I know a handful of people who have been buying books from Amazon since the late 1990s, and today is their lucky day. Amazon has just announced a new program where past customers who had bought new paper books from Amazon will be able to buy a Kindle edition of the paper books.

The program is called Kindle Matchbook, and while it sounds a lot like iTunes Match (and similar services offered by Apple’s competitors) it doesn’t quite work the same.

Kindle Matchbook is going to be launching in October, and getting that Kindle ebook could cost you as much as $3. There’s also only a limited number of publishers signed up for the program, with around 10,000 titles available when the program goes live. But that is likely to change as more publishers sign up.

“If you logged onto your CompuServe account during the Clinton administration and bought a book like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus from Amazon, Kindle MatchBook now makes it possible for that purchase—18 years later—to be added to your Kindle library at a very low cost,” said Russ Grandinetti, VP of Kindle Content.

Amazon is promising that you’ll be able to look up past purchases in your order history (as far back as 1995) and find out if they are included in the program. After you buy buy the ebook, you’ll get access to all the same features as any other Kindle ebook owner including Whispersync, Popular Highlights, and X-Ray.

Post sale ebook bundling is a relatively new idea that is growing increasingly popular. For example. Amazon offers a similar program which bundles ebooks and audiobooks.

The University of Kentucky Press has launched a similar marketing program, and there is a Canadian startup called Bitlit that is about to launch a platform almost identical to Kindle MatchBook. It will let publishers offer their ebooks to customers either as a free or paid download, just like Amazon’s program. Bitlit has a dozen publishers signed up to join the program when it goes live, and I have been told that most will offer their ebooks as free downloads to buyers of paper books.

But as great as this sounds, Amazon still hasn’t signed up very many publishers. With only 10 thousand titles listed it’s pretty clear that most of the titles published by the Big 5 aren’t included. That’s obviously going to limit the usefulness of the program, but not for long.

I would not be surprised to if a lot of legacy publishers signed up for this program. One side effect of this program is that it will support one of the goals of Agency Model. While publishers wanted to restrain Amazon, they also wanted to increase ebook prices so ebooks wouldn’t bleed sales away from paper books.

The Kindle MatchBook program will increase the value of a paper edition at the expense of the ebook. IMO that serves the purposes of the Big 5.

Also, this program can serve as a way for publishers to generate new revenue on previous sales. Readers who had bought a book a decade ago might not be interested in paying retail for the ebook (not when they can get a used copy starting at $4) but they might pay $3 for the Kindle edition. That could be a could be a source of considerable additional windfall revenue for publishers and authors.

On the other hand, Kindle MatchBook is owned by Amazon, and in some circles that alone will generate an instant NO.  Had this program been announced by any of Amazon’s competitors it would probably have received a warmer reception.

Kindle Matchbook

 More Reading:

• BitLit Lets Book Buyers Get a Paper/Digital Bundle After Buying a Paper Book (The Digital Reader)
• Ghost in the Machine: Does Ebook Bundling Have a Future? (Publishing Perspectives)
• Is bundling ebooks with print books a good idea? (MobyLives)
• Send the University Press of Kentucky a Bookshelfie, Get a Free eBook (The Digital Reader)

The German ebook company txtr has never had much luck with hardware.

Their first ereader, the aptly named and innovative txtr Reader, never overcame production and cost issues. It kept being delayed due to production issues and by the time it was ready in late 2010 its price ($400) kept it off the market.

And now it looks like the txtr beagle has suffered a similar fate.

There’s been no official announcement, but I have just learned that txtr has updated the product page for the beagle, their 5″ smartphone accessory. It has been officially labeled "ausverkauft". Depending on which translation you use that means that the device has either been discontinued or is out of stock. Given the general lack of market success I would bet that the beagle was retired as soon as the last of the remaining stock was sold.

Update: txtr has officially denied that the beagle has been discontinued. But given that it is not available anywhere I don’t see that there is a practical difference.

This device launched last October to a lot of fan fare but unfortunately never lived up to the hype. It was pitched as a 10 euro ereader, so naturally the price and its svelte size caught a lot of attention.

Unfortunately that price came with a couple catches. This device was only going to be available as a smartphone accessory, which means that you would probably only be able to get it with a new service contract. The beagle also came with a severe hardware limitation. It simply could not function as a stand alone device; it needed the txtr Android app to convert and transfer ebooks (more details here).

The beagle had a 5″ (600×800) screen, Bluetooth, a copious amount of storage and ran on a pair of AA batteries, but what set it apart was what the beagle lacked. It didn’t have a card slot, Wifi, or a USB port. These components were left out of the design in part to lower the cost but also to restrict how the beagle could be used.

This device was intended to be a smartphone accessory, so a lot of the excess components were deemed unnecessary. The beagle was supposed to be sold via telecoms, but so far as I now that never happened. Instead txtr ended up having to sell the beagle themselves. It retailed for 59 euros, or about 20 euros less than the Kindle.

I have been told that txtr never had much success in selling the beagle, and that by mid-July they had sold fewer than 100 units (seriously). That really comes as no surprise. By the time the beagle hit the market in April 2013 it was no longer the cheapest or the lightest ereader, so consumers didn’t buy it.

AlleseBook.de

Every time I think there’s nothing new in ereaders something comes along to surprise me. The Dutch gadget maker Gembird is reportedly going to unveil their second 9.7″ ereader next week at the IFA-Berlin trade show.

The EnerGenie PP2 takes a hardware design that some readers will recognize, adds Android, and tries to convince everyone that a price between 399 and 499 euros isn’t completely nuts. It doesn’t succeed.

This ereader has a 9.7″ E-ink screen (1600 x 1200), a touchscreen (with stylus), and is running Android 2.3.4 on an 800 MHz CPU. It comes equipped with 4GB of storage, Wifi, and a microSD card slot.

As soon as I laid eyes on this device I recognized the hardware. This is the same hardware design as the Ectaco Jetbook Color, only without the color E-ink screen. That means that the EnerGenie PP2 is probably based on the Hanvon E920, and not the Hanvon C920.

Gembird is trying to position the EnerGenie PP2 as an "e-paper printer". You plug in the ereader to your PC via USB and it is automatically recognized as a USB printer. You can then "print" a document to the ereader rather than printing it on paper.

Basically Gembird is going to try to convince everyone that buying this expensive ereader is a better option than printing out paper. That’s pretty much the same marketing spiel as their first ereader, which showed up at CES 2012. That Energenie model had a docking station which looked cool, but so far as I can tell was never actually released (I cannot find it).

When I covered that earlier model in 2012 I pointed out that sending your documents to a tablet (like many of us already do) is a more cost-effective option given that you can use a tablet for more than just an ereader:

Gembird  has a great idea here, but do they really have to throw a €500 ereader into the deal? I think there would be a much better value to find a similar ability that utilizes the iPad or other existing tablets and ereaders.

In fact, there already is an option. Goodreader lets you edit PDFs on the iPad, and you can even email or print the PDF after you’ve edited it.  I’m not sure on the best way to get them to the app (email seems like a good bet), but this is still a better value.

But on the plus side, the Energenie will also let you send documents back to your PC:

BTW, while this ereader runs Android I  do not know yet whether you will be able to access the Android OS. It’s not uncommon for users to be blocked from accessing the OS on Android-based and other ereaders. But I also expect that one hacker or another will find away to unlock the OS, though given the price I’m not sure how many hardware hackers will want to buy such a limited device.

I’m not sure why anyone would want to buy it. A tablet would offer a better return, and if you are enamored of the idea of printing to your ereader then don’t forget that Amazon offers a similar ability for the Kindle platform. Even better, it doesn’t even require that you own a Kindle.

MobileRead

For the past year librarians with the Douglas County (CO) Libraries have been publishing a monthly price list which compared the retail price for an ebook with the price a library would have to pay (if they can buy the title at all).

The 12th such price list was compiled a few weeks back, and the librarians who compiled it took a moment to reflect on how the library ebook market has changed.

The short answer is that it hasn’t changed very much.

Each monthly list was generated by taking an existing best seller list (Amazon, NYTimes, USA Today, Kindle Store, etc) and then seeing which ebooks could be bought by libraries and how much each ebook would cost. The results have been fairly uniform, with libraries often having to pay 3 or 4 times what a consumer would pay for the same ebook.

For example, the July price list shows that 3 of the 17 titles weren’t available to libraries, and of the ones that were available only 2 titles were offered to libraries at a price even close to that of the consumer price. The rest were marked up 2 to 4 times the consumer price.

But over the past year things have changed slightly. Libraries can buy more of the titles on the July 2013 list than they could on the September 2012 list. Of course, the ebooks are as expensive now as they were a year ago but at least more are available to be purchased.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time then you’ve probably read one or another of my rants about the high price of library ebooks.  And as you can see from these lists (here, scroll down) it’s not just me. Libraries really are being overcharged.

And that’s not the worst of it.  While the monthly list shows you the prices, what it doesn’t tell you is that some of the titles are sold under expiring licenses (more details here). HarperCollins and Penguin, for example, have several titles on the July list which they sell to libraries at a considerable markup (2 to 3 times retail). Those titles are sold under a license that expires in a year.

I should think that you would care about this as much as me. That’s our tax dollars being wasted, and it is out communities being harmed by publishers refusing to deal fairly with libraries.

Luckily there are signs that state and local govt aren’t going to let the situation stand. There are signs that more and more governments are considering regulating the library book market and forcing publishers to deal fairly. That can’t happen soon enough, IMO.

American Libraries Magazine

image by IvanWalsh.com

The AAP has released a new StatShot report for the first 4 months of 2013 and while the news is not bad it is nevertheless frustrating.

The overall market shrank by 6% in that period, with much of the drop due to the children’s/YA segment (religious and adult segments increased slightly). Both children’s hardback and kid’s ebook market segments are still normalizing after last year’s anomalous spike in sales caused by the release of The Hunger Games movie.

The total book market dropped by 6.1% ($2 billion vs $2.13 billion), while the adult segment was up 1.3% ($1.39 billion vs $1.37 billion). The religious book segment also increased by 1.9% ($193.2 million vs $189.7 million), while the kids /YA segment dragged down the rest of the market.

Thanks to the fact that there’s no blockbuster hit this year which matched last year’s success of The Hunger Games, the kids book segment dropped by 26.8% ($417.5 million vs $570 million).

The overall ebook market remained flat for the first 4 months of this year, also largely due to a lack of a blockbuster hit. Nevertheless, adult ebooks and religious ebooks both posted modest gains in that period (12.4% and 7.9%, respectively). The only reason that the ebook market as a whole remained flat was that sales of kids ebooks dropped by 43.7%.

If you factor out the kids ebook market, then the other 2 segments average out to a 12.1% increase over last year. That’s not great but it is also not the flattening out of ebook sales that Nicholas Carr would have you believe.

And if we focused on the adult market segment alone we’ll see that the digital content (ebook & audiobook) made up 38.1% of the reported revenue in the first 4 months of 2013 vs 35% in the same period of 2012. That is not a flattening market, IMO.

Speaking of anomalous spikes in sales, the AAP is also saying that their figures are now showing the effect of the second publication of 50 Shades of Gray last April. I am not sure that claim is true for April, but sales of  that book will likely be reflected in figures for May and June.

And while we are on the topic, let me share another reason that you shouldn’t read too much into these figures.

50 Shades was immensely popular last year, with news reports from as early as February saying that it was a widely read best-seller. That title was even at the top of the Kindle Store best-seller list in March 2012 (and earlier).

Here’s the fun part: Those early sales aren’t reflected in AAP figures for the first 3 months of last year. At that time the book was still published by an Australian publisher who obviously was not an AAP member.

I bring this up to remind everyone that this data only reflects the sales of 1195 US publishers, and not the rest of the world (this includes indie pub and self-pub).

P.S. Here’s the data, for those who are interested in playing along at home. Please note the absence of specific data for April; the AAP did not share that data so any stories which mention specific figures for April are at best iffy.

Fall is rapidly approaching, and that means that Amazon is going to launch new gadgets.

I still don’t have any leaked details on whether a new Kindle is coming out soon but I can tell you that another model seems to be on the way out. Supplies of the Kindle Paperwhite, Amazon’s newest ereader, are running low.

Reports are coming in from across the web that the Wifi mode is out of stock on Amazon.com as well as Amazon.it and Amazon.es. Those websites are still selling the 3G model, so readers aren’t completely cut off, but the better selling Wifi model is no longer available.

I was first tipped to this story at the beginning of the month by a reader, who told me that the KPW Wifi was out of stock on the European websites (Thanks, aceflor!). I didn’t think it meant anything at the time, but now that Amazon.com is showing a similar shortage of Kindle Paperwhites it’s clear that I was wrong.

It looks like Amazon is letting the Kindle Paperwhite go out of stock before they launch a replacement. That’s different from past years when Amazon continued to sell older models for several weeks or months after shipping their newest ereader.

On a related note, Amazon also stopped selling the Kindle Keyboard earlier this year, also without announcing a replacement. I am bring up that older news because two points make a line, and that line is pointing at a startling possibility. What if this is a sign that Amazon isn’t going to launch new Kindles this year?

That’s not as crazy as it sounds. We don’t really know much about the number of ereaders made and sold, though the latest quarterly reports from E-ink suggest that sales aren’t as good as they used to be (also that Amazon’s E-ink screen purchases had dropped). What if Amazon is seeing a decrease in the number of people interested in buying a grayscale screen?

This speculation would fit in with the news from earlier this year that Amazon bought Liquavista, a competing screen tech company with a low power color screen. Maybe Amaozn is hoping to goose their ereader sales with a color screen, though as one reader reminds me we aren’t likely to see that ereader this year.

On the other hand, maybe Amazon simply misjudged the demand for the Kindle Paperwhite. For all we know there might be a new E-ink ereader coming from Amazon in the next few months, possibly even with an ultra-HD screen.

It is frankly too early to say for certain.

The ebook library management tool calibre has just hit a major milestone. Kovid Goyal, the lead developer, announced the official release of the 1.0 version of the app yesterday.

Calibre was initially launched in October 2006 at a time when Mr Goyal was still a university student.  It was called libprs500 at the time, and the original goal was quite modest. Kovid wanted to use his newly purchased Sony Reader PRS-500 with his preferred OS, Linux, but the ereader required software that was only available for Windows.

From those humble beginnings libprs500 quickly grew into the best open source ebook management tool anywhere. By the time I encountered it for the first time in early 2007 libprs500 already supported conversion from multiple formats and already had the basics of the ebook management tools it has today. It soon added support for more devices and ebook formats, and as the focus expanded beyond Sony’s first ereader Kovid rebranded libprs500 as calibre in mid-2008.

The last major update for this app was about a year ago, and since then contributors have added many new features like:

• A grid view of book covers
• A new, faster database backend
• Virtual Libraries
• Conversion of Microsoft Word documents
• New metadata download sources
• Full support for font embedding
• An easy to use tool to edit the Table of Contents in ebooks
• Rewritten PDF Output engine
• New tool: "Polish books" that allows you to perform various automated cleanup actions on ebooks

Calibre is now actively used by over 3.4 million readers to support an unbelievable number of ereaders and ebooks. It now works with most Android tablets and smartphones, iOS devices, and more ereaders than you can even conceive of.

Congratulations to everyone who’s been involved in the development of calibre, and of course, first and foremost congrats to Kovid.

MobileRead

Sony might not be interested in making a cutting edge ereader any more but one thing they’ve always managed to do is leak their new gadget right before they announce it.

Two years ago the PRS-T1 leaked on a Dutch retail website, last year the T2 leaked on a US website, and today the PRS-T3 leaked on a Swiss website.

A reader tipped me to the news that the Swiss retailers BuchHaus.ch and OnlineBuchladen.ch (and Spanish and Canadian retailer) may have jumped the gun (Thanks!). They’re now showing incomplete product listings for the PRS-T3 which don’t have nearly as much info on this ereader as we had on the T2 last year, but I can tell you a few details. For example, the model number is PRST3BC.CE7.

Next, the thumbnail at right is the largest image I could find on either website, so here is a photo from the leaked FCC paperwork to refresh your memory:

This ereader has a 6″ HD E-ink screen (1024×758 resolution), IR touchscreen, Wifi, and it might possibly have a frontlight:

Leichter E-Book Reader inkl. Cover mit automatischer Start/Sleep-Funktion, mit IR Touchscreen, W-LAN (802.11b/g/n), Systemvoraussetzung: 6" Bildschirmdiagonale (152.4mm), E Ink Pearls HD Touchscreen (1024 x 758, 212 dpi), 16 Graustufen-Display. Aufladbar

This is an incomplete product description but Google Translate says that "Leichter E-Book Reader" means "light ebook reader". That might indicate that this ereader has a frontlight, though it is far from clear.

Update: Several commenters have already chimed in and told me I am wrong. They say that this would better be translated as "lightweight ereader". That doesn’t really make any sense given the other technical details but they are probably right.

One detail that is clear is that this ereader ships a smart cover. It’s described as having an automatic start/sleep function. The listing also said that this ereader weighs 200g, or about 40g more than the PRS-T2.

Update: This ereader is also going to have a cover with a built in light. Chalid uncovered this detail on BuchHaus.ch, and you can see it at right.

And that’s about all I can glean from the listings.

The Swiss retail price is going to be 179 Swiss Francs, or about $194 USD. BuchHaus.ch is expecting to ship this ereader in October.

There’s no indication of when this ereader will be announced, but in past years Sony has announced their new ereader in August so we are probably only a week or two away from the debut.

I haven’t been briefed on the new device, and I would like to thank Sony for excluding me again. If I had been briefed then I would be under an NDA and would not be able to write about this leak.

Brazil’s Nuvem de Livros might not be getting much attention in the English language blogosphere but it is drawing the attention of readers.

This service recently boasted that they have 1 million users in Brazil and Argentina, making them the single largest ebook subscription service short of the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library.

The reason for their success? Students.

Nuvem de Livros was launched to offer students access to content that Brazil’s limited school libraries  couldn’t provide. Terra Brasil reports that this platform was developed in partnership with the Brazilian telecom Vivo, and that it has a goal of supporting the 15 million Brazilian students who only have a limited access to a library, as well as the 3 million college students taking distance learning courses.

Students pay a discounted subscription of 2 Brazilian reais per month (under $1), while regular subscribers pay 6 reais per month. They can read ebooks from a 10 thousand title catalog in their web browser or in apps for iPad, Android, and iPhone.

The students can read novels, biographies, short story collections, or essays, and they can also look up terms in encyclopedias and dictionaries or study interactive maps. The Nuvem de Livros catalog also includes audiobooks, educational videos, and author interviews. The apps are equipped with features that allows users to search through books to find specific terms, bookmark pages, and learn.

Brazil has passed a law that requires schools to have well-stocked libraries by 2020, but based on current trends (as anyone familiar with school funding could tell you) it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll achieve this goal.

Surprisingly, they have managed to bring internet access to schools in a timely fashion. The latest data from the Brazilian government shows that 94% of public schools in Brazil offer internet access. That figure is far higher than the percentage of schools that have libraries, much less well-stocked libraries. It’s also far higher than the 40% of Brazilians households which had access to the internet in 2012.

Nuvem de Livros is already available in Argentina and plans to launch in other Latin American countries and Spain in September.

As they add more Spanish language content they’ll move more into direct competition with 24Symbols, a competing service that offers more titles (15 thousand at last count) but has far fewer users (175,000).

Terra Brasil

Actualitte

It looks like Amazon isn’t satisfied with the buzz generated by the benchmark which leaked a couple days ago, because they’ve arranged for another leaked benchmark.

MobileRead  is reporting that they have a set of benchmarks for the new 7″ Kindle Fire HD tablet. This one is codenamed Thor (KFTHWI), and the benchmark confirms the rumored 1,920 x 1,200 screen resolution and that this tablet is running Android 4.2.2 on what looks to be the same 2.15GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU as the new 8.9″ KFHD.

That’s the only benchmark revealed today, but I can also add a few more details. Apparently the new Kindle Fire (expected to be unveiled alongside the new KFHD tablets) is codenamed Soho (KFSOWI).

This is rather curious, because when I combined Soho, Thor, and the codename for the new KFHD 8.9 (Apollo) I came up with a rather interesting Google search result.

A research firm I had never heard of before posted on their website that Amazon’s 3 new tablets would be called Soho, Thor, and Apollo.  They appear to have posted this back in May of this year, though I can only confirm via Google cache that this was posted before 3 August 2013.

It’s not clear where they got their info but they also had the screen resolution for both Thor and Apollo.

Either that research firm is part of an elaborate hoax or it is an independent confirmation of the latest rumors. And given that leaks are now an established part of any media campaign for a gadget launch, I don’t think this is a hoax.

With that in mind, does anyone have a bloody clue what "Soho" is supposed to reference? What about the other names?

I already know that Amazon likes to choose names that make a specific reference. For example, the original Kindle is codenamed Fiona, a nod to a character in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Other early Kindle hardware also referenced that book.

Come on, I know that I have any number of readers who work for Amazon. Throw me a bone. Please?

MobileRead

Here’s an odd story which I am still not completely sure is true.

One traveler is reporting that the Google Books app on his iPad removed the ebooks he bought from Google Play because he happened to be in an unsupported country. As the story goes, he is in Singapore and happened to update the Play Books app on his iPad. After the update the app removed the ebooks because Google doesn’t sell ebooks in Singapore yet.

Update: The original source left a comment with more details.

This story set off my BS meter, but that is what he is claiming:

So when I got here, I noticed that several of my iPad apps had updates on offer, so I clicked and approved. One of them was Google Play. When it finished and I went to open the app, it told me that it needed to update my book files and this might take several minutes. Time passed and the screen filled in the covers of the 30 or 40 titles I keep live on the machine. Two of them were books I am actively reading for my teaching this fall.

But all of my books had un-downloaded and needed to be downloaded again. The app is an inefficient downloader, almost as bad as the New Yorker app, so I dreaded this, but clicked on the two I needed most at once. (I checked the amount of storage used, and indeed the files really have gone off my tablet.)

And it balked. It turns out that because I am not in a country where Google Books is an approved enterprise (which encompasses most of the countries on the planet), I cannot download. Local wisdom among the wizards here speculates that the undownloading occurred when the update noted that I was outside the US borders and so intervened.

At this point I still don’t have any corroborating reports, so I am not inclined to believe this story. There’s nothing in Google’s support pages to back this up, I’ve never read about it before, and I can’t find similar reports via Google.

If nothing else, the simple fact that Google only sells books in 27 countries would seem to increase the chances that this event would have happened and been reported. I have never heard of this happening before. Have you?

I have been told by Andrew Rhomberg, founder of ebook startup JellyBooks, that it’s possible, but IMO it is also an incredibly stupid way to run a content store. No other ebookstore has policies anywhere close to this supposed policy,  and that’s the other reason I don’t believe this story.

Update: On the other hand, a quick poll digital publishing insiders hasn’t found anyone who thought it was impossible. In fact, one even went so far as to describe it as:

@thDigitalReader Google is much more crap at ebooks than at anything else. That their incompetence might reach those levels is believable.

— Baldur Bjarnason (@fakebaldur) August 17, 2013

If you have info to share, the comment section is open. And if you work for Google and know that this isn’t true, give me something I can use to debunk it.

Update: The original source showed up in the comments and provided more details. Suddenly the story makes a lot more sense:

Two footnotes: (1) The books were not bought books, they were Google Books scanned 19th century books, all of them *clearly* public domain; (2) I have since discovered that about 6 of the 40 are in fact downloadable, but there is *no* pattern — volume 2 of Middlemarch is downloadable, but not volumes 1 or 3 of the same issue. The error message is that they don’t have Google Play in my country. — One technical point: my iPad had signaled that the app had an update available and I did that; it was doing the update that called attention to my extraterritoriality and zapped all my books. If I hadn’t touched the update, I would have probably been just fine.

I *do* think the Google Play app on the iPad is lousy. Takes *forever* to download things, so I will have 6-8 hours of watching grass grow when I get home and want the books back.

I have heard of any number of problems concerning Google Books, so I am not surprised to read of another.

Remember earlier this year when E-ink announced that they expected ereader shipments to increase? While that could well be happening, that increase isn’t reflected in E-ink’s recent quarterly report.

Taipei Times reported today that:

E Ink Holdings Inc, which supplies e-paper displays for Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle e-reader series, yesterday reported a widening net loss of NT$1.01 billion (US$33.63 million) for last quarter because of slack demand for e-paper displays and LCD panels.

The quarterly net loss represented a deterioration from the first quarter’s net loss of NT$492 million and a net loss of NT$818 million in the second quarter of last year, the company’s financial statement showed. That also marked the worst quarterly loss in about four years.

Last quarter, E Ink also booked a one-time severance payment of NT$500 million for a 50 percent workforce layoff at its South Korean LCD manufacturing subsidiary Hydis Technologies Co. The number of Hydis employees has been halved to about 400 from between 800 or 900 before the personal adjustment, E Ink said.

Just to put that NT$1.01 billion net loss in perspective, E-ink earned NT$2.93 billion in revenue.

E-ink has made a strong move into other market segments over the past year, including signage, shelf labels, and other niche uses, and they even expanded their tech portfolio by buying Sipix, a competing screen tech company. But in spite of ongoing investment those other uses are expected to contribute less than 5% of E-ink’s revenues by the end of the year.

Revenues are expected to pick up for the coming quarter due to new ereader launches, including ones which haven’t happened yet (Kobo, for example).

Taipei Times

I have tried dozens of possible Google Reader replacements since Google announced the Readerpocalypse in March but rarely have I found one that is so feature rich.

InoReader is a relatively obscure news reader that deserved to have been at the top of all the GR alternatives lists. It offers more customization options, including display, profile, and behavior, than pretty much any other news reader.

The service was initially launched in April. It’s free, and it offers a browser view, a mobile browser-friendly layout, and an Android app. There’s also an API, but that’s more for app developers than for users.

I’ve only tried the desktop browser version, which looks like this:

BTW, there is an option for hiding folders and feeds that don’t have new content; I just hadn’t found it yet when I took that screen shot. And as you can see in the menu bar along the top you also have the option of showing all articles or just the unread blog posts.

Speaking of options, this settings menu is only showing about half of the options available:

As you can also see in the screen shot, InoReader also offers the option of importing and exporting your subscriptions. The import is slow but it works. There are also tabs for managing your subscriptions and folders/tags, which is nice. While many news readers offer similar management options they’re not as easy to use.

In terms of extras, InoReader offers Pocket and Instapaper integration as well as a couple Chrome bookmarklets (one makes it easier to subscribe while the other notifies you of new unread posts).

This service also offers search (it works, too) and it will automatically update with new content for you to peruse (not all news readers do that).

Here’s what it looks like when you read an article in InoReader. This is not a distraction-free reading mode, but it’s readable, not too wide, and the images are aligned correctly. It’s definitely usable.

One thing you can’t see in the screenshot is the footer of the reading window. That offers a keep unread button as well as sharing options (email, FB, Twitter, and many more).

This service is pretty great, but unfortunately InoReader is also not terribly stable (for me). I have managed to crash it twice, and I even took down Firefox at the same time.  TBF, my issues probably had more to do with the 2100 feeds I follow and not InoReader.

Update: Firefox crashed a couple more times today after I stopped using InoReader. Clearly there is an unrelated issue.

In spite of the issues I have had, I still plan to keep InoReader on my shortlist of alternatives. The positives far outweigh the negatives.

InoReader

The German gadget maker is going to be delivering an early Christmas gift this year: their first frontlight-equipped ereader.

The Pyrus 2 LED might have a funny name, but it also has a 6″ E-ink screen (600×800), 2GB of storage, and a microSD card slot. Unfortunately this ereader is lacking a touchscreen or Wifi, but that’s what happens when you drive the price down to 80 euros.

This ereader is licensed from the same OEM as Trekstor’s other ereaders, but as you may have noticed, the Pyrus 2 LED doesn’t have the "Digital Ink" knockoff E-ink screen found on its 4.3″, 8″, and 6″ siblings. Instead this ereader has a real E-ink screen.

The shift from one screen supplier to another is likely due to the frontlight. E-ink is capable of attaching a frontlight to their screen and selling the assembly to ereader makers, but they’re not all that interested in simply selling the frontlight component. And apparently the OEM who designed and built the Pyrus 2 for Trekstor can’t yet make their own frontlight.

The Pyrus 2 LED is a basic ereader, and its eBook format support includes Epub, FB2, PDB, and PDF. The Pyrus 2 can also read html, rtf, and txt files and display BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF image files.

There’s no information yet on battery life or weight, but I do know that the Pyrus 2 LED will officially debut in October at IFA-Berlin.

This is going to be a rather curious product at its price point. It’s going to cost 80 euros, or about 10 euros more than the Trekstor’s other 6″ ereader. It’s not the cheapest ereader on the German market, but it is the cheapest one with a frontlight. I think I can see the appeal.

lesen.net