technical skills.

The debut title on TypeEngine was created by Jim Dalrymple, a veteran tech blogger and publisher of the leading Apple tech blog The Loop. The magazine will be run as a complement to the blog with exclusive content. It will be published on a bimonthly schedule with a subscription of $1.99. The first issue will contain articles by 6 writers and is available now in iTunes.

source

The term "Spotify for eBooks" for ebooks has been tossed around a lot in the past couple years, with startups like Afictionado, Oyster, and Ligimi briefly claiming the monicker, but so far there has been exactly one startup that has come even close to deserving the label.

The Madrid-based 24symbols is back in the news today with the announcement of a new distribution agreement.

They’ve just signed a deal with Zed, a leading mobile content distributor. Zed will be working with 24symbols to bring its subscription-based content to Zed’s nearly 200 telecom partners around the world.

The distributor is also making a capital investment in 24symbols, providing a significant fund for expansion as well as validating the business model. Zed is investing an unnamed sum in 24symbols in exchange for a 32% interest in the startup.

24symbols has spent much of its first couple years focused on the Spanish language market, but in the past 6 months they have expanded their focus and added more content in English and other languages. The service now has over 175,000 registered users who are reading content from 120+ publishers. 24symbols offers around 15,000 titles, largely in English and Spanish, which can be read in the web browser or in apps for Android, the iPad, and iPhone. Subscription starts at 5 euros a month, and there is free content that you can try before subscribing.

• Google Play
• iTunes

When Techcrunch revealed last night that MS was trying to buy Nook Media, one key detail they mentioned was that Nook Media would get out of ereaders soon and eventually get out of hardware entirely.

I think we could be seeing the second (yes, second) sign of that plan coming to pass. A number of retail chains have recently either put the Nook Touch on clearance or stopped carrying it entirely, and the Nook Glow has similarly vanished from their websites.

The list price on the Nook Touch is $80, and that is in fact what Barnes & Noble is still charging for this 2-year-old ereader. But not all retailers are charging full price.

Last night a reader tipped me to a sale that Radio Shack is having right now (thanks, Fbone). This retailer has marked the Nook Touch down to $20. RS appears to be out of stock in their warehouses, so this offer is good only in stores. But I have confirmed that the NT can still be found in a limited number of stores.

That tip inspired me to check other retailers, and while the clearance sales appear to be limited, Radio Shack isn’t the only one with the Nook Touch on sale. Sears is reportedly selling off their remaining Nook Touch for $30. Multiple reports have indicated that the price was reduced last week in an unannounced sale. I have not been able to confirm this myself but there are reports that the lower price was charged in at least 4 different locations.

And that’s not all. I checked other retailers and discovered that Walmart is selling the Nook Touch for $60, a 25% markdown from the regular retail. That’s not a clearance, no, but it is an aggressive sale price for a gadget with a razor-thin profit margin.

I have also learned that Office Max seems to have stopped carrying the Nook Touch entirely. This office supply chain still carries the newer Nook HD and Nook HD+, both of which can be bought from the website. But they don’t carry the Nook Touch, and I’m not sure that is a coincidence.

And in case you were wondering, none of those 4 retailers showed any sign of carrying the Nook Glow. I’m not sure if that means they already sold out, but that would certainly be my guess.

I don’t really have much in the way of compelling proof, and it is entirely possible that these chains might simply have decided to stop carrying this model. But if this were a normal stock decision I would have expected the unsold stock to be returned to Nook Media. That is what happened in the Spring of 2012, or so B&N reported in one of their quarterly statements.

Instead the unsold stock is being dumped in the clearance bin, and that suggests that Nook Media doesn’t want the hardware back. They’re not even going to try to sell off the returned stock as refurbs like B&N has done in the past.

On the one hand this should come as no surprise given the age of the Nook Touch, but on the other hand simply clearing out stock is a change from B&N’s past behavior. In the past B&N has continued to sell their older models as new units long after the devices were no longer being made. The original Nook, for example, was still available from B&N well into 2012.

P.S. The first sign that Nook Media was getting out of ereaders is actually the sale that was announced last week in the UK. All Nook hardware was on sale, with the Nook Touch marked down to a ridiculously low £29. That is almost a clearance price, wouldn’t you say?

Microsoft could be getting back into the ebook biz.

Techcrunch is reporting today that Microsoft has made an offer to buy out B&N’s controlling interest in Nook Media. According to unnamed documents, MS is willing to put up $1,000,000 to gain control of the beleaguered Nook Media.

The docs reportedly reveal that Nook Media plans to retire their current line of hardware by the end of the 2014 fiscal year and transition to a model which focuses on getting Nook apps onto partner devices and 3rd-party hardware. Obviously that also indicates the coming end of the Nook ereaders, a detail that comes as no surprise given the recent rumor that B&N passed on using the new 6.8″ E-ink screen on a Nook Glow HD.

So is this story true? I think so, but the more important question is whether B&N will take Microsoft up on their offer.

Microsoft has clearly been interested in Nook Media ever since the subsidiary was formed last year. That’s why MS put up $300 million for a minority share, so today’s news would make perfect sense.

And the price also makes sense; while some might think that it undervalues the $1.8 billion value that B&N assigned to Nook Media, I always thought that B&N had overpriced Nook Media by a significant margin. Furthermore, a billion dollars doesn’t mean the same thing to MS as it would to B&N; Microsoft has over $60 billion in cash on hand. They won’t miss a billion here or there.

But the important question here is whether B&N will take Microsoft up on the offer. I expect them to do so, yes.

This is the kind of deal that B&N should have made this time last year, but they didn’t. B&N had just come off a not entirely satisfactory holiday season which made them decide to spin off Nook Media, but instead of selling off the Nook B&N instead took a piecemeal investment from Microsoft.

I’m afraid that  if B&N repeats that mistake it will be the end of the Nook platform.

But I’m not too worried because that probably won’t happen. Remember a few months back when Len Riggio wanted to buy the B&N retail stores and split the company in two? He didn’t want Nook Media, just the stores, so today’s deal is almost exactly what he wants – almost.

It’s not quite the deal he wanted back then – MS is trying to buy the Nook but not the B&N College bookstores.  Those would stay with B&N (according to the rumor). Still, I expect Riggio to take Microsoft up on the offer. It’s close enough to what he wants that he’d be a fool to pass it up.