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New Sony Readers lets you export your notes, highlights, and annotations

So my Sony Reader review units finally arrived (I must have been really far down the list). I just got them yesterday, so I’m still in the early stages of playing with them to see what they can do. But I found a feature that I really want you to see: Sony lets you export annotations from the PRS-650 and PRS-350.

You might recall that I reviewed the Edge back in April. One feature that made me really happy was that it could export your annotations as a PDF. It was the only ereader with that ability at the time. I do wonder if Sony added this export in response to my post. I don’t know if they did, but I do know that I can’t find it in the PRS-600 user manual, and that ereader had largely the same feature set as the 650.

Update: a commenter pointed out that I was wrong; the PRS-600 could export notes. I’ll take his word for it; I just went through the manual again and I can’t see where this feature is mentioned. #SonyFAIL

You’ll need the Sony Reader Library software to extract the notes, and you’ll get a RTF file.The RTF file will have highlighted excerpts, typed notes, and whatever you scribbled on the screen.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work all that well. It’s difficult to get the screen shots out; I’d much rather have a PDF. But I think part of my problem with the screen shot is that it appears to be acting like it is an SVG, and I don’t know how to handle it. Also, Mike Cane noted some time back that DRM breaks the export feature. If you highlight part of a DRM protected ebook; it won’t get exported. And Sony hid the export button quite well (they can’t design a user interface to save their lives).

All in all, this is a good start and it’s better than anything the Nook, Kobo, or Pocketbook can do. If you were wondering why Sony charged more, this is a pretty good reason.

Second Update: Now that we know that Sony added this feature last year, it changes my perception. It really should work better by now.

How to go Amazon free on your Kindle

A few days ago I came across Duokan, an open source firmware for the Amazon Kindle (2/3/DX). It’s being developed by a group of Chinese developers and while it’s still in beta, unfortunately, it’s gotten good enough that you might want to try it.

BTW, Duokan doesn’t replace the existing Kindle firmware, so you won’t have to worry about breaking your Kindle.

Right now Wifi isn’t working (for me), and I’m not sure they plan to hack the 3G connection. But you can read Epub, Mobi, PDF, and txt, and you can highlight and bookmark. I haven’t tested it yet, but you also have the option of TTS (it’s probably Chinese only at the moment). There’s also a music player and what appears to be an RSS Reader.

I’m going to pass, myself. Yes, I’d love to be able to read Epub, but Duokan currently supports only full justification and I much prefer to have left justification only. Also, I’d really prefer to have Wifi.  And to be perfectly honest, if I wanted an ereader that supported Epub I’d get an ereader that supported Epub.

You can download a copy of Duokan here. Pay close attention to the instructions on how to switch the interface from Chinese to English.

Doukan via lesen.net

eReader market dividing into high end and cheap and cheerful

By Tony Cole

It is beginning… From Rolls Royce to junk…

As many commentators have been saying for some time, as the idea of eReaders becomes more established, we are now seeing that both ends of the market are growing.  At the top end we have  sophisticated devices such as the Entourage and Kindle 3, and at the other end there are now an increasing number of cheap, almost throw-away eReaders coming onto the market.   Prices for some of these low end models have gone down to less that 80 USD a piece, and will get even cheaper in time.

Obviously those of us who see an eReader as a device we hope to use for some years will plump for the high- end ones.. Kindles, Sony’s, Kobos and so on, but there appears to be a place for the cheap ones too…   The sort of electronic device one would expect to find in mass outlets such as Wall mart and similar.  After all, one can buy an MP3 player made by a well known company for a relatively high price, or a no-name Chinese knock-off for almost nothing, both of which will perform as advertised, but the cheap one will of course give up the ghost long before the expensive one.   It will be the same with eReaders, of this I am sure.

The MiGear ereader is a good example of the cheap end of the market – it works, but is pretty limited in what it can offer you.

Not necessarily a bad thing…

I don’t see this as a bad thing to be honest, as people ask different things from their electronic devices – some simply buy them on impulse and don’t really know why they bought it, others after a lot of thought and research and know exactly what they want it for.   If you happen to be someone who reads at every opportunity, or at least pretty  often, then obviously a higher end device is what you want, on the other hand, if all you want it for is to store recipes or a dictionary, then the cheaper ones are a better bet.

It is this dichotomy that I feel will drive the two ends of this market over the next years.

Every day I receive more than a hundred press releases and alerts all relating to eBooks and similar, and as I have mentioned before on this blog, the number of eBooks that are appearing that are obviously aimed squarely at the bottom end of the market is astounding, eBooks on how to keep slim, how to feed your family, how to look after your pets and similar. This is not the sort of thing that a “serious” eBook reader is likely to want to have, but is very much what a lot of people who are not really book readers do find useful to have at their disposal.   and if the device that they can keep such books on is cheap and easy to use, they will happily buy them.

An ereader for each person’s needs…

Basically, what I anticipate is the situation we currently have with shops, one has newsagents, who sell magazines, cook books and similar stuff, and one has book shops who sell (obviously) books.   And what I believe is that the eReader market will reflect this situation.  Cheap eReaders for those who would normally buy their reading and reference material at newsagents or airports and who consider their purchases to be more or less throw away stuff, and expensive eReaders for those who are serious readers.

If one’s eReader is going to live on a shelf in the kitchen, it would seem foolish to have a 200 USD device for that…  Getting covered in fat, milk being spilled on it and all the other risks of such a life…  Much better to have a truly simple eReader that you can afford to replace when it, inevitably, dies.

A whole house full of cheap and expensive ereaders:

This development seems to me not simply to be inevitable, but to have already started, a sort of democratization of the eReader as it becomes steadily more and more mainstream in our lives.   So ere long, we will all probably have a number of devices knocking about the house on which to store our various eBooks – one for serious reading, one for the kitchen, another for the TV room, perhaps several for the kids and so on…   Much as we do with MP3 players and mobile phones already.

As a result of this development, I am completely convinced that a steady stream of no-name eReaders will become easily available to us all, at almost no cost as production increases, and thus lowers the unit cost to manufacturers.  As a demonstration of this I have seen brand new MP3 players on sale in Chinese shops for as little as about 2 USD – and they worked fine too…

Samsung Zeal to ship with E-ink screen

Verizon accidentally announced the newest Samsung cellphone. There’s no press release yet and Verizon’s product pages don’t list it anymore, but SlashGear got this screen shot before the page was taken down.

The Zeal is one of the latest phones to have 2 screens, only in this case one screen is E-ink and one is LCD. But aside from the E-ink screen, this is a rather ordinary phone. It has a 2.6″ LCD screen, Bluetooth, 2MP camera, and the usual media abilities.

There’s no word yet on price or availability.

via Slashgear

Amazon to open German ebookstore next year?

Well, yeah. You could pretty much assume that Amazon were going to open ebookstores on all their country specific sites (UK, France, Germany); the only question was when.

The Bookseller are reporting on a story that hit the German blogs yesterday. Again, it’s not much of a story.

Germany could become the next market outside of the United States and United Kingdom to have a dedicated Kindle store.

Buchmarkt reports that publishers at the recent Homer 3.0 conference in Berlin said they were in discussions with Amazon representatives about a 2011 launch of a Kindle store.

Personally, I think it’s a bad idea. I’d much rather have one global ebookstore.

Have Amazon dropped the Whispernet tax?

I’ve heard an interesting report from an Australian tech blogger I know.  Amazon appear to have removed the $2 surcharge on ebooks sold in the Australian Kindle Store.

FYI: In most of the countries where Amazon sell ebooks, they charge an extra $2. This money is used to pay the local cell phone provider for the use of the network. BTW, if you want to get annoyed with Amazon, ask yourself why Amazon are charging people who don’t own a K2i or K3 3G the extra $2 on each ebook they buy. They don’t use the cell network, so why are they paying for it?

Here’s what Darryl Adams reported:

A message left by reader Chris has some great news:

Just an update on the Kindle: the whispernet tax has been quietly repealed.

You won’t find any official announcement about it, as it was never official policy in the first place, but in the last month every single kindle book on my wishlist dropped in price by exactly $2

I can not confirm it yet (as Chris has said, no statement has been made, and whispertax was never advised officially either), but if true, this is great news and a boon for Kindle users.

The Whispernet Tax should never had been applied, and Amazon should repay the $2 premium it charged on Aussie customers.

New Kindle app now available – Panda Poet

Spry Fox (they developed Triple Town) have just uploaded a new app for the Kindle. It’s called Panda Poet, and they’re selling it for $2.99. I haven’t played it yet, so I’m going to have to go with the product listing:

With Panda Poet you use the letters on the game board to form words. Words formed from letters in open spaces create pandas. Words formed from letters near pandas make existing pandas grow.

The goal is grow the biggest panda possible. You get the highest scores from either creating the biggest possible panda or from forming the longest possible words.

To add to the challenge, each letter is only available for a fixed number of turns. Each time you enter a word, all the letters on the screen come one step closer to expiring. When a letter expires, it is replaced by a skull, which prevents you from growing your pandas in that direction. This makes playing Panda Poet a delicate balancing act: you must consider where a letter is located on the grid and how soon it will expire, not simply spell the longest word you can.

Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0049U0M96/ref=kin_post_os_B0049U0M96

Hanvon to debut color E-ink e-reader on Tuesday

I guess this means Hanvon won’t be doing a Mirasol based ereader after all.  The NY Times have the story:

But on Tuesday at the FPD International 2010 trade show in Tokyo, a Chinese company will announce that it will be the first to sell a color display using technology from E Ink, whose black-and-white displays are used in 90 percent of the world’s ereaders, including the Amazon Kindle, Sony Readers and the Nook from Barnes & Noble.

However, the new color E Ink display, while an important technological breakthrough, is not as sharp and colorful as LCD. Unlike an LCD screen, the colors are muted, as if one were looking at a faded color photograph. In addition, E Ink cannot handle full-motion video. At best, it can show simple animations.

Hanvon’s first product using a 9.68-inch color touch screen will be available this March in China, starting at about $440. The price is less than an iPad in China, which sells for about $590. It will be positioned as a business product, with Wi-Fi and 3G wireless connectivity.

Cybook Orizon hands on video

Mike Cane found this video on Youtube. It shows some of the abilities of the new Cybook Orizon. You also get a side by side comparison with the PRS-650, which unfortunately shows that the Orizon has the same gray screen problem as the Oyo. But, the Orizon doesn’t have the faded text problem, which should make it easier to use.

Earlier today I was exchanging emails with my Bookeen contact. I asked (not really expecting an answer) why Bookeen kept developing this ereader in spite of the screen quality issue. Now I know why. The Orizon uses the touchscreen to do things that you can’t with any other ereader. If they’d changed the hardware this wouldn’t be such an interesting ereader.

I think I’m going to have to eat my words about the Sipix screen quality. It has some features that make me not care (the pinch-zoom made me drool).

An Example Of Bad eBook Formatting

by Mike Cane

It shouldn’t have to be this way, either.

Harriman House thought so highly of the late Max Gunther’s long out-of-print books that they’ve gotten not only the print rights, but the eBook ones too.

While the print editions are probably very readable, the eBook ones are just a disaster.

Thanks to Moriah Jovan, I’m able to compare screensnaps of the bad Kindle formatting with iPad screensnaps I took from an ePub version sample available at the iBookstore.


Click = big


Click = big

While the cover’s dimensions are suitable for an 600×800 eInk screen, the cover is lost in all of the whitespace of the iPad’s larger screen. Publishers need to create large eye-popping covers for tablets.

The indicia:


Click = big


Click = big

Notice how it all clumps together in the Kindle version and even has some very bizarre line breaks!

It’s not much better on the iPad, either:


Click = big

No blank lines between the block paragraphs, as there would be in a proper print version. No publisher would even allow that in a professionally-produced print version, so why let it pass here?


Click = big

Moriah doesn’t like the fact “Harriman House, 2010? is in gray text. But it works on the iPad:


Click = big

Notice however that the line is now left-aligned, not right-aligned!

And here comes the horrendous formatting in the Kindle version:


Click = big

It’s just about all one block of text! What were they thinking?

I think they were counting on something the iPad tried to do:


Click = big

Notice that the iPad tried to insert some spacing between the paragraphs. But this is still bad formatting and should be redone.

It doesn’t get any better as it continues:


Click = big


Click = big

Really, just a line of asterisks as a separator? Do proper dingbats cost more? I don’t think so. An amateur would do that line of asterisks back in the days of IBM Selectrics and Liquid Paper. It has no business showing up in the 21st century in an eBook!

Below is just a rough I did myself. I took the Kindle sample, converted it to HTML, dumped it in Atlantis, and just put in proper paragraph indents. This is just messing around. I’m not saying this is pro quality (it’s damn well not!):


Click = big

So they can get proper frikkin paragraph indents, they just didn’t bother to do the little bit of extra work that would take.

I’ve recommended Max Gunther’s books. They’re excellent. But I can’t recommend these eBook versions until Harriman House lives up to its commitment to Gunther and formats them properly

Sony now offering a $75 trade in credit for old e-readers

A new trade in offer showed up on the S0ny Style website yesterday. Send Sony your old ereader and they’ll give you a $75 credit towards a new one. I’m going to take them up on this offer.

I spent a day digging through my collection and I’ve decided to part with one of my old Sony Data Discman.  I bought this one off Ebay in August 2008, and with a manufacturing date of October 1991 it holds the title as my oldest fucntional ereader.

This is one of the earlier models. For the most part Sony numbered the models sequentially, so the DD-1 was released before the DD-20. But I also know this was an early model becuase it only supports the basic Data Discman ebook format. You see, Sony developed several different formats for the DDs; I know of at least 2, and there might have been as many as 4. The basic format only has text and images, and the more advanced format EBXA supports embedded audio. I’ve also found hints that there was a format with embedded video, but I haven’t seen it.

I’m parting with it, though. The screen barely works anymore, and the battery won’t hold a charge. Its only value now is as a display unit, and I have a couple other models that are in much better shape.

Sony Style

Kalahari.net to sell the Elonex 500EB

Now _this_ was an interesting choice.

I have just learned that Kalahari.net, a South African web retailer, have added the Elonex 500EB as a platform for their ebookstore. The 500EB was just announced at IFA 2010. It has a 5″ LCD screen, 2GB Flash, and a SD card slot, but no Wifi or touchscreen. It supports Adobe DE DRM, and it also reads AVI, MP3, and WAV.

click to embiggen

In other news, Kalahari are also selling the Cybook Gen3, Cybook Opus, and the iriver Story (all of which can be used with the Kalahari ebookstore). They have also expanded their ebookstore to include digital magazines. They’ve signed up to be a retailer for Zinio. You can buy the magazines from Kalahari, but you’ll need the Zinio to read them.

Kalahari.net via IT Web

Kobo now offering NYTimes as a 30 day trial

I just got an email from Kobo. IIn partnership with the NYTimes, they’ve extended the trial subscription for the daily edition of the New York Times newspaper. You now have the option of a 30 day risk free trial.

Of course, there’s a minor problem with this offer. Right now, subscriptions only work with the Kobo iOS app (and the Kobo Wifi), and there’s a very good _free_ app for the NYTimes. There’s little point in subscribing if you can get the web content free.

Pocketbook to open first US e-reader stores next week

The Kansas City Business Journal are reporting that Pocketbook will open their first US retail locations on 10 November. The 2 pilot stores will be mall kiosks in Seattle and at the Independence Center Mall outside of Kansas City, MO. Why Kansas City? Because that’s where Pocketbook just opened their US headquarters.

I had heard from a  source that these would be mall kiosks soon, but this is the first official confirmation that I’ve seen. BTW, these won’t be the first Pocketbook stores, just the first in the USA. Pocketbook already have 3 retail stores in the Ukraine.

Energy Sistem ColorBook 5″ LCD e-reader, 110€

Do you know how you can tell it’s a slow day for tech news? It’s when major tech blogs like Engadget cover a boring little ereader like this one. I’m not trying to be mean; it’s just that this ereader is really nothing special.

I’ve covered Energy Sistem before; they’re a consumer electronics importer in Spain and this is their 6th ereader (the previous 5 had E-ink screens). It’s based on a 5″ LCD screen and it offers 4  options (2GB to 8GB Flash) and a microSD card slot, but no Wifi or touchscreen. Energy Sistem are selling it for 110€ to 135€, which is a little much considering what the K3 costs.

It doesn’t appear to support DRM, but it does read TXT, HTML, PDF, EPUB, FB2, RTF, MOBI, CHM, and DOC ebook formats as well as a pretty broad selection of video and audio formats (WMA, MP3, MP4, WMV, AVI, RMVB, FLV, ASF, 3GP, and MOV).

Energy Sistem