Yesterday Evernote announced new integration with the budget scanning service 1DollarScan, and today they’ve launched a new partnership with Moleskine. And this isn’t the usual slap a brand on the product kind of deal; on a technical level this is rather cool.

I’m sure you know the name Moleskine. This company designs high quality pens, notebooks, and accessory. I’ve never used one due to the price tag (I like the 15 cent spiral notebooks), but these beautiful notebooks are the go-to choice for creative individuals of all types. And now they’re going to appeal to the creative techie as well.

Moleskine and Evernote have just launched the Evernote Smart Notebook. The Smart Notebook comes in both lined and grid, and they’re designed to work with a new feature which has been added to the latest Evernote iOS app.

The app will of course let you photograph your paper notes and add them to Evernote, which is itself a cool feature (especially when you consider the OCR abilities of Evernote). But there is a limitation to capturing your notes this way; camera angle, lighting, or other issues can distort the notes.

The new notebook improves on the existing feature. The pages of the notebook are covered in a pattern of dots which are design so that the app can use them to correct for the distortion introduced by the camera. This enables you to add a page of notes as a rectangular note and not as a photo.

Pretty cool, huh? But wait, there’s more. Each notebook ships with a set of stickers. After you upload a page of notes, the app will recognize the stickers and instantly associate them with one of your predefined tags. There’s also a set of arrow stickers so you can call attention to specific parts of your note.

The new notebook is scheduled to hit store shelves on the first of October, with a retail price of $30. That price includes a free trial to Evernote Premium. You’ll find a code in the back good for 3 free months of service which gives you greater upload capacity, more sharing options, access to note history, faster image recognition, top priority support, offline notebooks, PIN lock, and more.

Do you recall how I said there was a new KF and Kindle coming this fall (FCC paperwork)? Amazon is probably going to announce them 2 weeks from today.

I just got the invite, and the press conference will be held in Santa Monica this time around.  Amazon is breaking with their past habit of scheduling launches in NYC. I’m still thinking about going, but if I do I expect to see that 10″ Kindle Fire, a new Kindle, and the new dock for the Kindle Fire. That last item is going to work with the larger KF, I think.

The new location suggests other possibilities, like a greater emphasis on the media abilities of the KF. That would fit well with the new dock.

A couple weeks back I showed you that the Lendink lynch mob was caused by a bunch of authors who didn’t understand law, technology, or the contracts they had signed. Today the Author’s Guild once again reminded us that those problems can exist on an institutional scale as well.

Publisher’s Weekly is reporting the Author’s Guild, publishing’s own rearguard Luddites, is now objecting to the services provided by 1DollarScan.

This company is the US spinoff of an immensely popular Japanese service called Bookscan, and like its parent company 1DollarScan offers a cheap book scanning service. You mail them the book and they scan it and email you the PDF. Their process usually results in a destroyed book, so it isn’t of much use for rare and valuable books. But it does offer an opportunity to get an ebook for a title that might not be available digitally.

Update: 1DollarScan is  in not related to the Japanese company Bookscan.

The company is in the news today because of new Evernote integration, which Chris covers over here. While that topic is interesting on a technical level, I’m more interested in what others are saying about the service.

According to the Author’s Guild, what 1DollarScan is doing is illegal. PW reached out to Author’s Guild executive director Paul Aiken, and this is what he said: "If the information on its website is accurate, this is a copyright infringement service. Their fair use defense is laughable."

I love it when someone in power spouts off about topics they clearly don’t understand, and Paul proceeded to dig himself a deeper hole: "There are differences between digitization projects of 1DollarScan and Google and HathiTrust, but they share this: each is subverting the author’s fundamental right to choose whether or not to make a work available digitally, and under what terms. Though it makes sense for most authors to enter the digital book market, digitization has clear risks. It’s not up to unlicensed third parties to choose whether to take those risks with an author’s work."

Yeah, if you believe that authors can effectively control whether their work gets digitized, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. That control went out the window over a decade ago.  I’m sure you recall the dedicated efforts to scan the Harry Potter books as each was released?  Those fans aren’t the only ones who can scan books.

What’s more, I seriously doubt that any copyright infringement suit against 1DollarScan will succeed. A  basic reading of the website will tell you that the customer gives up the original book in order to get the PDF. As I see it, to show that a copy was made you’d have to show the judge the original book as well as the PDF. That’s going to be a little hard, given that the original book was likely destroyed as part of being scanned.

I don’t claim to be a lawyer, but I will bet dollars to donuts that so long as 1DollarScan maintains a process that’s one to one it’s going to be rather hard to convince most judges that they’re committing copyright infringement. But more importantly, it’s going to be hard to convince most readers.

Think for a moment about all the people who have ripped their CDs.  No one objects to that anymore (none besides the terminally clueless), and it’s not unreasonable for readers to make the jump that scanning a book is okay. From there it’s only a small step to paying for their book to be scanned. After all, no one would blink if the reader did it themselves. How could a service that does the exact same thing be illegal?

I’m not trying to browbeat any author, but in this day and age you really do need to be aware of what readers believe is right and moral. Taking a position against it, especially when you’re not being harmed by the situation, is self defeating.

This week’s infographic isn’t directly related to ebooks but it is fun nonetheless.

It looks back at the many changes to the web over the past 10 years, including browser we don’t use anymore and sites which have given up the ghost. We’re spending nearly 6 times as many hours online as a decade ago and there’s 4 times as many poeple online.

My how things have changed.

Last week I told you that Amazon sent their new Kindle Fire through the FCC, and today I think they decided to keep it company with a new ereader.

I’ve just found a new set of FCC paperwork from another anonymous LLC. This time around the company is called Hannaford LLC, and it has a different contact name and mailing address. But like the LLC mentioned last week, this one happens to reside in an office suite belonging to CSC. It also seems to be run by an employee of CSC.

Don’t you just love it when Amazon makes it easy for you?

While last week’s paperwork referred to a Wifi equipped tablet, this one mentions an "electronic display device" called the EY21. All the interesting details will be concealed until February, but there are enough hints in the tests conducted to suggest this is a device with both Wifi and 3g/4g (I don’t understand the frequencies) .

The tests mention that an iPod earbud was used, so clearly it has sound as well, but there’s no indication that they tested the frontlight. We can guess that this is an E-ink Kindle from the description (a tablet would be called a tablet), but I don’t think this is the frontlight equipped Kindle we had been hoping for.

So it looks like Amazon is planning to repeat their Kindle Fire event of last year. Some time in the next couple months we’re going to see a new Kindle Fire, a new Kindle, and a dock for the Kindle Fire.

Oh yeah, Amazon owns the trademark for the term Firedock. This word had originally been registered by Grace Digital Audio, and they planned to use it for their Kindle Fire dock (which is now called the Matchstick). The trademark now belongs to Amazon. Coincidence? I think not.

Now, I don’t know that the Firedock will be unveiled at the same time as the new KF and Kindle, but it would make a very effective Jobsian "one more thing" moment. And Amazon would sell a truckload. So I am pretty sure we’re going to see it soon.

FCC ID A8Z-2690

America’s largest retailer released their latest quarterly financial report today. The report covers the 3 months ending 28 July, and while the news was generally good there was also a time bomb buried in the details from the Nook division

Sales in the B&N bookstores and the B&N College bookstores were both up slightly last quarter, with the retail stores reportedly benefiting from "the liquidation of Borders’ bookstores in fiscal 2012 and strong sales of the Fifty Shades of Grey series", while sales via the B&N website continued to drop. And B&N College bookstores saw a fraction of a percent increase which was largely due to new contracts to run more bookstores; same  store sales dipped 2% over last year.

The Nook division, on the other hand, now that’s the fun part of the news today. B&N reported that the Nook segment earned revenues of  $192 million for the quarter, which is up about 3 tenths of a percent. That’s as near as flat as to be no increase at all. But the story gets worse.

Barnes & Noble also states that digital sales (ebooks and apps) were up 46%, while device sales were down significantly due to decreased demand and production issues for the Nook Glow. You have to wonder exactly how much B&N is losing on the Nook hardware, don’t you?

BTW, there’s an interesting discrepancy in the press release. Today B&N is claiming that the Nook division earned $191 million in the first fiscal quarter of last year, while last year they reported earning $277 million during that same period. That’s a difference of some $86 million, which is no chump change.

Okay, this could just be an accounting difference, but the description in the press release is the same. Both figures cover "sales of digital content, device hardware and related accessories". Do you suppose B&N is pulling a sleight of hand to hide how bad things really are?

Absent an explanation from B&N, I cannot tell. But if we look at the rest of B&N’s bad news today, I’d say there’s a better than even chance.

Update: Here’s B&N’s explanation:

The $277 million we reported last year was for the consolidated NOOK business across all of the company’s segments, on a comparable sales basis.  The $191 million of NOOK segment revenues we reported for Q1 this year was on a GAAP basis, not a comparable sales basis.  Comparable sales reflect the actual selling price for eBooks sold under the agency model rather than solely the commission received.

Let’s hope B&N’s plan to sell the Nook to 10 more countries bears fruit, because they’re not getting the same growth in digital that they got last year. This time last year B&N was reporting a quadrupling of digital sales, and that makes today’s new look like the growth in their digital sales are starting to level off. The UK Nook store is expected to launch in October, and adding 60 million consumers should ameliorate the plateau.

P.S. And in other news, B&N also mentioned that they’re still working to spin off Newco, the new subsidiary which they and MS launched earlier this year. That process should be complete this fall.

A press release crossed my inbox this morning talking about a new gimmick which can be integrated into ebooks.  While at first glance it looked like one of the worst ideas of 2012, there’s a potentially useful innovation buried beneath the marketing drivel.

The press release heralded the launch of a new book, 11 Days in May. The book is a spiritual journey, so it has little interest to me.  But the ebook edition was produced via Vook, and in addition to the embedded videos the Vook edition incorporates a new interactive component that I had not seen before. It’s called WeJIT, and the developer Democrasoft is pitching it as having enabled:

  the world’s first two-way interactive e-book, which features a new technology that allows real-time author and reader-to-reader dialog and collaboration from inside an e-book.

With WeJIT the author (or anyone) can create a discussion point on a given topic, and it will exist as a persistent webpage with a URL. Other users can respond to the topic with their own opinions, links, and more. While that sounds like virtually every community site, the one thing that sets this idea apart is that it can be integrated into ebooks. A total of 32 discussion points were embedded in this ebook.

You can see one of the discussion pages in this screen shot from my iPad. (Click to enlarge.)

Now, I went into this thinking it was one of the most poorly conceived ideas I had ever seen incorporated into ebooks. I like to read after midnight, so there’s really no chance that the author or most of the other readers will be online and interested in discussing the book. As described in the press release I thought the idea was worse than animation, worse than augmented reality, and was likely developed by someone who kicked kittens.

But then I started reading the debate points and I changed my mind. While I still don’t think there’s any value in real-time discussion, if the comments left by readers are persistent then they might be worth going back to later – much later.

Ignore the real-time aspect; that’s unworkable. Instead I think the real value of this embedded content lies not in the immediacy of the interaction but in what readers add over time – years, even.

Think of it as marginalia.

Old books sometimes accumulate notes from owners, and as they get passed from one to the next we sometimes even see new comments responding to older ones.  With WeJIT, we might be able to duplicate that idea inside ebooks.

A history ebook could have new comments added over the years which reference events that happened after the book was published or new interpretations of past events. A science textbook could benefit from links to recently published articles that refute or dispute the content of the book. And a novel might pick up explanatory footnotes from the author when she responds to reader comments. (I would love that 0ne.) You could even have the authors add corrections to printing errors (though I suppose that’s not nearly as important for ebooks) or addition explanations that grew out of later work. Or fans could add background details that the novel’s author mentions during interviews at cons.

While all the examples include info that you might find elsewhere, having the content accessible from inside the ebook adds value.  You might even have the author maintain a website that offers all the same extranea, but it won’t be as useful as being able to access it from inside the ebook.

If I knew that the digital marginalia was still available for a given title, that would make me more likely to buy the ebook. In the past I have bought the enhanced edition of ebooks just to read the author’s footnotes. This could be 10 times as good, and it might even get better over time.

But do you know what would make this idea even better? I’d like to see it integrated with an existing reading community. This would give the ebook access to all sorts of user generated comments.

Of course, by the time you added reader feedback and added background material, you’d end up with something similar to what Amazon already offers on the Kindle. That platform already has shared notes and highlights, and it has X-Ray, which is based on background material drawn from Shelfari.

Perhaps WeJIT is not all that innovative after all, but I think it offers a couple useful aspects which aren’t accessible on the Kindle platform. The discussion points are discrete pages, not just text embedded in the ebook. They feel linear and thus more like a conversation than simply a jumble of random notes. At the very least WeJIT is worth a second look. I think publishers should consider which ideas they might be able to incorporate using the tech they already have. There’s value here.

Discounted gift cards are an old retailer trick as well as one we’ve all enjoyed at one time or another. It gets customers in the door and gives retailers an opportunity to use the funds long before they’re spent. But have you ever consider what would happen when the gift card comes up against a market where the retailer isn’t allowed to offer discounts?

That’s what is happening right now in Germany.

The German Apple blog iFun is reporting this morning that Apple has temporarily blocked access to the German iBookstore. It seems that German retailers like offering discounted iTunes gift cards just as much as US retailers (Walmart has an iTunes gift card on sale right now), which Apple is more than happy to accept. Unfortunately, Germany also has laws regulating the price of books and ebooks.

Last week the Buchpreisbindung, the price regulator for the German book market, sent a letter to Apple complaining about the discounts and pointing out how they violate German law. Unlike the US, Germany has strict laws covering the discounts that retailers can apply to books and ebooks. Attempts to skirt those laws can lead to a lot of expensive lawyers buying expensive cars, though I’m sure most retailers comply before that point.

In response, Apple has restricted access to the German iBookstore, resulting in a rather odd situation where Apple has to block a subset of their customers from using validly purchased gift cards to buy validly for sale ebooks.

If you’re wondering how Apple can tell the difference between a gift card sold under a discount and the rest of the iTunes gift cards, that’s where things get interesting. These cards sell for a 20% to 30% discount, and I seriously doubt that the money is coming out of the retailer’s pocket.  That suggests that Apple is giving up the discount, so they are likely also initiating the sale. It would seem that they are in a position to issue specific gift card numbers to the retailer who is selling them, numbers which could then be recorded.

If my supposition is correct then Apple wasn’t just an accidental violator. They were the ones organizing the sale of the gift cards, so they really should have known they were breaking the law. Whoops.

But as much as we might enjoy pointing fingers at Apple, they’re not the first to run afoul of Germany’s book price laws. For a while there Amazon thought they could get around the restrictions on discounts by offering free shipping. Needless to say, that didn’t work.

Germany enacted these laws to protect local booksellers and prevent the rise of the big box bookstores like Waltons, B&N,  Borders, and others.  The laws didn’t succeed completely, considering that Thalia has 200 bookstores in Germany, but Thalia’s smaller competitors aren’t under quite as much pressure as indie booksellers in the US. And that’s a good thing.

iFun

Lots of people in publishing get upset when readers object to the price of some ebooks, and often times you hear a retort about a cup of coffee. Brent Weeks made just that remark earlier this week, and his tweet set a minor record for insider retweets.  But have you ever considered whether the comparison of ebook prices and the cost of a cup of coffee was a valid one?

I hadn’t, but lucky for me earlier this week one reader sent me a link to a blog post by Josh Lehman.  Josh takes a look at the differences in markets for Starbucks coffee and apps, and while an app is not an ebook a lot of his points do transfer over.

Fact: Starbucks Coffee is a Trustable Experience

This is coming from a non-coffee drinker, but people buy Starbucks because they know what it’s going to be like. It will meet their expectations, and while it’s an experience that won’t change their lives it will be the same every time. People know that each cup of coffee will be exactly like the last. And if it’s not, Starbucks will remake it until the customer is satisfied. Would you make that same guarantee with your ebook?

Fact: Your eBook is a Total Gamble

I don’t know what your ebook will be like until I start reading it. Unlike Starbucks coffee, ebooks can vary by quality, genre, and even style – and that’s just for a single author, not the ebook market. The problem grows when you factor in situations where readers find an author for the first time. The experience of reading your ebook is not trustable. I have dozens of ebooks sitting unread on my computer right now; why should I shell out $13 for yours? Why should I even shell out $8 to get one of the ebooks on your backlist? Frankly the risk is too high for a potential gain of nothing.

Fact: Starbucks Has No Free Alternative

We cannot get a free cup of coffee, and even the cheap alternatives to Starbucks aren’t as good. But I can find alternatives to paid ebooks virtually everywhere – legal ones, too, and sometimes even from the same publisher as the one you want us to buy.

Fact: Free eBooks Are Often A Great Alternative

There are far more good free ebooks available right now than I could read in a lifetime, and I’m not just talking about the dregs of self-publishing. Baen Books, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg stand as 3 examples of quality free ebooks. And then there are the many authors like Cory Doctorow who have released some or all of their work for free, whether as a limited time offer or under a CC license.

Fact: Cheap Paper Books Are Often A Great Alternative

Here’s a point which Lehman couldn’t make, but definitely affects the price and value of ebooks. The used book market hasn’t gone away with the rise of ebooks; instead it has grown with the rise of Amazon and other sites. Publishers not only have to t compete with paid and free ebooks from other sources, but they also have to compete with their own cast off and used titles.

Fact: My Existing Library Is A Great Alternative to Your eBook

I can also read the many ebooks I’ve bought over the years instead of buying yours. While they are not your ebook, they do stand as a viable alternative for the few hours of diversion I’d get for the $13 I’d spend on your ebook.

Is There Hope for the Paid eBook?

Yes there is. You just have to give readers a good reason to buy.

Speaking as someone who balks at paying more than $6 for a fiction ebook, I myself bought a $15 ebook from Bane Books this week. It was an advance reader copy of the next Bujold novel (which won’t be published until November). The sample, which I read online, ended at a cliffhanger. That ebook was an experience I was willing to risk my money on because the free sample was a worthwhile read and the itch to finish reading the ebook was so great that I didn’t mind paying a high price.

via

Thanks, Merrill!

Sony officially unveiled their new ereader on Thursday, and according to a report from one of my readers it showed up in Sony stores that same day. I couldn’t make time to go get one until Saturday, but I have followed through on my promise to get one and see what changed.

I’ve known the general details on the T2 since it leaked over a week ago, so I won’t repeat them here.

I’ve now been playing with the T2 since yesterday morning. The new ereader has a matte shell, and Sony replaced the buttons with less obvious (but still physical) buttons. And of course the sound option is gone. But aside from those few details this device is functionally identical to the T1.

That’s pretty much what I expected when I got it, but I still have to wonder what the hell Sony was doing for the past year?

Okay, the fact there’s only minor differences should really come as no surprise. For the past several years Sony has been in a holding pattern when it comes to their ereaders, and if you look at the record you’ll see a stagnation which stretches back to 2009. That was the last time that Sony released a device which could even jokingly be called innovative. Since then they’ve been picking one change to make each year (while at the same time the competition has been adding several new hardware and software improvements each year).

In 2009, Sony released a trio of ereaders: a budget model with limited abilities, a mid range model with touchscreen but no connectivity, and a high end model with a touchscreen and a 3G connection which could be used to buy ebooks. In 2010, Sony added better touchscreens – but no new connectivity. And then in 2011 Sony released the T1, which effectively replaced all 3 models with one Android based device that had the same features (it does work better admittedly).

And now in 2012 Sony replaced the T1 with new device that is virtually identical. What the hell, Sony?

Do you want to know how little work Sony put into this? The one feature I like about the T2 is the new support for Evernote (you can back up all your notes). But that’s a software feature, so there’s really nothing stopping Sony from releasing a new update for the the T1 and giving it the new feature as well.

At this point I’m trying to come up with a good reason to suggest that someone buy the T2 over a refurbished T1. I cannot. The devices are so similar that I’d get a T1 simply because it’s cheaper. A refurb has the  same lifespan as a new unit, and unless the user really wants the matte finish or new software features, there’s little reason to spend the extra dough.

P.S. In case you’re wondering, the hacks for the T1 don’t work yet on the T2. I didn’t really expect them to, but it would have been nice to have hacked the T2 so quickly.

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Internet-posted fanfiction from the ‘90s comprised some of the original on-line “e-books”. And it’s still insanely popular today, even occasionally spawning professionally-published books that go on to become mega-hits. But the question of the legality of fanfic continues to be a controversial one. How do you know if your fanfic is “legal”? And what should you do if you get a cease-and-desist notice?

Over on io9, Lauren Davis has consulted with fanfic law maven Rebecca Tushnet to produce a lengthy, detailed analysis of how copyright pertains to fanfic, how fanfic fits into the four-factor test for fair use, and what to do if your fanfic gets a cease-and-desist order. The article goes into a number of legal precedents and is quite interesting in a number of ways. (Found via Techdirt.)

Of course, the only real way to find out whether a particular fan work is “fair use” or not is to take it to court and let a judge decide, and not many fanfic writers are going to want to do that. Fortunately, more and more creators are coming to recognize the promotional power of fanfic as an incitement to readers to investigate and purchase the original works.

But perhaps one of the most fascinating things about the article comes in the comment thread that follows it, in which Steve Vander Ark, creator and publisher of the Harry Potter Lexicon website and subsequent book, discusses the legal reasoning behind and the impact of the lawsuit that prevented the book from being published in its original form.

He points out that the original website had asked and been granted permission by all parties concerned with Harry Potter copyright ownership to use copyrighted material on its website…so why was it suddenly not kosher to use the same material in a book that was just that same website in another form? That being said, he was nonetheless happy with the judge’s decision, as it provided guidelines he could use to rewrite the book to pass legal muster and be published after all.

Image by Eric J. Heels, originally posted to erikjheels.com, “Drawing That Explains Copyright Law” – reproduced here under Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/. Previously used here.

I was on an expedition this evening to my local electronic stores when I happened something new. Conde Nast is now selling magazine subscriptions in Target stores. They’re currently offering a half dozen titles, including Wired, GQ, and Glamour.

I was making the rounds and checking to see if any store had the new Sony Reader (just announced today). None did, but while I was at Target I stopped to check out the Livrada ebook gift cards. I told you about them last month; they’re a new product by a young Calif startup which is trying to bring ebooks into brick-and-mortar stores.

Hanging on hooks next to the Livrada cards were a set of cards I’d never heard of before. There were a half dozen titles, all priced at $20, and from what I could tell they were all Conde Nast magazines.

The card is good for a 1 year combined subscription to Wired Magazine’s paper and digital editions. Once you activate the card you can choose to get the subscription via the Wired iPad app or the Nook or Kindle Stores. And you do have to have the card activated; it works just like the phone cards and gift cards that you’ve probably seen everywhere.

As I said, this is new to me. I can’t find anything on the Target or Conde Nast websites, and what little info I found on the Wired website at wired.com/target was simply an activation page (with a customer service phone number). I can’t even find any sign of this program in Google (now that is weird).

But I did find some technical info. While I’m pretty sure that Conde Nast is handling this in house, the cards are based on a system developed by Incomm called Fastcard. Now that has a website, and apparently there’s a parellel program for selling paper subscriptions with similar cards. Also, Incomm has been running a number of gift card type programs for a while now. In fact, I’ve probably bought one card or another at some point.

Conde Nast is a US publisher with 18 magazine titles and numerous websites. They were one of the first publishers to jump on the iPad app bandwagon, and they were also one of the first to offer the dual subscriptions. With that in mind, today’s news is more of a puzzler than a surprise. I’m puzzled by the lack of publicity, not the cards.

Still, I do find it interesting that these cards first appeared in Target. In the past I’ve said I expected Target to replace the ereader hardware sales (they dropped the Kindle and Kobo Touch) with something that would let them cash in on content sales; clearly they’ve found it.

Do you recall all those rumors about Amazon is working on a larger Kindle Fire, and how that tablet is expected to be released this fall? I think it cleared the FCC yesterday.

Now here’s something guaranteed to wake you up this morning.

A friend of mine has tipped me to a set of FCC documents which were posted yesterday. They don’t show any useful detail, but they do lead somewhere interesting. Like Amazon’s past FCC submissions, this paperwork belongs to a new front company. This time around the company is Harpers LLC.

The thing is, folks, every time Amazon has sent a device through the FCC they’ve used a new front company and then hid the paperwork. This is what Amazon has done for every ereader and tablet since the second Kindle. (The first leaked accidentally.) In fact, when the K4, Kindle Touch, and Kindle Fire went through the FCC, Amazon used 3 front companies.

I know Harpers LLC is a front company because the address leads back to a storefront rented by CSC Entity Services, and the guy named on the paperwork as the President of Harpers also works for CSC.

Stephen Facciolo shows up on LinkedIn as a service leader for CSC, and that leads me to conclude that CSC is the legitimate front company (corporate services provider) that Amazon hired to run a second front company so that this FCC paperwork wouldn’t get back to them.

Yeah, that worked well.

I don’t have anything beyond the label, but after looking at the dimensions I’m guessing that this is a 9.7″ or 10″ tablet. The general screen geometry is likely going to be 4:3 (like the iPad), and not widescreen like many Android tablets. And since some of the hidden parts of the FCC paperwork will be revealed in December, this device will clearly be launched this fall.

FCC (YJM-0725)

Amazon seems to be in the mood to duplicate the work of others today. They just announced a new plugin for Google Chrome called Send to Kindle, and as you can guess from the name it will let you clip webpages and email them to your Kindle.

Color me underwhelmed. There already was a Chrome plugin that did this. It came out in January 2011, and it too is called Send to Kindle. The latest stats for that plugin show 128 thousand users, with a 4 star rating.

You can find Amazon’s version in the Chrome Web Store. It looks to have a better interface, and comes with the little menu you see at right. Other than that the  plugins are quite similar. Both clip webpages and both offer previews.

The older plugin is from klip.me, a lesser known read it later type of service. It’s worth a deeper look. That site also offers plugins for Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE9. It even has a bookmarklet that will let you save webpages to Evernote or Instapaper.

Folks, today I get to show Sony and everyone else the value of being the one major blog not included in Sony’s NDA. I’ve just come across a screenshot from an ad, and it shows the new Sony Reader as going on sale next month.

You can click on the image at right to see a larger version, but it shows the new Sony Reader PRS-T2 being marked down from $129 to $99. The ad also mentions the dozen dictionaries found on the last Sony Reader, and it specifically calls out the free Harry Potter ebook that ships with each device.

I can’t find the ad online myself, but it’s been attributed to MCX Brands, a company that runs retail stores on US Marine Corps bases. It’s supposed to come from their anniversary sale, which looks to happen in the middle of September. Okay, so that’s not terribly useful unless you have access to a military base, but it’s still an interesting bit of news that Sony’s new ereader is going to go on sale almost immediately.

Well, I’m not sure I’d call it a sale, given that the Kindle costs less. You can also get the B&N Nook Touch for $99, and if you don’t mind a refurb you can get the Nook Touch for $60 on Ebay. (Now that’s a sale.) Sony’s sale price here looks to be the usual sleight of hand that device makers use. They invent a higher fictional retail price and then sell the device for the real retail price, which is usually much lower.

The real retail price is probably going to be $99, so if you plan to get one I would wait for that price.

I was one of the 2 blogs to break the story on the Sony Reader late Thursday night, and like my competition I’m not terribly impressed. This ereader looks to be little more than a slightly improved version of Sony’s last ereader. It has the same screen, general design, and aside from a couple new software features there appears to be only one important different between the T1 and the T2.

The new device appears to lack a headphone jack.  That means there’s no audio. Sony has removed one of the few strengths that the T1 had over the Nook Touch, and now there’s really not much of a reason to get a Sony Reader anymore.

P.S. There was a marked lack of coverage of last week’s leak, and that’s why I believe that Sony has some of the major blogs under a non-disclosure agreement. Those blogs have already been briefed on the new ereader, and thanks to the NDA they cannot post the leak. While my guess that a launch would happen today turned out not to be true, I do expect the new device to launch soon.

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