Kobo just put out the press release for the new Kobo Wifi. You can pre order it for $139 at http://koboereader.com. It has a faster CPU, comes in 3 new colors, and is boasting improved battery life. Kobo are also promising automatic delivery of newspapers and that you can shop in the Kobo ebookstore from the Kobo Wifi.

Update: I just found the Borders US press release. You can also pre-order the Kobo Wifi at .

From the press release:

Kobo, a global eReading service, today announced the new Kobo Wireless eReader, the newest addition to the Kobo family. The new Kobo Wireless eReader adds WiFi connectivity, upgraded hardware with faster performance, longer battery life, and a sharper eInk screen.

With the new Kobo Wireless eReader, consumers can now shop on the go, anytime, anyplace, directly from their Kobo eReader with one touch of the “Shop” button. Adding over 200,000 books in six months, the Kobo store now boasts over 2.2 million books including today’s new releases and bestsellers, timeless classics and thousands of free books. Consumers can read on any device – iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, PC, MAC, Linux, and their library will always be up to date on their eReader. The addition of WiFi means consumers can now receive wireless deliveries of popular newspapers and magazines directly to their eReader.

With this release, Kobo demonstrates its continued commitment to providing customer with a choice when reading, rather than locking them in to a single provider. Support for open standards like EPUB and PDF means that customers can easily borrow and read the latest eBooks from their local library – for FREE – and also upload documents with an SD card, drag n’ drop or Adobe Digital editions. The eReader comes pre-loaded with 100 free literary masterpieces including a selection of fiction, memoirs, politics, philosophy and more.

“We introduced the Kobo eReader to make eReading more affordable and accessible for consumers. It worked, making the Kobo eReader a bestseller, and the industry followed,” said Michael Serbinis, CEO of Kobo. “Today, we are excited to introduce our latest generation, the Kobo Wireless eReader, enabling customers to shop and update their library on the go with superior performance for only $139 USD. The launch of the new Kobo Wireless eReader caps a very busy month for Kobo, in which we announced a new application that will come preloaded on the Samsung Galaxy, introduced the new Kobo Desktop and updates to our iPhone and Android apps, and unveiled the first social reading application for Blackberry. The market for eReading continues to grow at an unparalleled pace, and Kobo is advancing even faster.”

The Kobo Wireless eReader will be available for $139.99 USD at Kobobooks.com, and will be available for purchase at Borders US, Indigo Books & Music and Walmart in Canada. Online pre-orders begin today with the Kobo eReader being shipped to customers in October. The Kobo Wireless eReader is now available in three stylish colors: Onyx, Porcelain with Metallic Silver back, and Porcelain with a Pearlized Lilac back.

To celebrate the launch of the new Kobo Wireless eReader, Kobo has partnered with Random House of Canada and is pleased to offer two FREE eBooks to customers who pre-order the new eReader exclusively through Kobobooks.com or at Indigo Books & Music in Canada. The titles include International bestselling author Linwood Barclay’s critically acclaimed novel FEAR THE WORST which delivers readers a fast-paced suspense story, while WHEN MY WORLD WAS VERY SMALL by Ruth Rakoff provides an intimate, one-of-a-kind memoir of family, food, cancer and recovery. Together these titles provide customers with an additional value of $34.00.

More Information about the Kobo Wireless eReader:

New Built in Wireless: New Wireless connectivity with WiFi 802.11 b/g allows customers to shop or update their library on the go, and receive wireless deliveries of newspapers. Kobo includes wireless support for home networks, free networks and commercial hotspots, like those in public places or coffee shops.

New Faster Page Turning: A new faster processor makes turning pages over 2.5X times faster.

New, Sharper eInk Screen, Read in Bright Sunlight: The new Kobo Wireless eReader uses a new sharper 16-greyscale, 6” eInk screen which looks and reads like paper, with no glare, even in bright sunlight.

Longer Battery Life: With upgraded hardware, the Kobo Wireless eReader lasts up to 10,000 page turns on a single charge, with the wireless setting turned off.

Books in Less Than 60 Seconds: Downloading books to your Kobo has never been faster.

100 Free eBooks Included: The eReader comes pre-loaded with 100 free literary masterpieces so that customers can start reading right out of the box.

The Biggest Selection Worldwide: Customers can access the Kobo store featuring 2.2 million eBooks, as well as get the latest eBooks from public libraries for FREE, and can also access other popular stores that support the ePub standard.

The Largest Catalog of Free Books: Over 1.8 million titles like PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and WAR AND PEACE are available for FREE on Kobo.

Easy to Use: Kobo’s elegant design makes eReading easy with minimal buttons and no distractions to get in the way of diving into a great read.

Lightweight: At seven ounces, the Kobo eReader is about the weight of a small paperback making eReading comfortable with Kobo.

Unique Quilted Back: The device’s signature quilted back adds superior comfort and style to the design and overall reading experience.

Holds up to 5000 eBooks: The device features 1 GB of built in memory allowing for 1000 eBooks to be stored at any time, with capacity of up to 5000 eBooks with the addition of an SD card.

Customize Your Read: Choose from five font sizes and two font styles.

Manage Your Library: Hide preloaded books, or remove books from your Kobo eReader at any time.

Dictionary: New built in dictionary makes looking up definitions easy!

Read Anytime, Anyplace: Kobo’s FREE apps for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, Mac, PC, Linux, as well as our support of other popular eReaders and open APIs enable you to read your books on more devices than any other eBook offering.

Your Books Forever: If you lose or break your Kobo eReader, you will always be able to access your library online or by connecting a new device to your account. Additionally, you can download your eBooks to your desktop for backup.

Read Your Documents on Kobo: Drag and drop PDF files to your Kobo to read long reports, catch up on work or homework.

Poker Game! Kobo includes a video poker game for playing in between reading.

New Accessories: A wide range of new accessories including reading lights and covers are available from Koboereader.com or our retail partners.

For more information, visit www.koboereader.com.

The Blio reading app was finally available for download today, and I got it as soon as I could.  I was really looking forward to this; the demos were impressive. The faux 3D mode looked interesting, the TTS sounded good, and there were hints that even better features would be coming.

Given how wonderfulness of the demo, I’m a little surprised at how awful my reading experience was.

The TTS was horrifyingly bad.  I was slapping at my keyboard (trying to turn off the sound), it was so bad. Think bad 19080’s SF movie, and you begin to appreciate the sound. What’s even worse is that TTS on the Kindle was so much better! That should not have been possible; my laptop has significantly better hardware specs than the Kindle.

The faux 3D mode was also pretty bad, and I really don’t understand why.  The edges of the faux page were jagged. (Check out the screen shot.)  This shouldn’t have been hard; writing software for this kind of perspective is a homework assignment for college juniors, now.

There are a number of other viewing modes (single  & double column, double paged, etc) but they’re really nothing more than you can find elsewhere. I’ll skip them here.

Actually, I want to point out the double page mode. This mode rises to the point of FAIL. You see, I was reading a book I downloaded from Feedbooks. It started out as Epub, and in converting it to Blio format it became some horrifying mutant PDF format.

When I zoomed in in the double page mode, text disappeared off the bottom and top of the screen. I would expect this with a PDF, but I stared with an Epub. It really should have reflowed the text, not made it disappear.

Speaking of Feedbooks, it was one of the 2 sources of free ebooks (along with Google). Thing is, they forgot to tell Feedbooks:

Hey Blio, next time that you add our OPDS catalog to a commercial product, send us an e-mail first

Hadrien also had this to say about Blio:

Oh and I don’t care about 3D view of a book if the font looks like s**t

And one last point before I go. One of the features we were promised was Epub support. I remember this quite clearly. Unfortunately, Blio won’t open an Epub file, so I can’t read any of my current library. Do they really expect me to buy my existing library a second time? Given that there are only about 6k titles in the Blio ebookstore, I really have to wonder what they were thinking.

P.S. And if you think I’m pissed, you should check out what Mike Cane wrote.

by Chris Walters

If you’re tired of Minesweeper, don’t like the free word games Shuffled Row and Every Word, and don’t want to pay $5 for the new Scrabble game, then how about old-school text adventures?

On Friday, Kindle fan E. Yagi announced on Amazon’s customer discussion pages a new website, kindlequest.com, that presents 19 different text adventures–including a few Zork titles–for your amusement. Of course, to play you’ll have to have online access.

A list of games available at KindleQuest.com:

I tested in on a latest generation Wi-Fi Kindle and the site loaded fine, although a couple of times the page would hang after I entered a command and I would have to reload the page to get everything to show up properly. If you want to give the interface a trial run before hitting it up on your Kindle, it plays fine on a regular PC browser.

Remember to type “help” without quotation marks for some introductory commands. Also, here are a few Zork-specific commands if you need a cheat sheet, thanks to another Amazon customer named Abraxas:

> n, s, e, w
Short for “go north”, “go south”, etc.

> nw, ne, sw, se
Short for “go northwest”, “go southwest”, etc.

> u and d
Short for “go up” and “go down”

> i
Reveals a player’s inventory

> verbose
Gives full descriptions after each command (rather than omitting details already given to the player)

> score
Displays the player’s current score, number of moves, and ranking

And you can shorten “look” to “l”. I also found the game wants prepositions. You cannot omit them. Just use “look at ” instead of just “look “.

Originally posted at Booksprung.com

I just got an email from Toshiba reminding me that the Toshiba Bookplace website will be open tomorrow. As part of the launch Toshiba will be giving away 4 ebooks:

• History’s Greatest Lies: The Startling Truths Behind World Events our History Books Got Wrong – William Weir (Fair Winds Press)
• I Know an Old Teacher – Anne Bowen and Stephen Gammell (Lerner Publishing Group)
• Monster Boy’s Soccer Game, by Carl Emerson and Lon Levin Carl Emerson and Lon Levin (Magic Wagon)
• Knack Grilling Basics – Linda Johnson Larsen (Knack, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press)

The promotion will run for the next couple weeks, so there’s no reason to hurry.

As much as I want the DRM on this ebook format to die, I think you should get the ebooks. This ebookstore is based on Blio, and the Blio ebook format appears to have a number of interesting tricks that other formats lack. I’ve only seen demos at conferences (it’s not the same as having it on my computer), so I don’t know for sure. But I’m intrigued by the possibilities.

I want to bring everyone’s attention to the new banners, please. It’s something I’m trying out and I would appreciate feedback.

What you’re looking at (in the banner) is a word cloud (I made 4, actually). You can create a word cloud by drawing up a list of words and then using either wordle or wordcram to create an image.  My clouds are based on a list of words drawn from the topic of ebooks.

I like the idea, but I’m not entirely sold on how I’m using it. What do you think?

P.S. If you’re seeing a dog but (and not a word cloud) it’s because that is the one banner I haven’t replaced yet.

I stopped by the Overdrive booth at the National Book Festival yesterday and the Overdrive folks were kind enough to show me their new app. I couldn’t shoot a video, unfortunately, because the app is still in private beta. But they are still on schedule to be released this year, with Android coming first and iPhone, iPad coming later. And yes, the iPad will be getting its own app.

The new apps will support both ebooks and MP3 audiobooks checked out of your local library (they’re going to replace the existing Overdrive Media Console). I’m glad OMC is being replaced, actually; it was not a good experience.

They showed me the Android app (almost everyone in the booth had it on their Android smartphone).  It has a decent set of ebook options: 7 font sizes, several font types, brightness, and a night reading mode. There was also a CSS option that I didn’t quite understand. It looked like you could uncheck a box and ignore the CSS in the ebook.

That last one could be interesting; it’s one step away from letting the user control all formatting.

TBH, I thought they had decided to pass on the design. We’ve seen a lot of new devices from Asus since this showed up in January.

A new page turned up on the Qt website the other day. (I know it’s new because my search filters usually find stuff in the first couple days after it’s posted.) This page was written to promote the fact that the DR-950 uses Qt, so there isn’t much in the way of new details.

Using Qt 4.5.1 and the Qt WebKit open source web browser engine, Asus designed and built the DR-950 to stand above the generic 'crowd' of me-too eReader devices that are starting to spring up. As such, the product ships with a stack of extra applications, including a web browser and a handwriting-recognition system where individual letters are drawn into a box or the user selects the option of an onscreen keyboard.

"After our successful use of the Qt framework to build the UIs for the Asus EeePC and the Asus Touch Videophone, our production path for the Asus DR950 eReader’s interface was clear from the start. Our strategic product development plans also embraced Qt for application builds to run on this unit and the creation of an online Qt-based eBook SDK for third-party book vendors to target the device. With Qt on board, our customer and partner-facing proposition is one of the strongest around and I am confident that we will quickly adopt new services into our eBook platform," said an Ellis Wang, Software Product Marketing Director of Asustek.

This is good news, for 2 reasons. Asus are open to the idea of third party apps on the DR-950, and there’s already a community of developers working in Qt. This could be so much better than Irex Iliad (which often felt like the third party development was done despite the wishes of Irex).

I just got word that a new app is now available for the Kindle.  It’s Scrabble, and it’s made by Electronic Arts. They’re selling it for $4.99, which is more than I’m interested in paying. Here’s the description:

With SCRABBLE for Kindle play the game you know and love – anytime, anywhere.

Simple controls make it easy to play any way you want, whether you’re a casual or experienced SCRABBLE player. Pass N' Play with a friend, challenge the Kindle, or play a solo game. If you need help, use the Best Word feature to create the highest scoring word possible. You can even pause the game anytime and pick it up later.

Follow your progress game by game with instant statistics tracking. As your game-play and strategy improves, you’ll find more ways to rack up double and triple word scores.

This is the third app in the Kindle Store; the first 2 were made by Amazon and released about 2 months ago.

Amazon

There was a story going around this past week about EC Media and their new Wink 5″ ereader model. I passed on the story; I’d already reported about the 5″ ereader back in July and there was no new detail. No one had pictures, so it wasn’t worth a post.

One upside of all the stories on the 5″ Wink is that a number of sites were using pictures of the 6″ Wink, and I recognized it as the Hanlin V60. (When I last posted on the Wink, I hadn’t seen the V60 yet.)

I got the following picture from MobRead, a Chinese ereader blog. It’s quite obvious that the devices are the same, and this makes me feel a lot more confident about the Wink. Hanlin have several years of ereader development experience and quite a few previous models. My estimate of the qaulity and reliability of the Wink went up (a lot).

I’d been planning to do this for some time now but never got around to it.

Everyone assumes that bloggers will use any image they find, be it through Google or from the story’s original source or whatever. I know I do. I also know that when other blogs repost myoriginal stories they use my photos, and I’m quite happy to have them do it.

But I also want to be proactive in this so I’m going to release all the photos under a CC-BY-NC license. Basically anyone can use the photos for any non commercial purpose so long as they give me attribution. And in case you were wondering a blog post with adverts on the same page is _not_ a commercial purpose, so bloggers can indeed use the images.

P.S. If anyone thinks this is a bad idea, please let me know.

I just got this tweet today. I’ve checked, and it’s correct. That option is indeed missing in the latest version of KindleGen. I don’t know that it was offered in the previous version, though.

I don’t see a reason for stashing the Epub inside the Kindle file other than because they are planning ahead for a switchover. Actually, it would be more accurate to say they are giving themselves the option of a switchover.

FYI: KindleGen is a command line tool for making Kindle ebooks. If you’re using MobiCreator or MobiGen then you will probably want to use this instead. KindleGen supports larger image sizes as well as the video and audio tags for embedded content (for ebooks like Nixonland).

He just mentioned on his blog Monday that he was trying to convert his backlist so he can sell them on the Kindle. What’s more interesting is how he’s getting the source files. He’s relying on pirates.

Useful Pirates?

The major problem with getting one’s older works into electronic print is that few have electronic copies of the books. Having them scanned and edited can be expensive – not terribly so, but the costs can be significant, and usually involves destroying a printed copy so that it can be fed to a scanner. Multiple scans with comparisons can get copies arbitrarily similar to the printed copies; of course the printed copies will contain some typographical errors, so the author probably ought to do a final scan before reformatting for Kindle and iTunes publication. The temptation of course will be to do revisions: I don’t know, but I suspect that "Revised edition" with a new introduction by the author would increase sales.

Norman Spinrad has discovered Amazon and iTunes publication, and tells how he found clean copies of many of his works on pirate sites. Eric Flint has often said that pirates are more helpful than harmful; many authors have disagreed, but this is a clear example of how some pirates can be useful. Of course in Norman’s case there were pirates who undertook the work as a labor of love because they wanted to see his books in print, and they took care to do quality scans; many pirate copies of books are horribly done.

Meanwhile, Eric Pobirs and Peter Glaskowsky have been busy finding me clean copies of my fiction and some non-fiction.

It makes sense to me. A file is a file is a file.

I found an interesting video by the design firm IDEO. It shows their 3 concepts for the future of digital books.

I just watched the video, and a couple details struck me as rather odd. I can’t recall the last time I saw a video that showed active collaboration on a concept ereader. Do all these designers assume you will only create content computer, not an ereader? The other odd thing is that the collaboration abilities of most of these concept ereaders are actually less than what you can do right now with a tablet. Concepts aren’t supposed to be behind the curve, and this one is.

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

The picture is from my most recent visit with Entourage.  And yes, it is the Pocket Edge.

You might recall that I found a video last week. Well, after a lot of begging, pleading, and whining, Entourage let me take some pictures. The cat was out of the bag, after all.

Due to a tight schedule I only had a few minutes with it, though.

I was right. The Pocket Edge does have a 6″ Eink screen ( Vizplex, not Pearl) and a 7″ LCD (800×480). The touchscreens, speakers, and buttons are all in the same place as on the original Edge.

The 2 major changes to the face of the device is they moved the camera (it’s over the Eink screen now), and they replaced the nubbin with an optical mouse (the little black square). The general specs are similar  (CPU, OS, apps), with a couple exceptions. The pocket Edge has a microSDHC card slot and only 1 USB host port. Also, the battery is not removable (as on the original Edge).

There are going to be 2 Pocket Edge models. One only has Wifi, and the other will be tied in to Verizon. They should be available late next month.

I didn’t catch the price, but I was told that it weighs around a pound. You know, if they sell this for $300 then it will be a serious competition to the name brand Android tablets coming this fall. Even at $400 it will still cut into the tablet  market.

BTW, I got a couple pictures that show the ports:

And here’s one last photo to show the size difference between the Pocket and original Edge.

I was thinking this morning about Hachette introducing Agency pricing in the UK, and I’ve decided it’s time that I wrote down what I’ve been doing with Agency ebooks. Here is the Agency Ebook Pledge:

So long as some publishers chose to artificially raise the price of ebooks, and artificially reduce price competition (aka "the agency model"), I vow to:

1. Never buy an Agency priced ebook.
2. Never buy a new paper book from an Agency publisher if a used copy is available.
3. Never buy a paper book from an Agency publisher if I can check it out of the library.
   

It’s not a terribly complicated pledge, so it should be easy to follow. If you want to copy and share the pledge, please feel free.