Digitimes are reporting Chinese manufacturer Quanta Computers will be making RIM’s Android tablet, which will be officially launched in November:

The tablet (BlackPad) will support Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, as well as 3G through connection to a Blackberry smartphone. The device will be priced at US$499 and Quanta will start shipping orders in September with volumes to reach two million units in 2010 and eight million units in 2011, the paper added.

I’m not so sure that RIM could sell 2m BlackPads in only 2 months. As good as they are they’re not Apple. And besides, this would be during the Christmas shopping season here in the US. Consumers will be buying other junk. They’re not going to buoy the BlackPad sales (at least, not without a really good marketing campaign).

I have confirmation from Pandigital that the black Novel will officially launch on 18 August. It’s expected to arrive in Kohl’s and Bed, Bath & Beyond stores some time during that week.

The black Novel is a completely different set of hardware from the white Novel. There are really only 2 key differences, though. The first is the touchscreen and the second is the amount of internal storage.

The white Novel has an internal microSD card slot (which can be upgraded). The black Novel, on the other hand, has 2GB of Flash soldered to the mainboard.

I have one of the early review units, and I will post the review as soon as the embargo is lifted. Until then, here is a brief unboxing video:

There’s a new post today from Motley Fool. I think it does a pretty good job of showing why they call themselves fools (I assume it was becuase the word idiot wouldn’t have the same alliteration). Here’s a summary:

In this video, Fool.com analyst Eric Bleeker talks about the continuing battle between Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPad and Amazon.com's (Nasdaq: AMZN) Kindle. Bleeker feels that chatter in the media about Amazon and Apple — that Amazon’s success on the iPad creates a win-win situation for the company — is missing the mark.

Specifically, he’s afraid of companies that become reliant on other platforms, where the owner can change the rules at any time. In this case, Amazon is captive to whatever direction Apple takes the iPad.

While Apple didn’t initially ship iPads with Apple’s iBooks pre-installed, there’s little doubt it’ll be the default book reading program going forward. That’s the large concern for Amazon. Whenever users are required to take a separate action (download Amazon’s book application), a large number of those users will take the path that requires no action and use a pre-installed program. As the platform owner, Apple can promote its own bookstore in whatever format it desires.

He is ignoring so many details here that I don’t know where to begin.  I think I’ll just stay with the most obvious: you can only get the iBooks app in (I think) 4 countries and you can access the Kindle Store in 140. Apple would have to put a lot of work into expanding iBooks before they could serious impact the Kindle app. And then there are the number of platforms you can get the Kindle on and the vast difference in ebook selection.

I cam across an interesting article today in the Vancouver Sun. The author makes a pretty good case for calling Amazon a robber baron:

As a temporary loss leader marketing exercise, undercutting rival prices is just another form of healthy competition that’s good for markets.

But when a company such as Amazon is in a dominant or monopoly position and sells below its own costs, the market is destroyed by driving rivals out of business or keeping new entrants at bay. So the attorneys general are looking at whether Amazon’s pricing behaviour constitutes a form of market abuse under antitrust laws called "predatory pricing."

Amazon argues it has helped publishers with its cheap pricing by expanding the e-market. But the same could have been said by the robber barons of old whose predatory pricing ushered in a host of antitrust laws designed to protect markets from monopolism.

I have to disagree. You see, there’s one detail that everyone seems to have forgotten about digital content. You can’t monopolize the market for digital content because there will always be one supplier that can’t be defeated: piracy. Raise prices too much and people simply won’t buy.

And the other detail everyone seems to have forgotten is that ebook prices have a natural upper limit: the price of a paper book. Ebooks aren’t being sold in a vacuum; they are just one segment of the market. If one f0rm costs to much more people will get the their books another way.

So the UK version of the Kindle Store launched today, right on schedule. It has nearly 400k titles which might make it the largest ebookstore in the UK (Europe, too, for that matter).

If you’re wondering why I haven’t covered the UK Kindle Store before, it’s because I don’t like regional restrictions when it comes to ebookstores like this. I think they are an invitation to piracy.

But something happened today that changed my mind: I came across this post on how the top 25 ebooks cost less in the UK store than they do in the US store. It piqued my curiosity. I don’t know if you’ve been following ebook prices, but as a rule the USA has usually had the lowest price ebook. The price difference was big enough that a couple years ago US ebookstores were forced into blocking sales to anyone outside the US market. (It’s more complicated than that, but I’ll cover it another time.)

I’ve been doing a spot check of prices, and guess what? The prices were usually about the same in both stores. I’m sure you’re scratching your head and wondering why that is important. I know something you don’t: ebooks in the UK have a 17.5% tax built into the price (unlike the US where tax is assessed during the transaction). So if the US price is the same then we are in effect paying a 21% surcharge. The only reason I can see for the increase in price is that we are stuck with the Agency pricing.

Update: I can see over at Kindle Nation Daily that Steven is finding prices significantly higher in the US than in the UK. This is rather puzzling because I randomly checked about 30 titles and I found the sale prices to be about the same. I’m not seeing the same data as Steven, and I find that rather odd.

The long awaited ereader from Shanda Literature was revealed last week at the China Digital Entertainment Expo & Conference.

I don’t have the  specs for the Bambook, but I do know that it has Wifi and that Shanda have launched an ebookstore to support it.

UPDATE: One of my sources have come through for me. I now know that the Bambook is using a 800MHz Marvel CPU, costs, 998 Yuan (during the beta at least). It also won’t be going on sale on the 9th. Instead, it will be in a closed beta.

I also found some unboxing photos.

press release

source

From the press release:

NTT DOCOMO, INC. and Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. (DNP) announced today that they will partner in an electronic publishing business covering content aggregation, distribution and retail sales of e-books, which DOCOMO customers in Japan will access with a variety of mobile devices from this fall.

The business will use an open platform by combining DOCOMO’s existing content-distribution and payment systems with DNP’s planned hybrid digital/physical bookstores.

Initially targeting DOCOMO customers, the business will sell e-books via a mobile bookstore that users will access with DOCOMO wireless devices, including mobile phones, smartphones, tablet computers and e-book readers. The store will launch with more than 100,000 titles, including electronic books, manga comics, magazines and newspapers.

DOCOMO and DNP also are discussing the possible formation of a joint-venture company, collaborations with publishers and mobile-device manufacturers, and expansion into overseas markets.

FD.nl, a Dutch financial news website, are reporting that ereader maker Irex have secured new financing and will continue to operate. The new company will be called IRX Innovations. Hans Brons, head of Irex, has announced that IRX will abandon the consumer market with the plan to focus on the business market and licensing IRX designs to third parties.

This is great news for a bunch of people I know. They’re all waiting on repairs to their Irex ereader. Some have been waiting for months.

Wired is constantly working to find new ways to promote their digital  magazine (just the ones that won’t work).Their latest idea is to give the iPad app exclusive content that they have denied their paper subscribers. I’m sure this will make the app worth $3.99 an issue.

Do you want to know my issue with Wired? I have a paper subscription that they sold to me f0r $10 a year. I refuse to pay twice for the same content. And no, these videos aren’t enough for me to change my mind. Also, given that I have greater value as a paper subscriber (ad revenue), why can’t they give me a free digital subscription as a bonus?

Wired – Will Ferrell Short from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

via NYTimes

Do you remeber the old Choose Your Own Adventure books? Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing have decided to revive the concept with book apps. They’ve released one title so far, Return to the Cave of Time, with more titles coming in the fall.

It’s unfortunate that they took so long to release this. It doesn’t have to be done as an app and could quite easily have been done in Mobipocket/Kindle. I know that I could have designed it.

As someone who read CYOA books back in the 1980’s I couldn’t resist.I immediately downloaded and read it. I’m kinda glad that this is an app. They’ve taken advantage of the possibilities of a book app and integrated some interesting backgrounds and sound into the story.

It’s worth getting. You can find it in iTunes for $3.99.

If you’re thinking about getting this tablet then this review will definitely make up your mind.

Verdict

The GenTouch78 was never going to be a powerhouse or the most desirable tablet this side of the iPad, but even at $149 it’s a waste of money. The Archos 7 Home Tablet, which was no prize in itself, is a better choice, as the company at least includes media codecs. Yes, having the Android Market (assuming Augen can get it working) and core apps on a tablet is a treat, but they don’t make up for this slate’s awful resistive screen, awkward button placement, and other deficiencies. We can see hackers and tinkerers potentially gravitating toward the GenTouch78 as a cheap Android testbed, but for general consumers, it’s not worth the investment.

Laptop Mag

Yesterday I reported on remarks about tablets made by Rupert Murdoch. I mentioned that I thought tablets were a fad, and a friend sent me an email and asked why.

Fad isn’t the quite the right word, but I think the hype exceeds reality. I have this feeling that tablets are about to go through the same cycle as netbooks (or ereaders, for that matter).

The original netbook niche (7″ to 9″ screens) is dead. What’s left are actually underpowered laptops (which aren’t terribly different from ones being made before netbooks became hot). What killed off netbooks was the small screen and keyboard. They weren’t all that nice to use, so people went back to laptops.

I think tablets will fail for much the same reason. I don’t think most tablet advocates have really thought through whether a tablet will be pleasant to use. The short of it is that a lot of people will jump into making apps for tablets. Most of the apps will suck and the user experience will be poor. This will cause most users to go back to using something else. We’ve already seen how a poor UE affected netbooks.

Basically I’m expecting the average user to walk up to a tablet display at Best Buy next year, try to use a tablet, and walk away dissatisfied. TBH, that was my experience with an eee701 at Target.

In fact, I’m not even sure tablets will get big enough to warrant a display at Best Buy.  If you’ve been following tablet news for the past couple months then you know that both of the splashiest releases (Pandigital and Augen) didn’t go so well. The tablet market has jumped past the high end models and gone straight to the crappy knockoffs. Long before the big name manufacturers can get their tablets out the door, the word tablet will have a negative connotation.

P.S. Laptop Mag reviewed the Augen Gentouch78 yesterday. That’s one of the 2 splashy releases I was talking about.

So B&N are thinking about putting the company up for sale and try to go private.  From the press release:

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today announced that its Board of Directors intends to evaluate strategic alternatives, including a possible sale of the company, in order to increase stockholder value.  The Board came to this decision based on the price of Barnes & Noble shares in the marketplace, which the Board believes are now significantly undervalued.

There’s a lot of talk about who should buy the company, and I’ve decided to take the radical position: no one.  I think B&N should rebrand themselves as a web retailer. The income generated by the stores has gone down for the last 3 years in a row. Only the website is doing well.  I think they should give up on the brick and mortar presence entirely.

What do they have to lose?

Of course, the Kindle doesn’t work well with textbooks so that’s not saying much.

I’ve spent the last couple hours with NookStudy and while it has a number of usability issues, it is still the best desktop reading app on the market. It also fills a need. It’s the first decent desktop reading app that supports Adobe DRM (I loaded ebooks bought elsewhere). Yes, I’m familiar with Adobe DE; I think it’s crap.  You should use NookStudy instead.

NookStudy is better than either the Kindle4PC or Adobe DE becuase it provides so many more annotation and search options. It also has a better looking design than the fugly one used by Adobe DE.

With NookStudy you don’t just have the basic highlights, notes, and bookmarks. Instead, you have multiple types of annotations (highlight, asterisk, question) and you can do asterisks and questions in 7 different colors. You can also attach text notes as well as search Wikipedia, Google, Dictionary.com, Wolfram Alpha, and Youtube. And I just noticed that you can attach a link to the webpage you just found through the search. Attaching the link isn’t easy, but it can be done.

Now I’m really impressed. I love that I can search Dictionary.com, Wolfram Alpha, and Youtube. I think this might be the killer feature for NookStudy (like indexed search was for the Kindle).

Some of the other neat features include having multiple ebooks open in tabs, and a second TOC for annotations. They’re rather straightforward so I won’t go into detail.

Do you know what I think? I think B&N just made themselves the leading textbook platform. Aside from the niche textbook platforms, this is the best on the market.