09:23 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

WSJ Online is reporting that Sony, Samsung, Philips, Matsushita and Intertrust have joined the Marlin Joint Development Association, aiming to develop standard specifications for software that can prevent digital movies and music from being improperly copied. The Association also intends to enforce rules about how such content can be played and shared.

What makes Marlin different, the article cites supporters, is mainly that it is emanating from some of the biggest brands in consumer electronics. "The CE industry has been pretty quiet," said Talal Shamoon, Intertrust's chief executive. Now, they are "detonating their DRM," he said.

Our question of the day: Can hackers be impressed by such a joint effort and can piracy really be discouraged by adopting increasingly more restrictive anti-piracy technologies?

08:14 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Here is this week's list of freebies from Handango:

Pocket PC: GeniusPro (ARM/XScale)
Palm OS: Blackjack PLS
Sony Ericsson: Memory Blaster
Series 60: SlovoEd English Dictionary
Windows Mobile Smartphone: Resco System Toys

07:53 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

The EU Directive 2001/29/EU (also known as the European Copyright Directive) has made it "a criminal offence to break or attempt to break the copy protection or access control systems on digital content such as music, videos, eBooks, and software".

Since today, at least in Germany there is one notable exception: The Deutsche Bibliothek, Germany's national library and bibliographic information center, has received a "license to copy", i.e. the official authorization to crack and duplicate DRM-protected e-books and other digital media such as CD-Audio and CD-Roms.

The Deutsche Bibliothek achieved an agreement with the German Federation of the Phonographic Industry and the German Booksellers and Publishers Association after it became obvious that copy protections would not only annoy teenage school boys, but also prohibit the library from fulling its legal mandate to collect, process and bibliographic index important German and German-language based works.

07:02 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Here's our periodic reminder that you can also subscribe to individual sections of MobileRead via RSS 0.92 and 2.0 feeds (like if you only want the posts from our E-Book Reading section, you can just get those). Visit this link for a full overview of our currently implemented feeds!

06:48 PM by Alexander Turcic in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Sandra Vogel from ZDNet UK has reviewed the Bookeen Cybook e-book reader and gave it a 7 out of 10. Although she misses a few features such as integrated Wi-Fi, active USB, and some more productivity software tools, she comes to the conclusion that the Cybook "has the of potential to bridge the gap between much more expensive Tablet PCs and much smaller handhelds, and it's a good example of lateral thinking in hardware development."

See our related threads:
Bookeen answers regarding Cybook review
Teleread excited about Cybook
Cybook E-Book Reader reviewed

06:37 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

For a limited time, Fictionwise is offering the Nebula Preliminary Ballot Nominee Aloha by Ken Wharton for free. Make sure to also check out our other threads (1, 2) for previous nominee freebies!

06:15 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Chris Cather from Fool.com wrote a quick roundup of what the finance world currently thinks of palmOne stock. This is a good read for every hobby investor who also shares our love for handhelds!

05:07 PM by pruss in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Smoothed fonts (antialiased fonts) decrease the "jagginess" of bitmap fonts. FontSmoother lets you use smooth fonts in most applications on your OS 5 PDA (except for Tapwave and Treo 600) with Fonts4OS5 3.21 (some applications, e.g., eReader and Mobipocket do not even require Fonts4OS5!) It includes several smooth fonts and you can generate more from TrueType and Type 1 sources on your desktop with the free PalmFontConv utility.

You can get it from:
http://zlthemes.com/ProductDetailListing.php?PID=79
Or:
http://palmgear.com/index.cfm?xyz=90288