| Would You QUEue Up To Pay 800 Bucks For An eReader? |
|
Last week Plastic Logic announced the availability of its previously-introduced eReader, the QUE proReader. It’s a cool-looking device, but I’m a liberrian, so price tends to be the bottom-line with me: “The price for QUE will range from $649.00 for the 4GB QUE model with WiFi that holds up to 35,000 documents, to $799.00 for the 8GB QUE model with WiFi and 3G that holds up to 75,000 documents.” Oy. Have I mentioned that my netbook set me back only $279? In the end, though, it may not matter what they want to charge if Apple unveils the iSlate at the end of the month. I’d love to be a fly on the wall in Amazon’s offices when that happens. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
Comments (0)November 25, 2009
| Kindle Now Runs For 2 Weeks On a Single Charge |
|
Amazon has released Kindle software update v2.3 which, among other things, provides for longer battery life (up to 1 week on a single charge with wireless on and 2 weeks with wifi off) and a built-in PDF reader. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
November 23, 2009
| Google Books Settlement Will Have to Wait Another 88 Days |
|
As I blogged last week, Judge Chin has set the date for the next Google Books settlement “fairness hearing”: February 18. January 28 is the last call date for objections. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
November 17, 2009
| Google Books Settlement: It’s a Lot Like Pride and Prejudice |
|
Or Sense and Sensibility. I dunno — one of those Jane Austen novels in which everybody needs a kick in the pants to help them make up their minds. Anyway, Google and its partners, as agreed, submitted a revised settlement last Friday. Judge Denny Chin will again schedule a “fairness hearing” soon. As Jane woulda said, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a company in possession of a good fortune must be in want of good legal counsel.” |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
October 23, 2009
| Android’s Everywhere |
|
John Gruber notes that Barnes & Noble’s new Nook eBook reader is running Android. You’d of though that since they got a freebie OS they coulda knocked a few dollars off the price, huh? But nooooo … |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
October 20, 2009
| Can I Have Your Attention Here? [UPDATED] |
|
You, in the back, pipe down. Alright. Got some product announcements to go over with you. I’ll do ‘em in alpha order. Apple They had a good 4th quarter: 3 million Macs (up 17% over last year), 7.4M iPhones (+7%), and 10.2M iPods (-8%). Almost $10 billion in revenue, with $1.67 billion in profit. These numbers beat Q3. So, to celebrate, Apple’s just announced enhancements to the MacBook (polycarbonate unibody shell), iMac (new LED display), and Mac mini (more memory and faster processor), as well as a new mouse, called the Magic Mouse, that sports a multi-touch surface. BusinessWeek has a good summary of the details. Barnes & Noble The WSJ is reporting (sub required) that Barnes & Noble will release an eBook reader called the Nook. They got their scoop by reviewing an ad scheduled to run in the New York Times Book Review on October 25: “A new electronic book reader is expected Tuesday from bookseller Barnes & Noble Inc. that will challenge devices from Amazon.com Inc. and Sony Corp. with a color touch screen and $259 price, according to a planned ad for the device. The price for the reader, called the Nook, matches that of Amazon’s Kindle … Details of the reader appear in a full-page advertisement viewed by The Wall Street Journal in the New York Times Book Review section dated Sunday, Oct. 25. The advertisement says the Nook will enable its owners to ‘lend eBooks to friends.’” Books and tools, electronic or otherwise — I never lend ‘em, ’cause I never get ‘em back. UPDATE: On a related note, yesterday Plastic Logic introduced its new eReader. B&N will power the bookstore for the device. Free wifi on every Virgin America flight between November 10, 2009 and January 15, 2010. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
October 15, 2009
| Google Plans to Sell eBooks Next Year |
|
The WSJ (sub required) is reporting that Google will enter the ebook market next year: “Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search’s publisher partnership program, said the price per book would be set by their publishers and would start with between 400,000 to 600,000 books next year. ‘It will be a browser-based access [my emphasis],’ Mr. Turvey said Thursday at the 61st Frankfurt Book Fair. ‘The way the e-book market will evolve is by accessing the book from anywhere, from an access point of view and also from a geographical point of view.’” Google will keep 55% of the revenue, with the rest going to the retailers and publishers. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
October 7, 2009
| November 9 Is New Date For Google Books Deal |
|
The parties in the Google Books-Authors Guild case met as scheduled today for a status update. The NY Times reports that Judge Denny Chin gave Google and its partners another month to come up with a revised version of the settlement. The due date is November 9. Stay tuned. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
| Kindle 2’s Price Has Dropped By $100 This Year |
|
Back in July Amazon knocked 60 bucks off the price, to $299. Now it’s $259. They’re slowly getting closer to my purchase point. At this rate I may just decide to get one in, say, 2011. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
September 24, 2009
| I Was Wondering How Long It’d Take For Scribd To Get Sued |
|
Social docs site Scribd is being sued by a children’s author. Elaine Scott found that her 1985 book “Stocks and Bonds: Profits and Losses — A Quick Look at Financial Markets” had been posted on Scribd and consequently downloaded more than 100 times. She fired off a C&D notice to Scribd, then followed that up with a lawsuit. Ms. Scott claims 2 violations of copyright — one for the upload (even though Scribd gets a “safe harbor” under the DMCA since they took it down), and another when her book was added to Scribd’s copyright protection system as a result of the takedown notice (hmmm … interesting). According to the complaint (available from — you guessed it! — Scribd): “Scribd is building two profitable businesses on a foundation of enterprise-wide copyright infringement — a website that provides storage, searching, and retrieval of documents, and a copyright system fed by stolen works that is used to identify and prevent the uploading of unlicensed copyrighted works. The value of the copyright protection system may someday exceed (or already has) the value of the document storage and retrieval system, especially if it were illegal to operate a Scribd-type business unless the business also implemented a copyright filter.” Um … OK, if you say so. But I cannot believe that Scribd’s filter uses the full text of each work to determine whether something is copyrighted. Indeed Wired’s Threat Level blog reports that Scribd “creates a digital fingerprint, or a ‘hash,’ to identify infringing copies.” If that’s true, then the suit IMHO doesn’t have much to stand on. Anyway this is the first Scribd lawsuit that I’ve heard of. I guess it was inevitable, given that many full-length books are now being posted there. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
RSS