05:44 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Jeff Kirvin from Writing On Your Palm is asking for our support. He is currently broke; if you enjoy reading his excellent blog on writing on PDAs, you could help him out with a small Paypal donation.

05:37 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

NYT's Sunday Book Review features an interesting essay on how the negative trend in e-books has finally reversed its momentum:

[I]t turns out the e-book market has been changing course and, though still tiny, has been growing at double-digit rates. It is, in fact, the fastest-growing segment of the comparatively static publishing world. Between 2002 and 2003, the number of e-books sold rose 71 percent, according to the industry's trade association, the Open eBook Forum. The industry posted record sales in the first quarter of 2004, a 46 percent increase compared with the same period last year.

Author Sarah Glazer argues that main driver of the positive shift in the e-book market is the immense growth in cellphones and handheld devices sold. She doesn't neglect to speak also about the convience of e-books:

Fans of cellphone reading tell me they quickly forget about the size of the screen once they get absorbed in a good plot; moreover, they can increase the type size to make it easier on the eyes. And the convenience is unbeatable. A friend of mine, who had forgotten to bring reading matter to the dentist, recently read Kitty Kelley's book ''The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty'' on his Treo smart phone, then text-messaged a particularly damning paragraph about the Bush family to my cell.

In one aspect I strongly disagree with Mrs Glazer: E-books are not "significantly cheaper" than paper books. It may be true that a few bestsellers such as the Dan Browns' "Da Vinci Code" sell for a few cents less, but the overall picture is still bleak. There is no justification for selling e-books on a price-level that is just/or almost on par with paper books. E-books can be easily reproduced, they greatly reduce deliver costs, and they don't require any expensive store space. Similar like it is the case with audio cds vs. downloadable MP3, the publishing industry should reconsider its pricing policy in order to make e-books more attractive.

Overall this is a good essay that clearly depicts how e-books are slowly, but unstoppable integrating into mainstream.

05:11 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

It's almost like the Holy Grail of e-books: technology to flip ("skim") through dozens of digital pages and be able to catch a glimpse of what is on each page - much like browsing through a book. Singapore software company E-Book Systems (EBS) might be able to deliver such a e-book technology very soon. According to yesterday's article at Singapore's The New Paper, EBS has its own patented technology called Digital Flip, which allows you to flip an e-book just like its paper version:

It was first used in its consumer range of products called FlipAlbum, allowing people to make virtual photo albums. The company claims to have sold one million of FlipAlbum products to date worldwide.

Though I have never heard of FlipAlbum, I am anxious to see how this technology works when it is applied to e-book reader software.

10:54 AM by Laurens in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Interesting thread over at TreoCentral. Some users are reporting that their voice sounds "muffled" on the other end.

PalmOne is under intense scrutiny these days, maybe unfairly so. However, for a phone, any serious audio issues (that did not occur with earlier models) are of course totally unacceptable. Let's see how quickly they'll respond to this.

10:25 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Hi everyone!

Sorry for the recent downtime (~24hrs). It took longer to update the forum than we had previously anticipated. Now we are back!

If you visit our forums, you'll notice a new category structure. If you have suggestions or comments, now is the best time

We are not done with all internal MR changes yet; so expect some more (short!) downtimes next week.

A more formal announcement will follow.

Thank you,
Editors
Mobileread.com

07:36 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

In case you've missed any MobileRead news from this week, here is our usual roundup:

Announcements
Site maintenance 12/03 and 12/04

E-Book Webstores
Free ebooks at eReader.com

General Chat
December Deals at PalmGear and PocketGear
Free Weekly Software from Handango

iSilo/X
iSilo/X V4.2 Beta 1 - finally with RSS support!

Other Readers
CHM eBook Reader 2.3 for Pocket PC

Palm
802.11b comes to the Zodiac
PalmSource CFO leaves the company

Pocket PC
BetaPlayer 0.094 Unstable released - with AC3 support
Pocket PC Freeware Sites
Rival accuses BetaPlayer of copyright infringement
Trisystech 25 Days of Christmas Sale

Portable Audio/Video
Sony's NW-HD3 - The First iPod Killer

Sunrise
Sunrise Tutorial Available

WiFi / Bluetooth Technologies
Streaming WiFi Content for your PDA
Wireless Internet take off to the sky in 2005

01:32 PM by TadW in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The discussion first started slowly, when Picard, famous author of the free video player BetaPlayer for Pocket PC, released the first BetaPlayer plugin supporting the Intel 2700 accelerator chip of the Axim X50v.

Then the bad thing happened.

In an insanely long discussion thread at Aximsite, member PocketTV Team first accused Picard of breaking the terms of the GPL license (mentioned earlier at MR). After a long and heated discussion, Picard decided to take the blame on himself and continue development of the plugin. Users were so happy and excited about his work that they decided to denote him Paypal money (including myself).

Then someone (could have been me ) asked Picard whether it was possible to add support for MPEG2 / SVCD to BetaPlayer. It didn't take long for PocketTV Team user to pop up again (I call him the Devil's advocate from now) and to mention the fact that MPEGLA requires software decoders to pay patent royalties for mpeg-2 and mpeg-4. Anyways, after exploring the Net, I came to the conclusing that using any unlicensed mpeg2 decoder (free or commercial) is indeed illegal. In order to be able to distribute a MPEG-2 decoding product, you must have the license from patent holders. Obviously one way to get this license is to obtain the MPEG LA patent portfolio license.

However, a free mpeg2 decoder library or plugin by itself is not an MPEG-2 decoding product until it is compiled, linked to an application and actually used by the end-user - in which case it is the end-user who is infringing the patent, not the programmer.

Have a look at 3.4 of the VideoLAN FAQ:

3.4. What about personal/commercial usage?
Some of the codecs distributed with VLC are patented and require you to pay royalties to their licensors. These are
mostly the MPEG style codecs.
With many products the producer pays the license body (in this case MPEG LA (http://www.mpegla.com)) so the
user (commercial or personal) does not have to take care of this. VLC (and ffmpeg and libmpeg2 which it uses in
most of these cases) cannot do this because they are Free and Open Source implementations of these codecs. The
software is not sold and therefore the end-user becomes responsible for complying to the licensing and royalty
requirements. You will need to contact the licensor on how to comply to these licenses.
This goes for playing a DVD with VLC for your personal joy ($2.50 one time payment to MPEG LA) as well as for
using VLC for streaming a live event in MPEG-4 over the Internet.

Obviously, while this sounds good, it is not an official answer by MPEG LA regarding this matter. Considering that the libmpeg2 project is several years old, used by a dozen well-known applications for MPEG2 decoding, and yet has not run into any legal trouble, I don't see how a MPEG2 plugin for BetaPlayer would make any difference. After all, it is the end-user who decides whether he wants to install and use the plugin or not.

And then I stumbled over today's interview at msmobiles, where PocketTV calls Betaplayer "an illegal hack" due to a) patent infridgement and b) stolen code. It saddens me deeply to see someone like PocketTV desperately vituperating someone elses work without showing definite proof.

Is it just a coincidence that user PocketTV represents MpegTV LLC, who develops PocketTV, another video player for Pocket PC, which is not freeware and lacks some of the more advanced features of BetaPlayer?

10:12 AM by sUnShInE in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Tapwave has released a Wifi driver and an e-mail application. The e-mail app allows you to set up 8 accounts, and includes IMAP support and scheduled downloading. You can use the SanDisk or palmOne Wifi cards.

Download the drivers here.

Now if palmOne would only get their act together....