Update: They’ve resubmitted the app and it was approved on Monday. Just so you know, I meant this post as a joke.

Read it Later just tried to submit their new iPhone app to Apple on Friday. (I bet you can guess what the app does from the company’s name.) Today they were told that it was rejected. They were given a rather odd explanation:

We’ve reviewed your apps, but cannot post these versions to the App Store because they require customers to register with personal information without providing account-based features. We have included additional details below to help explain the issue, and hope you’ll consider revising and resubmitting your application.

Applications cannot require user registration prior to allowing access to app features and content; such user registration must be optional and tied to account-based functionality.

The mind boggles. They didn’t add anything new, so I have to wonder if the reviewer was on drugs. The other alternative is that Apple has a new rule that "applications cannot require user registration prior to allowing access to app features and content". There goes almost all the reading apps . You can’t use Kindle, Kobo, B&N, or a lot of others without an account.

Perhaps this is a nefarious plan on the part of Apple. Naw. They’re not that competent.

The developer behind Inkmesh apparently had a break in his day job. He just ran another ebook price survey similar to the one he ran back in November 2009. FYI: Inkmesh is an ebook search engine. It’s the best way to find out which ebookstore has a given title, and more importantly which store has the best price.

First, a little background. The survey only covers titles that were available in all 5 major stores (Kindle, B&N, Kobo, Borders, Sony). This gave a sample set of 16,931 titles.

The following chart shows the number of titles for which each retailer had the lowest price (among the 16,931 titles in the survey). A lower score means that a store had the best price less often than a store with a higher score.

Note: if 2 stores had a titles at the same low price they each got the point.

He added a footnote of other statistics he found interesting:

As we found with our previous analysis, there were only 1270 (7.5%) ebooks that were free amongst these top selling ebooks. Thus, contrary to popular belief most of the top selling ebooks are actually not free.

Along with Amazon, and B&N, BooksOnBoard and Kobo put up a strong showing by beating Sony and Borders in terms of ebook pricing. Another interesting fact was that unlike before when Amazon had lowest price for 74% of the ebooks, this time the number dropped to 48%. A possibility could be that some smaller ebook vendors are yet not following the agency model and pricing their ebooks more aggressively than Amazon. A deeper analysis would be the subject of another blog.

In summary: when it comes to ebook pricing, Amazon is still the best, but B&N is close on heels. Sony is much better than before, but still far behind and needs to tighten up it’s pricing to start making a big impact. Borders is coming up, and Kobo had a surprisingly good showing. The landscape will continue to change as both newer and more established ebook vendors continue to lure readers to their sites.

Inkmesh blog

Forbes are reporting:

Best Buy is known for stocking thousands of electronic gadgets. To date, that assortment has included just one tablet computer–Apple’s iPad–but that will change in coming months, Forbes has learned.

“Going into the holidays, we will make tablets a focus,” said Shawn Score, the president of Best Buy’s wireless retail unit, Best Buy Mobile, in an interview. “Like ereaders over the last couple years, we think customers will think of Best Buy for tablets and expect us to have the right ones.”

…

A new crop of tablets, including devices from Samsung, Acer and Research In Motion, is expected to debut in time for the holidays. Another wave may follow in January. Industry insiders say some tablets have been delayed and revamped due to the iPad’s popularity, but will be introduced in early 2011.

Told you so. Okay, I didn’t think it would move this fast, but I knew it would happen. And I think it makes my prediction that much more likely to come true. How many good tablets will BB have? There aren’t that many on the market. Heck, aside from Archos and the iPad I’m not sure there are any good tablets on the US market. I hope you’re not thinking about the Dell Streak. It’s going for $550 off contract, and it’s still sim-locked to AT&T.

Yes, a number of the majors are promising tablets in time for Christmas, but do you really think they’ll meet the ship date?

BTW, the Forbes author is somewhat wrong when she says that BB don’t stock tablets. I don’t have a picture handy, but they already have a display table that has about 12 to 15 handhelds like the Archos 5IT, iPod Touch, and others.They will likely reorganize that display and put the tablets there.

Digitimes have the story:

Delta Electronics will tap into the education market with its e-book readers in the second half of 2010 amid the digitalization in universities and school libraries.

Larger-size displays for reading and pen input are important for the educational market, which has been a major focus during the development of e-book readers, the company said.

Delta currently is focused on developing 8-inch e-book readers for the consumer market, and 13-inch devices for the education market, the company noted. Delta is scheduled to introduce its 8- and 13-inch e-book readers – with the two segments offering both grayscale and color devices – in the fourth quarter of 2010 or the beginning of 2011 in Taiwan and China.

FYI: The screen tech was developed by Bridgestone, and Delta Electronics are the ereader development partner. Also, Delta only operates in Taiwan and China, so we’re not going to see this device in the US.

Digitimes have the story:

Qualcomm MEMS Technologies plans to invest a total of US$2 billion to set up a 4.5G production plant for Mirasol displays at the Longtan site of Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP), according to market sources.

Equipment installation is scheduled to begin in October 2011 and volume production at the beginning of 2012 mainly for 5.7-inch color applications, the sources added.

…Equipment suppliers have revealed that Qualcomm is the sole investor in the new plant project, according to the sources. But the company also hopes to expand Mirasol’s market through licensing, the sources added.

I know the name of at least one of ereader companies who will use the Mirasol screen (there might be several). Right now I’m waiting to see if Qualcomm will talk to me and ask me to hold the story.

At long last the the next hot Android tablets are up for preorder on the Velocity Micro website and at Borders. VM are promising to ship both devices in late September, but Borders won’t ship the CT until late October.

I’m looking at the specs now, and I think I’d rather wait for the Cruz Tablet. I’m pretty sure that the Cruz Reader is the same hardware as the white Pandigital Novel.

Here are the specs for the Cruz Reader:

• 7” diagonal 800×600 touch screen
• Android 2.0
• 256MB RAM, 256MB internal storage
• Supports ePub, PDF, TXT, PDB, HTML
• 802.11 b/g wifi
• battery – up to 10+ hours of life, 24+ standby
• 4GB Bundled SD card
• Access to the Cruz Market™

And for the Cruz Tablet:

• 7” 16:9 800×480 screen
• Capacitive touch screen
• Android 2.1
• 512MB RAM
• 4GB Flash storage
• 8GB bundled SD card
• Supports ePub, PDF, TXT, PDB, HTML
• 802.11n wifi
• speakers
• Mic and headphone jacks
• battery – up to 10+ hours of life, 24+ standby
• Access to the Cruz Market™

I found this over on the Daisy Consortium blog:

Nearly all of the publications digitized by the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre are now also available in DAISY format to support the needs of readers with print disabilities.

Thanks to a grant from the Community Partnership Fund, and in collaboration with the Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind, the NZETC has generated DAISY books for 1,064 titles in its collection, including a number of required course texts.

To access an e-text in DAISY format, readers can select "DAISY ebook" from the list of "Other Formats" when browsing the NZETC title page. More information is available on the Victoria University of Wellington Library website.

Interesting post on Business Insider yesterday. The author argues that the hot-news doctrine needs to be strengthened so aggregators can’t link to news articles:

Using aggregators like Google and others, I can access essentially in real time the lead paragraphs of almost any story from the New York Times, the Washington Post, or indeed any other major news service.  Not surprisingly, traditional print media publications are dying, and not surprisingly their owners’ online dotcom alternatives are generating far too little revenue to pick up the slack; why pay for any content when the essence of everything is available immediately, and free, elsewhere.

Except that copyright laws were created to compensate creators, not prop up broken business models. Normally I’d post a rebuttal, but in this case Mike Masnick over at TechDirt beat me to it. This is his niche (it’s why I follow him). Go read his post.

It’s been a week since the launch and none of the digital reading blogs have covered Xplana.com yet. Weird.

Rob Reynolds posted a status update on the Xplana blog on Monday. Some features of the Xplana platform have been delayed, which is understandable. I don’t think much of the platform, and I said so before. TBH, that could be because I’m not a group person. So long as I have my ow notebook handy I’m good. I don’t need the collaboration abilities that Xplana.com gives you.

From the blog post:

While we will be publishing our official roadmap in a few weeks, I thought it might be helpful to share some specific gaps that we are aware of, and enhancements that we plan to make.

• RSS Feeds — Yes, we will be adding RSS feeds. This means that we will feature news feeds as part of our content library, and also provide feeds for user and community journals.
• Journal Enhancements — We are also excited about our journals, and look forward to extending this tool with: named URLs, full rich text editor, and a robust portfolio theme)
• Communities — We will be introducing more granular administrative controls, better customization, group authorship capabilities, and named URLs.
• Flashcards — We will make this a richer activity with a basic template and faster authoring capabilities
• Embed Codes and Content Exports – We are committed to supporting various distributed models for content access. To that end, we will be adding embed codes for albums, as well as content export capabilities
• Creative Commons — We understand the importance of Creative Commons licensing, and are working to map our baseline permissions to different CC licenses. In a future release, we will roll out an advanced option that allows users to select a CC license and have that badge placed with their content

In addition to these enhancements of our current features, there are also some larger projects on our radar. I am listing a few of them here as I believe this will help everyone gain a deeper insight into our product purpose and vision.

• Mobile — We will launch our mobile applications for iPhone and Android in October and continue evolving our mobile options from that initial foundation
• LMS Integration — Xplana.com is designed a a complementary platform to traditional, formal learning solutions like the LMS. We are already working on our LMS integration strategy and will begin piloting options with university partners this year. Our goal is to join the content and student-focused informal learning options of Xplana.com with the other facets of the student’s learning life
• E-book Integrations – Students will be able to access purchased e-books in our platform this fall, but we plan to extent our e-book integration over the next year so that content can flow more freely between the e-book container and the other content and tools within our larger paltform
• Chat and Discussion — We certainly understand the importance of this element with regards to social interactivity, and are looking at a variety of alternatives. This will be something we add int he coming year, and we plan to use it to extend both individual and community interactions
• Expanded Support for Content Types — Much of our vision for Xplana.com is around our content library. To that end, we will continually expand the types of content that we support, both for physical upload as well as for virtual integration. In the coming year we will be expanding our support for file types, and also developing support for key content platforms such as Flickr and Slideshare

Update: A couple people (@draccah and @nicboshart) have pointed out the flaw in this post.  The sales figures we’re looking at here are only from the major publishers; the independents and the self-published aren’t included.

We just got the June ebook sales figures (via E-reads) yesterday so I’m going to revisit the predictions I made last month.  I don’t know total reported sales, but I do know that $29.8m worth of ebooks were sold, which is less than a 5% increase over the previous month. Here are the reported ebook sales for June through January:

Ebooks sales: 29.8 29.3 27.4 28.5 28.9 31.9

And here are the predictions I made:

One, I think ebook sales are largely flat so far this year. This prediction has obviously remained true.

Two, iBooks didn’t boost sales at all. This one’s still good. Then again, are book app sales included in these figures? We could be missing growth that’s either not reported or not expressed.

Three, ebook sales don’t seem to be affected by the same market pressures as other book sales. I can’t answer this one without the total sales figures.

Four, I don’t think ebook sales will grow on their own at quite the same spectacular rate as last year. Yep.

So when it comes to market predictions I’m 3 for 4. That’s not bad.

P.S. If you haven’t seen them before, you might want to read the last 2 predictions. I’ll reprint them here.

Three, ebook sales don’t seem to be affected by the same market pressures as other book sales. I think it would be useful if we could compare ebook sales with that of other digital media. I bet we’d see similar behavior.

Four, I don’t think ebook sales will grow on their own at quite the same spectacular rate as last year.  Instead, I think market growth will be directly related to the publicity surrounding new ereader announcements. (The big January sales might have been caused by the Nook.)

I’m one of the first to get the black Novel and I have to say that it was a lot of fun to play with.

Before I go further I think I should explain the photographs. I know the screen looks cloudy but it really isn’t. I have the brightness turned down (I like it that way). I also shot the pictures without a flash because I wanted to show you the screen without the ginormous crack running across it.

Update: Much of this post is outdated. Rather than read this review, why don’t you go install the latest firmware update for this tablet (here)?

Last minute addition: Pandigital pushed  out an update Tuesday afternoon. It was supposed to fix a couple of the minor problems (I didn’t mention them in the review), but it also made the black Novel forget the ebooks folder. I probably just need to rename it, and I’m waiting to hear back from Pandigital.

Hardware

We got our first look at the black Novel a couple months ago when it cleared the FCC. Like the white Novel, it’s a basic 7″ Android tablet with a custom Home Screen and support for B&N ebookstore.

The black Novel is slightly thicker than the white one. It’s also not quite as wide or long. It has a bezel around the screen (the white novel had a screen that was flush with the facing). There are no buttons on the front.

On the lower back right corner there is a stylus. (I didn’t need it, actually. This screen is quite usable without it.) The power jack and USB port are on the upper right edge. On the top edge are the volume buttons, SD card slot, Wifi switch, and headphone jack. There is a speaker on the upper left corner of the back. The back has a matte finish (the white Novel was glossy).

Hacking & Apps

Comparison (of the 2 Novels)

Opinion

I was one of the lucky few who received a loaner black Pandigital Novel weeks before the official launch.  Unfortunately, it fell off my desk one day and the touchscreen layer broke. This wasn’t an extreme fall, nor did the Novel land on a hard surface.

What’s interesting about this accident was that the LCD came through it just fine. The only thing that broke was the middle touchscreen layer.

I’ve been thinking about the accident since it happened a week ago. This is the second time I’ve seen a tablet with a broken touch screen layer and an otherwise functional LCD screen. Both this tablet and the Gemei GM2000 are cheap tablets from China, so I’ve decided to hang the name "Chinese Tablet Syndrome" on it.

From what I can tell, CTS will only happen to a particular type of touchscreen. I’m not sure of the type of touchscreen, but I can tell you what to look for. One physical characteristic that these 2 tablets have in common is the way that the touchscreen "dimpled" when pressed. I bet the dimpling can be used as diagnostic tool for CTS. Any tablet that exhibits this dimpling should be avoided.

So I had an interesting experience today. I was trying to find the FCC paperwork for the Pocket Edge, and I found a new way for somebody to hide their gadgets from public view. There are a number of ways to keep it secret. The most basic is that you can request that certain documents (photos, diagrams, etc) be kept form the public, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Amazon takes this a step further. Each time they send a Kindle through the FCC, they have created a separate fictitious Delaware corporation (and then had the pictures hidden). I’ve never actually found one of their dummy corporations before they announced a new Kindle, but I’m working on it.

The new trick I learned today is used by Foxconn. You probably know the name; they assemble electronics for everyone from Apple to Amazon to Entourage. What Foxconn does is so clever that I’m surprised more companies don’t copy them.

You see, in addition to assembling hardware Foxconn will also submit your device to the FCC on your behalf. Get this: they don’t submit the device. Instead they submit just the component that actively transmits (Wifi, 3G, Bluetooth, etc). So even if you figure out which filing is for which device you’ll never actually see the gadget. All that will ever show up in the paperwork is the module.

Let me give you an example. I searched for the FCC paperwork for the Entourage Edge and this is what  found. Check out the external photos.

When it comes to keeping secrets, this cannot be beat. I’m really surprised that Amazon aren’t doing it this way.