Wistron, one of Kobo’s hardware partners, sent a new gadget through the FCC today. It’s called the Kobo Vox and that’s all I know.

Now, I would normally speculate about the gadget but I’m not sure what it is. The screen shape is rather odd for a tablet or ebook reader; the (screen) corners are far too rounded for most screens that I know of. No large screen tablet has corners that rounded. You can sometimes see that on small devices but not often.

Note that I’m talking about the inside corners, not the shell.

Wistron is calling it an "eReader Tablet", and it was test for Wifi(n). We also know that it has a microSD card slot and the model number is K080.

It’s my guess that this is a device that Kobo worked on and then decided not to release. I suspect that Wistron sent it through the FCC becuase they have a business partner that is interested.

Update: I’ve gotten a hint that Kobo will release this tablet. Whoops. Also, this is now a 7″ tablet.

We’ll know more in early November; that’s when the embargo lifts.

FCC

Do you recall how last month a rumor went around that the Kindle was supposed to get library ebook support some time in September? Guess what: it wasn’t a rumor.

It’s been just over 5 months since Amazon announced that the Kindle would get library ebooks, and it is just about to happen. Unfortunately for us, the system isn’t actually live just yet. It’s in beta at a couple libraries in the Seattle area. It’s not available elsewhere just yet

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Update: Amazon have expanded the beta to include all OverDrive partners in the US. The new service is slowly being rolled out to the 11 thousand participating libraries. I can now see that something like 50 or so libraries support the new service (as of Wednesday at Noon).

Note that not all will be getting the service right away. Also, not all of the 11 thousand libraries mentioned in the press release actually support ebooks; some are like my local library (which only has audiobooks). But whne they do, it will be offered as an additional service at no charge to the libraries.

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I found an ongoing discussion over on MobileRead this evening where several Kindle owners are trying (and succeeding) to download ebooks from their libraries. Several have reported seeing Kindle ebooks listed and I have one report of someone actually downloading an ebook to their Kindle.

The Kindle hasn’t gotten a firmware update recently, so this would suggest that there might be some unseen conversion going on to change the Epub/PDF to Kindle, and then wrap the ebook in the expiring DRM. Edit: On the other hand, one commenter pointed out that he doesn’t think the conversion is happening, and he could be right. Amazon might be serving up the relevant Kindle file from their own catalog.

Update: The commenter also made me catch something I had missed. There are thousands of Kindle ebooks in each library system. I seriously doubt that they had the funds to buy all those new ebooks, so they must be using the existing license to cover for the Kindle copy when it is loaned. That was one of the details hinted at back in April and it’s good to see it confirmed.

Update: The Kindle is also spuuposed to have a new firmware update, v3.3, which enables the new service. It’s not avaialble yet but some people in the Seattle area report that they got it as an over-the-air update.

Neither Amazon nor OverDrive have announced anything, and in fact I’m still waiting to hear back from my contacts at Overdrive. But I do know that Amazon’s help pages now refer to the library ebooks as a current feature, and OverDrive already list the Kindle as having beta support. The service is indeed live.

You can see proof of the new support on the website for the King County Library System. Their website promises that the new support is up and running right now. The other library is the Seattle Public Library.

So this news isn’t as great as you being able to download the library ebooks today, but it’s still a big deal. It means that fairly soon you will be able to download ebooks from any of OverDrive’s 11 thousand plus partner libraries in the US and read them on your Kindle. According to Overdrive, all 3 generations of the Kindle are supported (see the screen shot above). Unfortunately, you’ll need a wifi equipped model for direct downloads; you cannot download a Kindle library ebook over 3G (no one wants to pay the data cost).  Go dig out that USB cable; you’ll need it. BTW, if you check with Amazon, all the apps are supported too.

If you really want library ebooks on your Kindle, I would suggest that you go ask your local OverDrive  library partner. They can then bug Overdrive about the new features.

P.S. I will add an update here when I hear back from Overdrive.

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Earlier today I showed you a couple of product pages for Kindle ebooks on Amazon.fr. Now I can show you something even better.

Merrill Goussot, the editor of Le Journal du Kindle, sent me a screen shot (at right) and a link. Part of the Kindle Store is up and running right now. Well, it’s up at the moment. You can’t actually do anything because none of the product pages are available.

To be honest, the screen shot doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t know. The French Kindle Store is going to look like the US, UK, and German Kindle Stores. But if this page reflects the prices accurately, the French Kindle Store will have higher prices than the German one.

And it does give us one more piece of info that confirms the rumor I posted a couple weeks back. The CEO of Hachette Livre is rumored to have dropped a few hints in following a radio interview. I’m told that he said a new Kindle was coming to France on 8 October, but it’s clear now that he was referring to the Kindle Store.

Should the new Kindle Store open 18 days from now,  it will be Amazon’s 3rd local Kindle Store, following Germany and the UK.

Thanks, Merrill.

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Early yesterday morning I brought you the news that Amazon appeared to have opened the Android Appstore to international customers. I quickly got confirmation from a friend in the Netherlands and from a tech blog in India.

Reports then followed which confirmed access from UK, Canada, South Africa, Venezuela, Finland, Australia,  Romania, and a dozen more countries.

Well, I’ve gotten a bunch of complaints in the past 12 hours that Amazon have cut off the international access, closed the loophole, or whatever it is they did. I’ve been told that it is cut off in the UK, Greece, India, and Canada. Sorry folks, it looks like I was right yesterday when I guess that this might have been a technical error.

As much as we may regret it, this really shouldn’t come as a surprise. the normal pattern for Amazon would be to announce a big and noise public launch. At the very least there should have been a press release, not not just a quiet realization that the Appstore was open to the world.

This would have been an obvious move for Amazon, and while I thought it might be an accident I also hoped that Amazon would let it continue. Making the Appstore available outside the U.S. would have been the obvious next move for Amazon. This wouldn’t just be to drive more traffic to the Appstore but also because of the upcoming Kindle tablet. More users would attract more developers and the more content that Amazon can offer users of such devices, the better to keep them using and buying the products.

P.S. I’m still waiting to hear back from Amazon on this. I will amend this post when I get a response.

Liz Castro has tipped me to this great new way to download and convert webpages. It’s called GrabMyBooks.

It’s a Firefox plug-in that functions kinda like dotEpub, only it’s better. GrabMyBooks will not only get the content from a webpage, it will also let you combine several pages into one. And it gets better. You can also pause the conversion midstream and edit the content to fix the more annoying formatting errors and generally clean up the files. it will also accept RSS feeds as a source.

Now, dotEpub does have one advantage in that it is not tied to Firefox; GrabMyBooks is  currently only available as a Firefox plug-in, which is fine by me.

P.S. Mike Cane ranted and raved about it, which should tell you how good it is.

I’ve just gotten word from an Australian gadget blog I follow that Amazon have quietly expanded their Android Appstore to include Australia. It’s not mentioned on their support pages, so I’m still waiting for confirmation.

My source reports that they successfully installed the Appstore client and registered it with their existing (Australian) Amazon account. This is great, but does it work anywhere else? I ask because I would expect that Amazon enabled Canada, UK, NZ, as well as Australia, only they haven’t announced it yet.

Final Update: Amazon appear to have closed off the loophole. The Appstore is back to being US-only again.

Update: I just got word on Twitter that the Amazon Appstore now works in the Netherlands. That’s confirmation enough for me.

Second Update: I got a pingback from an Android blog in India. They just used the Appstore.

Third Update: The Appstore has been confirmed for  UK, Canada, South Africa, Venezuela, Finland, Ireland, Austria, Estonia, Romania, Poland, and more. <- I’m going to cut it off there and call it good.

I’d love to have everyone try this and report back.

If you want to install the app store client (and you already have an Amazon account), open the browser on your Android gadget and go here: http://www.amazon.com/app-email. That is the direct download link for the install file.

Amazon launched the Appstore back in March, and it has been slowly growing since then. With around 15 thousand apps, it’s still not nearly as large as Android Market, which is the largest app store in the world with nearly half a million apps available. But there’s also something to be said about smaller is better. Take the NookColor App Store, for example, with its curated experience. It might only have a few hundred apps but they’re the good ones.

You know, this expansion could be a technical snafu. It might be due to someone changing the wrong setting on a server. TBH, the fact that Amazon have not announced the expansion makes me believe that  this was an accident, and not part of the planned expansion.

But if it’s not a snafu then it’s a sign of Amazon finally pushing their non-Kindle content sales beyond the US. Who knows, we might see the Kindle games, mp3 store, and streaming video follow suit.

And possibly even the Kindle Tablet.

The IA announced Friday night that they had achieved a new milestone. It’s 6 years now that they’ve been scanning and uploading public domain titles and this is the week that they released their 3,ooo,oooth title.

The 3 millionth upload is from the rare book collection of the University of Toronto:

The Internet Archive launched in 2005, and since that day they have scanned and uploaded over 2 million documents.They also host another million documents that have been scanned by other groups and individuals, including around 37 thousand titles from Project Gutenberg.

The growing collection is due in large part to the one hundred+ people who work in IA scanning centers in 27 libraries in 6 countries.   The IA are also making an effort to archive hard disks, film, , and other modern storage mediums, as well as preserving the books that have been scanned. (While you might think that a hard disk is more durable than a paper book, the latter can actually have a longer lifespan.) If you look through their collection carefully, you can also find the occasional odd item like the hard disk from a 1970s Cray supercomputer, or a braille Playboy.

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Last Friday night The Economist published an anecdote about how Ikea had planned for the death of the book. They were supposedly about to release a new deeper bookcase and were also now pushing doors for their bookcases. (I covered it here.)

TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

My problem with the anecdote was that it sounded too much like an urban legend to be plausible. I didn’t believe the story, and guess what?

I was right, and the many sites who posted this story, including The Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, Time, The Daily Mail, Gizmodo, The Los Angeles Times, TechCrunch, TeleRead, NeatoRama, Acualitte, eBouquin were all wrong.

My counter argument could be summed up as:

• Ikea always had doors for the bookcases,
• they already had deeper bookcases, and
• it was the wrong time of year for a new model.

I was right on 2 out of 3, which isn’t bad.

Edward Champion of the Reluctant Habits blog contacted Ikea and he was told that the death of books had nothing to do with the new deeper Billy bookcase. It did exist, but it had also been under development for a couple years now. Also, the existing 11″ model isn’t going anywhere; the new 15″ Billy will simply supplement it.

BTW, this new deeper Billy model is the same depth as the existing Bergsbo bookcase, and that one isn’t going away either. I’ve also heard via another source that Ikea have had doors for the Billy pretty much since it launched in 1979. Ebooks had nothing to do with the doors, either.

My rule of thumb is that when a story sounds to good to be true, it probably is. And this one sounded too pat and too much like an urban legend. It’s right up there with not eating PopRock and Coke (because your stomach will rupture and you will die).

via Reluctant Habits

images by jepoirrier, mobilyazilar

Earlier today the Philadelphia Media Network beat out Hearst to become the first newspaper publisher to bundle a tablet along with the digital subscription.

I first reported on this story back when PMN first announced the bundle in July (here, here). They didn’t mention at the time which tablets they would use for the bundle, but they did discuss the general idea.  The deal they planned to offer was going to work pretty much the same as any cellphone plan. You would get the tablet for a reduced price in exchange for a long term subscription commitment.

Today they unveiled the tablet for bundle. It’s the Archos Arnova 10 G2. For a budget tablet, it’s not bad, but it’s nothing compared to the iPad. It’s running Android v2.3 Gingerbread on a 1GHz RockChip 2918 CPU with a 10″ capacitive touchscreen. It has Wifi, 4GB Flash storage, a microSD card slot, VGA webcam, and USB Host.

Curiously enough, this tablet doesn’t appear to be available yet in the US, which makes me wonder how the Philadelphia Media Network got their hands on them. In any case, it’s a decent tablet.

They’re offering the Arnova 10 G2 with 1 year and 2 year subscriptions, and the initial supply is limited to just 5 thousand units. The bundle originally was going to include just one subscription, but apparently they decided to throw in both publications (Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News) in for the one price. The 2 year subscription comes out to $340, and the one year subscription works out to cost you around $286.

• 2 year plan: $100 for the tablet and $10 a month for a digital subscription for both publications
• 1 year plan: $130 for the tablet and $13 a month for a digital subscription

Curiously enough, you’re actually getting 3 subscriptions, not 2. It’s not completely clear, but it looks like you get the digital editions of the 2 newspapers and you also get a subscription for the Philadelphia Inquirer Android app, which appears to be a different publication. The app boasts interactive content and looks to have content not offered in the regular digital edition.

All in all, I think it’s a great idea. Now that they know they’ll have this installed base of 10″ tablets, the Philadelphia Media Network might start customizing a digital edition for this tablet size.  I’ve never seen the electronic version of their newspapers, but I’m hoping this move will make them more readable.

While there is no evidence to prove it, that is what Arnaud Nourry, the CEO of Hachette Livre, said in an interview last week.

The other Nathan at the other ebook blog has turned up a radio interview that M. Nourry gave to Soft Power, a French radio show. I don’t speak French, but I’ve double checked with a second source and the guy does indeed say that the new Kindle is coming the second Saturday in October.

Update: I’m now told that my confirming source was wrong. There is no mention of a Kindle in the radio interview. The only evidence comes from  tweets posted by the journalist who interviewed Noury. Sorry, folks. This correction comes from Merrill Goussot, the editor of Le Journal du Kindle. Thanks, Merrill.

So it’s coming on a Saturday. Since when do Amazon release product on a Saturday?

Now, you’d think that the CEO of one of the world’s largest publishers would have some idea when the next Kindle is due, and this isn’t the first time that a CEO leaked details. So I think that he was right about the Kindle coming soon but wrong on the date.

I wonder if he had the month right but the day wrong? What if the correct date is actually 18 October? That is a Tuesday, and Amazon like to launch products on Tuesdays. But there’s a second possibility. November 8 is also a Tuesday, so what if it’s not coming out until November?

On the other hand, what if this is actually a reference to the local Kindle Store? Perhaps it might launch on 8 October.

In any case, this is just one rumor piled upon a bunch of others. Let’s see what turns up next week.

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There’s an interesting sound bite from an article that everyone is repeating today, and it is nonsense. The original source is an anecdote used to start a day old article on the Econ0mist website, and it truly is a sound bite:

TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

Lots of people, including The Daily Mail, Time, Gizmodo, LATimes, TechCrunch, TeleRead, NeatoRama, Acualitte, and eBouquin, are repeating the story because it is a great sound bite.

Unfortunately, no one took a moment to stop and think it through. The story is anecdotal and it is nonsense.

The problem with this is rather simple: one detail is out of context and the other is probably wrong. Ikea have always had doors for their bookshelves, including glass. They have the doors, yes, but to derive some meaning from the claim that they are already promoting doors is disingenuous; Ikea have never made any effort to sell me anything, much less doors for the bookshelves.

Also, I’m fairly sure that Ikea will not be releasing a new Billy model. It’s my understanding that they introduce new models with each new catalog. They already sent out a catalog for this year; it came out in June. That would suggest that they will not release a new model until next year.

BTW, the Billy line might be getting a new deeper model (though I cannot find any evidence), but it will simply replace/compete with one of Ikea’s existing deep bookshelves.  They already have a couple, including some shelving units that are so deep they are closer to being cabinets.

Update: It turns out that I am half right. Scroll down and you will see a pingback from a Swedish (?) blog. The blogger was told by Ikea that they would soon have a deeper Billy bookcase. The new Billy is one that Ikea already sell; it’s just going to get a different brand name.

I hate stories like this. It’s one of those stories that sounds so good that few bother to double check the details (sometimes I fall for them too). What’s worse is that this little anecdote is overshadowing the rest of a highly detailed, well written Econ0mist article.

images by jepoirrier, mobilyazilar

A couple weeks ago I brought you news that Google might be planning to expand the Google eBookstore UK, CA, and Australia. At the time I posted I did not have any real proof of their intention other than that they were letting publishers set prices and sales conditions for the new markets.

Today I have something new to show you. One eagle-eyed reader has found a new job listing with Google Australia.  It’s a temp position for a "Google eBooks Site Merchandiser".

It looks to me like Google are hiring the staff for the Australian branch of the Google eBookstore. I can’t get a statement from Google on when they plan to launch down-under, but it should be clear now that they are going to. In fact, the temporary nature of this position argues that Google plan to launch soon, doesn’t it?

Now, I looked at the related jobs pages for Canada and the UK, but I didn’t find any job postings that mentioned the Google eBookstore. I also can’t find anything on Linkedin, but that doesn’t really mean anything.

It’s been just 9 months between the time Google launched the eBookstore and the first hint that it would go international, and compared to some of Google’s services that is actually rather fast. But as I’ve said in the previous post, Google are probably going to be lining up the  publishers for at least a few months before they announce the launch. That’s what they did before the US launch, and there’s no reason for them to change.

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A friend sent me an email this morning with an update on Amazon’s new KPR format. He thought I’d want to know that the usual suspects had hacked the file and released a script that could remove the DRM.

He’s right. I did want to know.

You see, I own an ebook in the new KPR format. I’d like to be able to make sure I can still use my property even after the original copy is gone from the Kindle store, and even after I’ve switched to a new computer. The only way I can do that is by removing the DRM.

I have said on many occasions that you should use DRM removal tools not so you can pirate the content, but so you can protect your purchases. And that is why I’m posting about this new hack.

You can find the KPR hack as part of the latest bundle of DRM removal scripts. It’s over on the Apprentice Alf blog, but you need to know where to look (here). That site is being quietly maintained by someone, and out of appreciation for their work I have not pried too deeply.

The ZIP file that they’re maintaining over there is actually a bundle of scripts that can remove the DRM from a number of ebook formats, including Kindle, Nook, Mobipocket, eReader (the really old format), Epub, and PDF. It doesn’t appear to support iBooks yet, but that’s okay (it’s a minor format).

You might also want to check out the FAQ.

image via by Moff

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Charbax has posted another hands-on video from IFA, and this time around he spent time with Pocketbook’s newest tablet, the A10.

I know that it might look odd to see the buttons lined up like that, but that was part of the design. The tablet has a wedge shaped design with the thickest part under the buttons and the back is rubberized so you can get a better grip.

The A10 is running Android v2.3 Gingerbread on a Texas Instruments 1GHz CPU.  It has a 10″ (1024×768) capacitive touchscreen, and it will come with Wifi/Bluetooth, 4GB Flash storage, g-sensor, a microSD card slot, speaker/mike, and a 2MP camera.

Charbax was his usual charming self and he managed to talk a lot of details out of the tech rep. The retail is going to be 299, but it’s not clear if that is the price in euros or dollars. The A10 is supposed to hit store shelves in November, just in time to compete with the AmTab. The PB rep said that it had around 7 hours battery life, and if you turn it upside down the screen will automatically reorient itself.

It’s a pretty slick looking tablet, isn’t it? I really hope that the price ends up being $299, but even at that price I’m not sure it’s worth it. For not too much more I could get the Asus Transformer.