This is a follow up post to one I wrote last week.

Like many people, I use Google Reader to follow RSS feeds. Also like many people, I’ve noticed that it is sometimes slow. I had always assumed that my sources weren’t  providing content in a timely manner.

Last week I learned that the problem wasn’t the source feeds; the problem lies with gReader.  There are times where it neglects to check a source feed for new content, and I’ve noticed some surprising delays. This morning gReader rose to a new height of FAIL.

I’m now looking at the RSS feeds from one of my blogs, and gReader neglected to update that feed for  close to 50 hours. That is a new record.

And I know for a fact that the problem was not the source feed. This particular feed came from Feedburner.  I also follow the email sub for this feed, and it was picking up new posts on time and sending them by email on schedule.

It’s time to look for an alternative. Any suggestions?

The Story HD was officially launched in Target stores today, and I got mine as early as possible. It’s an okay ebook reader, but I’m never one to be satisfied with the legit features. This evening I started looking  for the web browser. And I found it.

It turns out that the Story HD uses a mobile version of the Google eBookstore, and you’re visiting the site in a web browser. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have an address bar. But if you know which links to click on you can get out of the ebookstore.

Sorry about the quality of the pictures; I didn’t find the trick until late at night. There just wasn’t enough light to shoot better photos.

My trick involves first entering the Google eBookstore, then going to the Help pages. When you’re on the first Help page, look at the links across the top. The one labeled Books will take you to books.google.com, and that is one of Google’s home pages. You can jump from books.google.com to Google.com by clicking on the "Web" link at the top. And once you’re on Google’s home page, you can search for a site and go just about anywhere.

The web browser doesn’t have an address bar, but it does have some basic features (previous page, next page, refresh, cancel). You can access them by pressing the options button.

I’d recommend searching for a site called Kinstant. That’s a site  that hosts webpages designed to work as start pages for the Kindle. The Story HD needs the help.

BTW, if you let the Story HD go to sleep, it will kick you out of the browser. So don’t let it sit too long.

This isn’t all that useful of a feature, but finding it was a neat trick.

A new ebook vending machine was on display at the Tokyo Ebook Fair last week. Japan is a country known for selling almost anything in vending machines (you should see the model that dispenses other vending machines), so it should come as no surprise to see one for ebooks.

A Japanese company called Glory had their prototype on display. From what details I can glean, you select and pay for the ebook on screen. The machine will print a receipt with a QR code and other info you’ll need to download the ebook.

The system is geared towards smartphones, which makes sense. There aren’t any ebook readers that can support downloading 3rd party DRMed ebooks in this manner.

There’s no word on when the system will be available or if it will make it out of Japan.

click to enlarge

via

Byte Magazine, one of the better tech news sources of the ’90s,  has been brought back to life after a 13 year hiatus. It’s being relaunched on the  Information Week website as a prelude to launching byte.com, its new home.

Byte actually launched over 2 weeks ago, but it looks like this was a quiet launch (so the bugs could be worked out). (The inaugural post went up back in June but there’s a gap between then and the new stuff posted yesterday.) The writing staff is already lined up, and it’s going to be a mix of old and new (mostly new). The most important name (for me, at least) is Jerry Pournelle, who will be reprising his column from the print edition.

I couldn’t get a firm answer on future plans, but it doesn’t look like this incarnation of BYTE will have a print edition. The status of apps and digital subscriptions is also still up in the air.

Byte

That’s what Michael Serbinis, CEO of Kobo, told Bloomsberg earlier today.

The German language ebookstore starts tomorrow, and their ebook reader will be available from a local retailer sometime in August. The other 4 ebookstores that I told you about a month ago will be opening later this year.

Note that while tomorrow is the official launch, Kobo have actually been selling German language ebooks for a month now. You can find them here.  Right now I can see around 8 thousand titles, and that’s a far cry from the 80,000 that are supposed to be available tomorrow. It’s also a big difference from the 30 thousand German language titles in the Kindle Store.

I don’t know yet whether an ereader will ship to Germany tomorrow, nor do I know which one. I’m also still tracking down the price.

Tomorrow Kobo will be launching with German versions of their iOS and Android apps. The latest word is that the Kobo touch won’t be available until August, and the retail will be €149 (same as the Kindle).

image by adamblang

I’m only repeating this rumor so I can snicker at it, loudly.

According to the ZatzNotFunny blog, they have a source who sat next to an unnamed Amazon exec on a flight somewhere. This Amazon exec is supposed to have said  a few things about the new Kindle tablet:

Most notably that it features two displays: e-Ink on one side, color LCD on the other. And he seemed quite clear that this is front and back, versus the stacked displays seen on the original Barnes & Noble Nook or a dual mode screen, à la Pixel Qi. Which sounds pretty far fetched… How thick would the device have to be to support two screens and reasonable battery life?

Dave Zatz didn’t believe this rumor, either, which is to his credit.

This is a rumor that you can write off as an impossibility. We’ve seen 3 dual screen ebook readers come and go over the past 18 months. All were failures, and 1 never even made it to market. Not even Amazon could succeed after 2 other companies failed. Heck, I’m not sure that Apple could pull off a success for a dual screen tablet. Also, there’s no way that this would be cheaper than the NookColor.

I’m sure Amazon played with the concept, but I don’t see how they could plan to release one.  As much as I like the idea, a dual screen tablet proves the rule "jack of all trades, master of none". You have to admit that a dual screen tablet will not be better as a tablet than a single screen Android tablet, nor will it be better than the Kindle as a reading device. Do you think Amazon would want to make a second rate device?

Augen burst on the gadget scene last year when they released The Book, their Kindle clone with a 7″ screen. While they got a lot of attention at birth, their demise has gone unnoticed.

I was first clued in to the story by an owner of Augen’s The Book. She was supposed to have gotten her device back from a warranty repair, and while she had an estimated delivery date she never got the ereader. She checked Augen’s website, and it was down. No one responded to her emails, so she reached out to me for help.

It turns out that Augen’s website has been down for over a month. I’m not getting any responses to any of the emails I sent – not from either of the Augen email accounts I know. I asked about the problems with their website, and they said nothing. I didn’t even get a response when I asked them if the company had died.

I know that’s not based on anything solid, and there really isn’t any proof. But the company looks dead to me.

That’s a pity. I was looking forward to Augen’s line of tablets and their new ebook readers. Last fall Augen unveiled a line of 6 tablets ranging from entry level to a couple high end models. They were quite pretty and I admired the ambitiousness of trying to get 6 devices on the market all at once. And then there were Augen’s ebook readers, which were supposed to be shipping in April. I was so looking forward to them.

image by amandabhslater

Amazon is not the type to sleep in on a holiday. They announced in a very brief press release today that they bought one of the major online bookstores, and thus eliminated one of their competitors.

"Customers in more than 100 countries enjoy The Book Depository’s vast selection, convenient delivery and free shipping," said Greg Greeley, Amazon’s Vice President of European Retail. "The Book Depository is very focused on serving its customers around the world, and we look forward to welcoming them to the Amazon family."

"With the support of Amazon, we look forward to continuing our growth and providing an ever-improving service for readers globally," said Andrew Crawford, Founder, The Book Depository.

If you don’t buy from them then you might not have heard of The Book Depository. They’re a UK based online bookseller who sell paper books and offer free shipping to over a hundred countries in the world. That’s more countries than Amazon operate in, I believe.

I’ve been watching TBD for a while now, and it was clear at least 7 months ago that they were outcompeting Amazon. This purchase happened for much the same reason as Woot, Zappos, or any other time Amazon bought out the competition. Basically, Amazon bought The Book Depository because they did the job better in that one niche.

Of course, the other interesting detail here is that the folks at Amazon clearly don’t think paper is dead. Otherwise they wouldn’t have invested in The Book Depository.

P.S. A little over a month ago I came across a presentation that listed all the different companies and websites owned by Amazon. It’s now out of date, of course, but it will still astound you when you see the true size of Amazon’s retail empire.

A few months ago I posted about the new free Pogoplug service, and how it let you create your own file server on a PC. I liked the idea of controlling my own data, or as Mike Cane put it in the comments:

The point is this: If the government wants access to *your* cloud files, they have to serve *you* with a search warrant, not Dropbox or Google or Amazon or Apple.

That might sound a bit paranoid, but given the things my government has been caught doing, I don’t think it is. And today we got another lesson in why you can’t really trust the cloud service providers.

There was an uproar today after people noticed that Dropbox changed their  user agreement. And the uproar continues, because Dropbox keep changing them! It started out this morning with Dropbox deciding that it can do what ever the bleep they want with your files:

you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service.

Apparently it’s changed at least 4 times since then. (I learned of this late, so I don’t know the exact count.) This isn’t quite as bad as the time Scribd got caught pirating users' uploaded content, but it’s still not good.

I’m not going to rant and rave about this, but I will ask a question. Given how often they’ve changed the TOU, how can you predict what Dropbox will do tomorrow?

Do you really want to run the legal risk of your uploaded content being distributed by Dropbox?

via Library Abominations

If you think the market is tight in the US, you won’t believe what’s happening in China.

Shanda recently cut the price of their Bambook ereader in half. This 6″ E-ink, Wifi equiped ereader is now selling for only RMB499. That’s $74 USD, and so far as I know that’s actually less than the cost of the components.

Hanvon have also cut the  price of a number of their ereaders, with some models now as low as RMB 599 ($92 USD).

If I had to guess, I would say that Chinese ebook readers are facing fierce competition from cheap tablets and handhelds. It’s not the same in the US, where we have 2 giants fighting. In China there’s hundreds if not thousands of small companies trying to produce gadgets as cheap as possible. It’s quite clearly driving the prices lower at a faster rate than anywhere else.

via TechNode

Back in February of this year the Internet Archive started a new partnership with a select group of libraries. These several dozen libraries across the US worked with the IA to provide in-library access to the Open Library, the IA’s new, cooperative 100,000+ eBook lending collection.

Yesterday the IA announced that they’d expanded to include libraries on 6 continents. The exact count isn’t done yet, but it’s up over a hundred library systems with a thousand or more branches.

In case you were wondering, I’m counting the participating libraries differently from how IA did it. They counted individual branches, and ended up with over 1k. I’m counting systems and treating all the branches of a system as 1 library.

The open Library functions in much the same way as OverDrive. Library patrons can check out up to 5 titles at a time for a period of 2 weeks. The ebooks can be read online or on any Device or app that supports Adobe DE DRM.

Open Library

The hot story today was the official launch of Pottermore, J.K. Rowling’s new website. it’s going to have all sorts of interesting content for the pottermaniacs, including Harry Potter ebooks as well as "sumptuous newly-commissioned illustrations and interactive ‘Moments’ through which you can navigate, starting with the first book" and that Rowling has brought to life "both the Sorting Hat and Ollivanders experiences from her books for the first time on Pottermore, by revealing the questions asked by the Sorting Hat – which places newcomers into their Hogwarts houses according to their characteristics – and the magic behind the Wand Chooser – which finds the right wand for each user from over 33,000 possible combinations".

While that’s very interesting, it’s not the big news today. The Inquirer is reporting that Pottermore will be selling the ebooks DRM-free.

The ebooks won’t be encumbered with DRM but they will come with watermarked data. This should make it possible to track a pirated copy back to the original source.

Okay, now I understand why the ebooks will be sold on just the one website. This new piece of data also lends credence to the twitter rumor that Kindle ebooks will also be supported. (Obviously they’re not using the Kindle DRM either.)

I have to hand it to J.K. Rowling, her agents, and her publishers for being more tech-savvy that I anticipated. Someone figured out that DRM doesn’t actually prevent piracy. And since they can’t prevent it, they picked the next best thing.

They’ll know which customer pirated which copy of the Potter ebooks. That’s going to put them at least 1 step up on publishers.

The American Library Association have released a new report on Monday, and the report covers the state of American libraries.

This report is based on a survey sent out to all participating libraries. The report as a whole is packed tightly with information, but the one detail I’m interested in is ebooks. The number of libraries that support ebooks is now up to 67%, and that’s a 30% increase in the past 4 years. (We probably won’t see a simialr bump next year; budgets are being cut.)

The ALA report also includes a number of online extras like the map I clipped and posted at right.  At full size the map tracks how many libraries offer ebooks in each state. You can find the map here.

via ALA

But they managed to keep it very quiet. BTW, Sagem Wireless changed their name to Mobiwire back in February, so I’ll refer to them as such.

I don’t have full details on the story just yet, but I do have a back channel confirmation that Mobiwire did indeed file for bankruptcy at the beginning of May. (I have to admit that I missed the story at the time, but then so did most people.)

Mobiwire look to be primarily a designer of OEM equipment. Their website shows a wide selection of interesting looking phones, and even a few ereaders.  The one at left is the Chromer 6. It never hit the market, but its 6″ color E-ink screen does show that Mobiwire were pushing ahead.

Mobiwire did release an ereader to the European market; it’s called the Binder. It was rebranded as the Thalia Oyo and the Fnac Fnacbook. The Binder looked much the same as the Chromer6 pictured above, only it had a 6″ Sipix screen (grayscale).

The Binder was not a terribly successful design, and its poor market performance may have hurt the company. Last month I told you that the Fnacbook only sold 14 thousand units since it launched late last year. The unfortunate part there is that I’ve also been told Fnac had signed a deal to buy 100 thousand. That’s a fair amount of money that Mobiwire could have used.

The latest news with Mobiwire is that several of the management are trying to make a buyout of part of the company. My guess is that it won’t be the ereader section.

The popular children’s book Go the F–k to Sleep has been released today and you can find it on Amazon in print and Kindle, and as an audiobook on Audible.com. This book hit the top of the bestsellers list last month because its satirical take on children’s bedtime stories appealed to most parent’s sense of humor.

The book was written by the award-winning novelist Adam Mansbach, who was moved to pen the book when his own daughter was suffering sleepless nights. The audiobook might actually be better than the print book. It’s narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, and if you’ve followed his career then you can appreciate the additional depth of humor that his presence brings to the book.

He explained in the narration: “I was anxious to do the audio read of this book because my agent has twins and he gave me the book and I read it and I fell out laughing. I remember all those times when I did read to my daughter when she was that age. Everybody tells you reading stories will put kids to sleep, but it never works. It didn’t in my house.”

Here are some of the lyrics, in case you haven’t gotten the audiobook yet:

"The flowers doze low in the meadows / And high on the mountains so steep. / My life is a failure, I’m a shitty-ass parent. / Stop fucking with me, please, and sleep, The cubs and the lions are snoring, / Wrapped in a big snuggly heap. / How come you can do all this other great shit / But you can’t lie the fuck down and sleep?"

Audible.com