Fnac held a press event today where they unveiled their new ereader, the FnacBook. Yes, I double checked and that really is the name.  You might recognize the hardware as the Thalia Oyo; they’re retail partners (I’m not sure that’s the right word) and both are using an ereader originally developed by Sagem Wireless.

Fnac now have the Fnacbook up for pre-order; retail will be 199€. An observant person might recall that Thalia are selling the Oyo for 139€. The FnacBook costs more because it ships with 3G, not just Wifi. Other than wireless, the FnacBook has the same specs as the Oyo.

• 6″ Sipix screen
• capacitive touchscreen
• 2GB Flash
• microSD card slot (16 GB supported)
• accelerometer
• MP3 player
• Adobe DE DRM support

via ebouquin.fr

This should be a slide show of photos taken at the press conference:

His ex-wife sued him for fraud!

A couple weeks ago I posted about how I was scammed by Max Seybold and a company called Cherrypal. On Monday one of Max’s other victims contacted me and suggested that I check the court records for Santa Clara County (that’s where the scumbag lives). Oh, boy. You’re not gonna beleive what I found.

First, a recap of my experience.

I was scammed by Max Seybold when his company, Cherrypal, sold me a netbook. He repeatedly lied to me and eventually he ignored my emails. I never got the netbook nor did I get a refund.

But never mind me; the scam he played on me was small potatoes.

I did some digging, and I found the court records  for Santa Clara County. It turns out that "Max Seybold" is only one of his alias. He’s also been sued under the names Wolfgang Max Seybold, Max Wolfgang Seybold, Max W. Seybold, Wolfgang M. Seybold, and probably several others that I haven’t found yet.

I don’t have the full court records, only the bare details. I don’t think that matters, though. He’s listed as a defendant in so many lawsuits that it shows a pattern. He is quite clearly a scammer. Here are some of the more interesting cases:

• Aok Management (my guess is they were his landlord)
• Sayer Fausto (a law firm)
• Credit Suisse
• Silicon Valley Bank
• American Express

I skipped a couple cases where his former employees sued him. And please don’t forget his ex-wife; she really did sue him for fraud.

From what I can tell, I don’t think anyone has sued him successfully. He’s obviously a very good attorney.

Folks, I’m going to leave it there (for now). This isn’t a get Max Seybold blog, and TBH I’m enjoying this too much. (*his own wife*) But I will say that this makes me feel better. Max only scammed me out of $120; he took some of his other victims for over $10,000.

Dorchester is a small to medium size publisher who have been having financial difficulties for the past year (or so). As part of a move to stave off bankruptcy, in the past couple months they’ve reduced staff, announced plans to go digital only, and they’ve dropped a number of authors.

There’s a problem with that last one. They’re still selling ebooks for a couple authors they dropped (even though Dorchester sent the appropriate paperwork to the respective agents).

Dorchester is committing PIRACY.

You can get the full story over at SBTB.

Jana DeLeon received the rights to her work from Dorchester on 15 September 2010. She even sent me a PDF of the rights reversion in case I doubted her story. She hasn’t been paid, nor has she received royalty statements in months, but now she has a bigger problem.

Over a month later, her digital books are still on sale pretty much everywhere. (Please note: links to books on sale ahoy. I’m going to do something horrible and ask you NOT to buy them. Please. Do not buy them. I have no faith that DeLeon or any Dorchester author I link to would ever see a dime.)

…

Leslie Langtry’s rights were also returned from Dorchester, and her digital books are still for sale at Amazon and other digital vendors. But Langtry finds herself in an even more uncomfortable situation: after her rights were reverted, her book Guns Will Keep Us Together was offered as a free digital download for Kindle.

Engadget are reporting that next week B&N will hold a press event  at their Union Square store in NYC. Right now everyone’s speculating on what type of ereader B&N will announce. I’m betting that this will be the large screen device I predicted based on the FCC paperwork we saw back in July.

Based on B&N’s trademark filings, the new device could be called the Nook 2 or the Nook Kids. (Or it might be called somehting entirely different.)

I won’t be attending; it’s not worth a trip to New York. I can cover this event without leaving my desk just as well as if I were there.

I posted a review of this ereader a couple hours ago, and a commenter  pointed me at the product page for the Lookbook. They’re selling it for only $123.

Do you like to hack the software on your gadgets? Here’s your chance to get a Lookbook and start a new project. If someone could give this ereader a new reading app and web browser it would be one heck of a gadget.

I’m looking at my Lookbook right now, and the words "squandered potential" come to mind.

I first heard about this ereader from the internal CVS docs that someone sent to Engadget. I’ve been quietly waiting for it to be released, and I got mine about a 2 weeks ago. It’s a Kindle clone based on a 7″ LCD screen, and I’ve covered the physical description in detail in my previous post.

Before I get into the review, it’s important for you to know that the Lookbook is a close relative of the Literati that we reviewed a several weeks ago. It has the same Kobo reading app and ebookstore access, so it shares a lot of the same shortcomings with respect to formatting, margins, etc. But one difference is that the Lookbook has page turn buttons instead of the Literati’s swipe pads. I like buttons; they’re  a heck of a lot easier to use.

I actually like how the Lookbook is designed, and if not for the poor reading experience, many debilitating bugs, missing web browser, and difficult joystick, I would recommend this devices to anyone. To be exact, I think it sucks as an ereader but it has potential has a MID. I think there’s a market niche for an MID that looks like a Kindle clone, and if the Lookbook had the right software it would fit in that niche.

Unfortunately, the Lookbook is crippled by a SD card bug similar to the one found on the Literati, so I can’t load my own ebooks. It also can’t find ebooks that I’ve copied to its internal Flash storage. This is a pass fail for me.

The Lookbook also shares the wide margins, limited font choices, and poor formatting found on the Literati. But do you know what’s really odd about this? I checked and the Kobo iOS app doesn’t have the same problems; it showed the ebooks as made by publisher. So I really have to wonder why Kobo handed over the crippled reading app. I suppose there was nothing better, but if that were true then I wouldn’t have released the app.

BTW, there have been a couple requests in the reviews of the Literati that I discuss how color image look on the screen. I can’t. The ebooks I get from Kobo don’t have pictures, and I can’t load my own. The cover images are often in color and they look nice, but without other images I really don’t care.

Battery life was disappointing; it only lasted 4 days between charges. The really bad part is that I didn’t use it much, so it was in sleep mode most of the time.

One last problem that the Lookbook shares with almost all Kobo reading apps is the slow loading of ebooks. that isn’t a bug they can fix; it’s unfortunate consequence of how the reading app was designed.

The ebooks you buy from Kobo aren’t stored on the ereader as Epub files. Instead, they’re all crammed into a SQLite database. The ebooks are slow to load becuase first they have to be extracted from the database.

If you’re wondering why they did this, well, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. It let Kobo get around the $75k per device license fee that Adobe charge for Adobe RM. Yes, that’s a nice chunk of change they saved, but in exchange Kobo inflicted a worse reading experience on us all. I don’t think that was a good trade.

Opinion

I’m almost tempted to keep the Lookbook. It’s a poor ereader for $149, but I really want to see what happens once hackers start messing with the firmware. Give this device a decent reading app (FBReader) and a web browser and it would be a serious competition in the ereader market.

Update: The Lookbook is now available at Overstock.com for $123. This doesn’t change my mind about it as an ereader, but the price is tempting.

Apple had their quarterly earning call earlier this evening, and of course the rumored 7″ iPad came up. Here’s what Wired reported Steve Jobs as saying:

Presumably referring to Samsung’s Android-powered Galaxy Tab and Research In Motion’s PlayBook — two 7-inch tablets hitting stores soon — Jobs said these devices were too small for a pleasant touchscreen experience.

“7-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad,” said Jobs, adding that competing manufacturers were struggling to meet the price point of the iPad, which starts at $500. Both Samsung and RIM have not announced pricing on their tablets.

“These are among the reasons that the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA — dead on arrival,” Jobs said during the earnings call.

I’ve had my hands on enough tablets that I agree with him.

As I see it, the 7″ tablet isn’t as useful as a 9″ tablet and it’s not as portable as a 5″ (and smaller). I currently have a 7″ and 10″ tablet in hand, and I’ve tested several other 7″ tablets. Trust me, the extra 2″ (for the iPad) is worth it. It makes the screen significantly more usable and the tablet no less portable. Why do you think the iPad debuted with a 9″ screen? They had to have tested this.

And if you go the other way and remove 2″, you’ll end up with something like the Archos 5IT (4.8″ screen). I can hols the 5IT comfortably in one hand; I can’t say the same for a 7″ tablet. When you have a one handed device, you have the opportunity of walking while using it. That’s just not possible with a 7″ tablet.

I actually made a similar prediction during a presentation last Thursday. I didn’t have the guts to post it, unfortunately; I was afraid the iPad Mini rumors were true. My prediction, actually, was that eventually everyone would figure out that 7″ tablets were less useful and they’d be dropped from the market.

I’m not saying that the 7″ tablet will die immediately; I’m expecting to see something similar to what happened to the 7″ netbook. People eventually realized they didn’t like it, so manufacturers simply stopped releasing new models. I expect the existing 7″ tablets will age out of the market and not be replaced.

Jbmm.fr came across this odd looking device in Hong Kong. It has the Archos brand on it, but I’m certain this is a knock-off (for 2 reasons). I’ve seen the menu on other generic Chinese gadgets, for one. And my other reason is that this doesn’t look like Archos hardware. Get it at your own risk, folks.

Right now all I know is that it runs Android and has a 7″ screen. I would strenuously urge you to avoid it.

via Armdevices.net

WH Smith launched their iPad app today. You have the option of buying and downloading their selection of 25,000 ebooks.

But how much is the app costing them? I have a source who gave me a heads up on the launch, and also told me that:

Sources report that … annual Adobe fees to be estimated at other £100,000 per year and the maintenance fees at over £100,000 per year.

I’m not sure if it’s true, but it would explain why it took so long for someone to develop an app that used Adobe DRM. This might also explain why Kobo went with their own DRM system instead of Adobe’s. Just think what it would mean if that fee were per app per year. The maintenance fee sounds plausible. It’s high, yes, but still plausible.

P.S. I’m waiting to see if Adobe or WHSmith will comment on this.

PC World are reporting that the Chinese cellphone maker Huawei have just launched an app store with 80k titles. They’re calling it a Digital Shopping Mall.

The Digital Shopping Mall is being built with a larger scope than other app stores, such as the iTunes Store which is solely meant for Apple products like the iPhone. The Digital Shopping Mall features apps for different mobile operating systems such as Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian. At the same time, Huawei is aggregating apps from countries across the world. Telecom operators will be able to customize how they wish to offer the Digital Shopping Mall to their users.

What’s most interesting about this app store is that it was built so Huawei’s telecom customers could offer their own branded app store. Not word yet on who is using it, but I did find a hint that Vodaphone SPain might be. The story is behind a paywall, so I’m not sure.

Mike Cane just tweeted:

Borders just changed their system so you don’t have to give them a credit card in order to download a free ebook. This is a big deal. It shows that Borders actually thought about this and realized what they were doing wrong.

I thought the matter was simple but given that several ebookstores still don’t understand, perhaps I should explain why Borders changed their system.

The point of free ebooks is to give people a reason to come back to an ebookstore. (Obvious, I know.)  But there is a corollary that seems to have escaped some ebookstores: you need to make this as easy as possible for the customer.

Borders used to require a credit card number before you could download a free ebook. (B&N still do.) I would have thought that forcing a customer to fill out a form in order to get a freebie would not count as making the process simple. It also irritates some customers. I, for one, won’t give out personal info to get a freebie, and I’m probably not alone in that.

I didn’t have an account at Borders and I don’t have an account at B&N. But I did have an account at Kobo. Do you know why? It’s becuase Kobo didn’t require a credit card. And becuase I already have an account with Kobo, it’s now the second place I check for ebooks (after Amazon).

P.S. I’m going to go download some freebies from Borders.com.

Do you recall the CVS paper work that Engadget got a couple months ago? It showed a netbook and an ereader that CVS planned to carry this Christmas season. I’ve been keeping an eye on CVS, and the product page went up a couple days ago.

I bought one and it arrived today. BTW, I’m pretty sure it won’t be carried in stores; I checked the 4 stores within driving distance and they don’t have it.

You probably know that this is a Kindle clone with a 7″ LCD screen, Wifi, and support for Kobo ebookstore. What you don’t know is that this is a close relative of the Literati. The Lookbook is trademarked, copyrighted, and so on by Merchsource, the company behind the Sharper Image Literati.

Sidenote: I went and found the FCC paperwork. I don’t know how I missed it when it was posted back in September.

I still have the white Literati, so I’ll compare the 2 ereaders. The Lookbook is slightly shorter and wider than the Literati. It has the USB, power, and SD card slot on the bottom, the Literati has the SD card slot on the upper edge. The Look book has a curved silver back; the Literati’s back is beveled.

For the most part they have the same keyboard, but the Lookbook has an extra button: "/". If it had a web browser, that button would come in handy.The Lookbook has page turn buttons, not swipe pads. And the keyboard on the Lookbook is very shiny (that’s why the photo looks odd.)

I’m really not impressed with the build quality; it has a cheap feel to it. Look at the picture, and you’ll see that the buttons don’t line up. It doesn’t look any better in person.

The 2 ereaders have the same library setup, ebookstore, and are running the same reading app. But they share the lack of decent annotation and formatting options, unfortunately.

One important difference is that the Lookbook doesn’t have the brightness control of the Literati. It also is having trouble finding the ebooks on my SD card. No, wait, it can’t find the card at all.

The support page is finally up (the site was down last I checked). They really need to rewrite the user manual; the font is ugly and it contains incorrect details.

That’s all for now; I’m going to go play with it for a while.

The problem with the internet is that it has such a short memory. This unfortunately makes it necessary to dredge up old news and remind people.

Cherrypal just announced a 7″ Android tablet for $188. Don’t order it; you"ll never get it.

I was scammed by Cherrypal and Max Seybold last December. His business is nothing but a scam, and I’m surprised he keeps getting away with it.

I first came across Cherrypal back in December 2009. They had just announced "grab-bag" type laptop for $99. The idea was that the laptop would be made from whatever parts that could be found cheap and that would have certain minimum specs. I bought one, and that was my first mistake.

Here’s what I wrote about Cherrypal back on 13 January 2010. When I wrote it, I hadn’t yet figured out that Cherrypal was a scam.

First, let’s cover the lies told to me. I ordered a Cherrypal Africa laptop on 21 December. I waited a couple days for an email about when my order was shipped, but received nothing. I did not get a response from Cherrypal until after the 4th email I sent. The email I received on 30 December said that I would get a tracking number the next day, and that I would receive my order soon. Needless to say, neither event occurred. I still do not have my laptop, nor have I gotten a refund.

Second, let’s consider what I had to say to get a response at all. My first 3 emails were ignored. In order to get a response to the 4th email, I had to include my concern that this was a scam. When I sent a 5th email to point out the broken promises, it was ignored as well. My 6th email did get a response, but that may have been because I asked "Where is my F***ing laptop"? It was questionable, yes, but I am very angry about the treatment I have received. Four weeks had gone by without a word from Cherrypal other than when I poked them.

My last response from "Max Sebold" was that I would get a refund by Wednesday (today). It has not happened.

Third, there was supposed to have been a blanket email sent to all outstanding orders. I did not get it. Other than when I poked them, I did not receive any emails from Cherrypal. According to this PDF, which was supposedly sent to all customers, my order should have been refunded on 2 January. I did not get the PDF, and I still do not have my refund.

I never got my refund and I never got my netbook. I was scammed.

P.S. I strongly urge you to go read the accounts of other people scammed by Cherrypal (here, here, here, here, and here). Note that some of the stories date back to Christmas 2008. This scam has been going for a long time.

P.P.S. If you’ve been scammed by Cherrypal, please post a comment with your story. I want to hear from you.

I think they may have learned from their mistake with Gentouch 78.

Augen just announced that they will soon sell no less than 6 Android tablets ranging in size from 7″ to 10″, with retail from $199.99 to $599.99. All the tablets run v2.2 and all will support Adobe DE DRM.

First up are a pair of 7″ tablets, the Latte, and Latte Grande.   Both have Wifi HDMI out, 2GB Flash, and a SDHC card slot.

• The Latte has a 7″ WVGA resistive touchscreen (800×480), a stylus, and retails for $199.
• The Latte Grande is a big step up for only $50 more. It has a 800 MHz CPU, 7″ multi-touch capacitive touchscreen (800×600), accelerometer, compass, and light sensor.

Next is the Espresso series, and these babies will support Android v3.0. All have Wifi, Bluetooth, a 3MP camera, accelerometer, compass, and light sensor.

• The base Espresso model has a 7″ multi-touch capacitive touchscreen (800×600), 1GHz Cortex A9 CPU, 8GB Flash, microSDHC card slot. All this for $349.
• The Espresso Dolce has a 10.2″ multi-touch capacitive touchscreen (1024×768), 1GHz Cortex A9 CPU, 8GB Flash, microSDHC card slot. Retail is $429.
• The Espresso Doppio is the tablet convertible I showed you in the first image. It’s a dual boot system with Android/Ubuntu as options. It has a 10.2″ multi-touch capacitive touchscreen (1024×768), 1GHz Cortex A9 CPU, Wifi, Bluetooth, 8GB Flash, 2 USB ports, trackpad, and a 160GB HD. All this for $599.

And then there is the Espresso Firma. This baby has a 7″ resistive touchscreen(800×480), a 600MHz dual core CPU, Wifi, Bluetooth, and 2GB Flash. Retails is $349. It also has this odd pen that’s supposed to let you write on paper, and the strokes will be transmitted to the Firma. I’ll believe it when I see it.