Tag Archives: ebooks

by Michelle Lentz

Yesterday at CES, Plastic Logic debuted the QUE ebook reader. This is more than just an ebook reader however; it borders on personal organizer.

Squarely aimed at type-A CEOs, the device comes in at $649 for the 4GB model with wifi and $799 for the 8GB model with wifi and AT&T 3G.  The QUE is oversized, more like the Kindle DX than the Kindle 2. They demo the device with several business publications loaded, including the Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review. Plastic Logic has a content deal with Barnes & Noble.

The design is absolutely gorgeous. QUE design was inspired by a piece of paper. The size of a pad of paper, about 1/3 inch thick, and weighing less than many periodicals (about a pound), QUE features a 10.7-inch shatterproof plastic display—the largest display in the industry. The display screen is rimmed with a shiny black frame. It’s gorgeous, but I suspect it would attract fingerprints – a small complaint really.

The QUE does more than just read newspapers and books. The screen displays your latest emails and calendar, pulled from Outlook. It also displays your favorite subscriptions and books so that you can access those with one touch instead of moving to a Table of Contents screen. In the midst of all this is also the content you are reading. With one touch, you can move from the Organizer style home screen to your content.

When we asked what formats the QUE supported, I laughed. This device is so geared at business that the rep told us “Word, Powerpoint, and Excel.”  Upon further inquiry, she added GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, TXT, and HTML as well as RTF, Visio, PDF, and ePub. (Right now, I’m almost positive that the Kindle is the only eReader on the market that does not support ePub. Get with the program Amazon – time for another firmware update.)

The QUE is a beautiful device. They clearly put a lot of effort into everything from the design to the one-touch navigation. However, I don’t think it will make a dent in the ever-growing ereader market. From what I saw at CES, only the Alex ebook reader really had some features that can compete with the Kindle, the Nook, and Sony. The QUE is aimed at an affluent, niche market. It’s lovely, but for us average folks, it’s not really practical.

__

Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

CoolerBooks.com is now billing itself as the world’s largest eBookstore. It was announced today that CoolerBooks has paired with Google to include over 1 million public domain books from Google Books.

Starting today, COOLERBOOKS.com will feature a Google API with out of copyright works from the Google Books index, accessible for free via the COOLERBOOKS.com website, and the COOL-ER ereader. With this partnership, COOLERBOOKS.com becomes the largest ebookstore in the world, with over one million titles available for purchase or free access.

CoolerBooks also produces the Cooler eBook reader, which looks sort of like a giant iPod. The eBook store carries 19 different file formats, including PUB and PDF, and MP3.

This is sort of a direct hit at Amazon who, again, carries books only in the AZW format for it’s AZW-reading Kindle.

__

Cheers!

Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

Sony held a press conference today announcing a new addition to it’s eBook Reader family, as well as some interesting partnerships.

Earlier this month, Sony announced the adoption of the ePUB format for its stores, making me seriously consider switching from the Kindle. Now Sony has upped the ante a bit. There are now several eReaders in the family.

The Pocket Edition has physical buttons and is smaller, sporting a 5 in display and 512 MB internal memory. It’s a perfect candidate for someone’s first foray into eBooks and is priced at $199. The Touch edition has a touchscreen, 6 in display, 512 MB internal memory and a slot for a Memory Stick Pro Duo SD card. It also includes an audio player and picture viewer. The Touch is priced at $299. Both of these devices are available now (and were actually announced earlier this month).

The big news is the Daily Edition, announced today and available by the holidays. The  Daily Edition is the top of the line, selling for $399 and is comparable in many ways to the Kindle DX. That includes 3G access via AT&T but unlike the Kindle, you can’t surf the web, just the Sony store. The Daily Edition includes a 7-in touchscreen and can be used in portrait or landscape mode. I’m not sure of the exact specs, but the press release states that the reader “has enough internal memory to hold more than one thousand standard eBooks and expansion slots for memory cards to hold even more.”

If I understand correctly, these devices are in addition to the existing Digital Book PRS-505, which sells for $279, but I suspect they may be phasing that one out and replacing it with the similar Pocket edition.

The really excellent news is Sony’s deal with the public libraries of the world. Believe it or not, your public library most likely has an eBook library available. For example, I have access to the Ohio eBook Project. Unfortunately, because my Kindle won’t read DRM’d .mobi or ePUB files, I can’t read any of the books available to me. Sony is making sure that its users can easily access the libraries and check out books, all from their eBook device.

Thousands of libraries in the OverDrive network offer eBooks optimized for the Sony Reader, and visitors can now find these libraries by typing their zip code into the Library Finder. Through the selected library’s download website, visitors can check out eBooks with a valid library card, download them to a PC and transfer to their Reader. At the end of the library’s lending period, eBooks simply expire, so there are never any late fees.

Sony has another major advantage over Amazon – it has physical stores. It’s one of the reasons that I am constantly asked about the Kindle in airports. “Is that a Kindle? Can I see it?”  Sony makes it easy. Not only can you walk into any SonyStyle store in your local mall to play with an eBook reader, you can also wander into any Borders to experience one. eBook Readers, whether Kindle or Sony, are hard to explain until someone actually has one in their hands, sees, the eInk, and “flips” a few pages.

__

Cheers!

Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

I’m not loyal to my electronic devices and brands. I’m happily leaving behind Apple to grab a different mobile phone. (This week I’m playing with a Blackberry Tour, but I still want to get my hands on a Pre.) And now, I’m considering leaving my Kindle behind to pick up a Sony eReader sometime this year. After all, I can sell the Kindle on eBay.

In the same way that Apple has irritated with iPhone/App Store quirks, Amazon is irritating me with Kindle quirks. In the last 6 months I’ve been rubbed the wrong way by several things:

• Inability to read formats other than DRM-free MOBI, DRM-free PDF, and AZW (Amazon). This keeps me from using the eBooks from my local library, all available in ePub and DRMed MOBI files.
• Amazon lowered the price of the Kindle 2 by $100. Yes, I paid $400 for the thing back in February. I should have waited a few months and saved some case.
• Amazon took back the George Orwell book. Now, I didn’t have it on my Kindle to begin with, but it does make me sort of shudder. Please don’t Big Brother my eBook Reader.

Today comes the news that Sony will be adopting the ePub format for their digital store. ePub is the open standard for eBooks and its a great sign that Sony is moving to the format. According to the New York Times,

After the change, books bought from Sony’s online store will be readable not just on its own device but on the growing constellation of other readers that support ePub. Those include the Plastic Logic eReader, a thin device that has been in development for nearly a decade and is expected to go on sale early next year.

“There is going to be a proliferation of different reading devices, with different features and capabilities and prices for a different set of consumer requirements,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit. “If people are going to this e-book shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores, and not just be required to shop at one store.”

Sony is going out of its way to let other readers into its store. It smartly sees the value in selling the books and not just the device. Wait a minute. Haven’t we gone through this before with music players? It’s worth mentioning that Sony will be switching to the Adobe DRM. Just because these are ePub, does not mean that they will be DRM free. But they are available for other devices, which is key.

The ePub format will be compatible with all of Sony’s available eReaders, including the PRS-500 (1st generation), which my husband happens to own. See? No brand loyalty in this house.

Amazon needs to get in the game. They cannot play the Apple card in the eBook field and hope to survive. Not with so many low-cost readers heading to market within the next year, all of which support the open ePub standard.

__

Cheers!

Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

DocStoc, the online document sharing and collaboration site, has launched a store where you can purchase premium documents. The store looks to have everything from legal templates to white papers. Their goal is admirable – “to become the iTunes of documents.”

As of right now, the site gets over 8M unique visitors a month, which is an increase of 150% since the beginning of the year. It seems like a good time to launch a new venture. DocStoc has partnered with 12 partners for their launch, including Legal Zoom and the Small Business Forum.  But sales are not limited to their business partners. Got a white paper, research paper, or never-published-novel you want to sell? You can apply to sell your own work in the DocStore.

The biggest fear around this, of course, is that people will sell things to which they don’t own the copyright. To help combat this, DocStoc is offering a 100% money-back guarantee on all paid content. They also have what they call Advanced Copyright Filtering, which prevents documents from the DocStore from being uploaded again anywhere on the DocStoc site. That doesn’t quite remove the worry however. According to Jason Nazar, DocStoc CEO, “In general, users can request to sell their content in the DocStore, but they will have to go through an application/approval process where, among other things, we verify that they have the rights to the content they want to sell.”

Along with the store comes a new document viewer for the premium documents. The new viewer limits how much of the document you can preview. Similar to Amazon’s widget that allows you to “See Inside” a small part of a book, the new viewer whets your appetite for the product.

DocStoc’s primary competitor, Scrib’d, launched their online store back in May and inked a deal with Simon & Schuster in June. As a huge fan of e-books and e-docs, I welcome any and all to the marketplace. I look forward to seeing where DocStoc heads next.

__

Cheers!

Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.