Mon August 12 2013
NOOK HD+ 16GB for $120, refurbished (via Groupon) |
02:56 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No... Did you miss last week's $120 deal on refurbed NOOK HD+ tablets? Well, thanks to Digital Reader we learned that Groupon is giving you another chance to get the device at the same discount - namely $30 off the standard price. Link to the Groupon offer: here Still undecided about your next tablet or e-reader purchase? Make sure to keep an eye on this thread where MobileRead tubemonkey meticulously follows current deals on tablet devices in the US. |
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Calibre Companion 3 beta for Android released |
01:04 PM by chaley in E-Book Software | Calibre Companion After many weeks of work, the latest release of the Calibre Companion is ready to test. This is a major release, containing many of the features most asked for by users: - A cover grid view and many (!) other changes. As we have changed so much, we think that it is prudent to make this release available to people willing to test it. Some notes: If you are willing to test, send me a PM with an email address and I will email you the APK today or tomorrow. You must be able to install manually the APK, something that most file managers do handily. Please post your comments on this thread. We are particularly interested in crashes, clearly incorrect behavior, and things that are confusing. Of course we will listen to comments on appearance and artwork, but we may not act on these before general release. The user interface now uses a variant of the "drawer" that Google is using in the new versions of its apps. In particular we are using the drawer that Google is using in their "hangout" app. In the drawer paradigm, there are two parts to the screen, the part normally visible and the part that is shown when you "open" the drawer. The grouping functions are inside the drawer, seen when it is open. If there is sufficient screen space then the drawer is always open. If there is not sufficient space then you slide the drawer open when you need it, and shut it when you don't. The screen shots below will (I hope) make this drawer notion clearer: First, these 5 images are from a Galaxy Nexus: The following 5 images are from a Nexus 7. You can see that in landscape the drawer is always open, while in portrait the book data is partially visible when the drawer is opened: |
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China Telecom rolls out Tianyibook e-reader to compete against Kindle PW |
12:51 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News Only two months after the Kindle Paperwhite was officially released to Chinese territory, another device, the Tianyibook e-reader, is up for grabs. At 849 yuan (~$140), it is priced exactly as the Kindle. The advantage of the Tianyibook (also called Skytel e-reader), so we were told, is the number of available e-books (Amazon: 40,000 versus Tianyi: 300,000) and the lower average cost per e-book. Specifications:
[via cctime.com (Chinese)] |
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Sat August 10 2013
Fri August 09 2013
Next-gen Kindle Fire specs revealed (yes, the "baby" Fire) |
03:30 PM by TadW in E-Book General | News After leaked specs of the next-gen Kindle Fire HD, here are the leaked specs of the non-HD, entry-level variant aka the baby Fire, as I like to call it.
Source: BGR. They further report:
Link to the report: http://bgr.com/2013/08/09/amazon-kin...ecs-exclusive/ |
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DOJ reiterates need for Apple punishments; gets support from Kobo |
03:20 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News For those of you who have spent the last few days in an isolation chamber, the DOJ is proposing an injunction prohibiting Apple from making pricing deals for five years and allowing e-book app vendors to link to their own stores for two years. Meanwhile, the five publishers who had previously settled in the e-book pricing case, ganged up once again, this time with a legal brief opposing the proposed penalties against Apple. Though this might have backfired a little. The Verge reports:
Kobo shows that it could have been done differently. As Publishers Weekly notes today:
Which is not really a surprise given that Kobo has invested quite some time and money lately in renovating their online book store. The PW article cites some convincing numbers showing how Kobo suffered from plummeted sales after Apple introduced its in-app store rules. |
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calibre V0.9.43 released |
01:05 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News A new version of calibre, the popular e-book library management software, has been released. 0.9.43 adds the following new features and fixes: New Features
Bug Fixes
New news sources
Improved news sources
Want to know more about calibre? Head over to the Calibre forums. |
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Indie bookstores resurgent |
08:44 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News No, they never went away, but independent bookstores are in growth mode. As half the book industry has moved to online purchases and ebooks, a good portion of the other half is now shopping indie. CNBC reports:
Some interesting numbers:
B&N's numbers include *their* online and ebook sales so it sounds as if the Indies are cumulatively the equivalent to B&N's storefronts. Which suggests that lots of smaller stores at more sites *is* a viable strategy for a chain. It certainly seems to work for Half-Price books. (Though I'm not sure I'd count them as indie as the report does. They're family owned but... 116 stores/16 states...) A trend worth watching. (image by secretlondon123 via Flickr) |
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