07:51 AM by jswinden in E-Book Readers | Apple Devices

I mentioned this in another thread, but thought it was important enough to create a new thread as well.

Amazon has released what they call a mandatory update of the Kindle app for those who plan to upgrade to iOS 7. This update will prevent the loss of registration information and books, which could occur if you don't update the app before upgrading to iOS 7.

Download link: iTunes

07:34 AM by AlPe in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

EPUB3Reader is a proof-of-concept Android App optimized for reading complex EPUB 2/3 ebooks, e.g. books with many internal/external links and/or with parallel texts.

The project has been developed by three students, under my supervision, at the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Padova (Padua), Italy.

You can get the APK, the code (MIT license) and some EPUB ebooks featuring parallel texts (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license) from the GitHub public repo:

https://github.com/pettarin/epub3reader

Screenshots are here:

https://github.com/pettarin/epub3rea...SCREENSHOTS.md

The app is not production-grade yet, but I think it shows some interesting UI tricks novel or not widely adopted in EPUB reading systems. Please see the README for a discussion.

Comments are welcome.

09:23 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

When Sony revealed the PRS-T3 to the world last Wednesday, it brought with it the promise of a smart and satisfying reading experience. With all the new devices announced to bring love, joy and peace to the world of e-reading, we reckon it'd be difficult to make the right purchase decision. Thanks to the guys of allesebook.de, below is a nicely made video review that, although it's in German, should give you a pretty good idea whether the PRS-T3 is the right one for you.

04:15 AM by chaley in E-Book Software | Calibre Companion

CC V3.1.1 has been released and should start appearing as an update soon.

This release:

• fixes the comments font size problems discussed in this thread.
• adds an option to revert to the old display where structural HTML (center, justify, font changes) were ignored.
• fixes an uncommon crash returning from book details
• improves performance returning from book details

Please comment or report problems with this release on this thread or by making a new thread.

02:33 AM by doctorow in E-Book General | General Discussions

Did you ever wonder how to use Lego Mindstorm to make your Kindle collection DRM-free? Well, according to the maker, "this is an art project reflecting the relation of book scanning, copyright, and digital rights management. This is not intended to be understood as an instruction or invitation, but rather as a provocative thought experiment."

From AllThingsD:

A university professor in Austria has released the video below, showing how he has automated a low-tech approach to bypassing the digital rights management system on the Kindle.

His name is Peter Purgathofer, and he’s an associate professor at the Vienna University of Technology.

Using Lego’s Mindstorms — a basic robotics kit popular with hobbyists — plus a Kindle and a Mac, he has assembled a way to photograph what’s on the screen, and then submit it to a cloud-based text-recognition service.

Here is the video:

http://vimeo.com/73675285

02:25 AM by doctorow in E-Book General | News

This is not about the rising cost of college tuition. This is about the rising cost of college textbooks. And it's real bad!

Bloomberg has it as its Chart of the Day:

The cost of college textbooks has more than doubled since the end of 2001 even as prices for other books retreated, illustrating soaring tuition isn’t the only thing to blame for rising higher education bills as the school year begins.

The CHART OF THE DAY shows university textbook prices surged 102 percent through July from December 2001 while the costs for recreational books declined 1.5 percent. Over the same period, the consumer price index measuring the cost of all goods and services rose 32 percent.

Did textbooks just get so much better, or is it a problem that professors, who are in charge of determining what their students have to buy, usually don't have any control over the cost of the textbooks?

[image: wohnai via Flickr]

05:44 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Last month we learned how the anti-piracy outfit BREIN is able to track down suspected e-book pirates by matching digital watermarks inside e-books with the transaction records they receive from e-book sellers (not without causing a political controversy). If you've caught yourself wondering how such a digital watermark looks like, a computer science student at the University of Twente was able to get his hands on a watermarked EPUB file and dissected it into pieces. The result is astonishingly simple: embedded on every page in the book is a minuscule image that turns out to be an ordinary barcode. This barcode contains the transaction code which uniquely identifies the e-book purchase.

Other pages in the book all have the same image at the bottom that is nearly impossible to notice with your naked eye. The image is embedded as a Based64 encoded string (see the image depicted above), decoding (using the openssl base64 command) it results in an image with the dimensions of 1 by a few hundred pixels. When seen with a naked eye it looks like a thin white line. [...]

When mapping the 7-bit blocks to characters you can see almost immediately that it results in a string equal to the transaction code. So, the barcode you find on each page in the book represents the transaction code encoded in 7-bit ASCII.

So is that really all? The author of the post doesn't exclude the possibility of other "invisible" watermarks, such as random variations in text or punctuation. How to know for sure? By comparing two separate purchases of the same book.

01:44 PM by K. Molen in E-Book General | General Discussions

With the launch of Amazon India I find myself wondering about the morality of circumventing geographical restrictions only to save money. With ebooks there's no shipping costs involved, so it'd be an easy thing to do and I wouldn't notice the difference in the end product. I'm personally perfectly fine with circumventing geographical restrictions to get access to an ebook that's not for sale in my location, but I'm not sure how I feel about doing it to get a better price.

On the one hand, it's still buying the book from a legal seller and the only thing that's making it a gray area is where I'm physically located. On the other hand, I'm denying authors some of their profits.

To illustrate what I'm talking about, the Kindle ebook for Margaret Atwood's latest, Maddaddam, is $17.49 on Amazon.com and $9.98 on Amazon.in, so if I were to buy this via Amazon India I'd effectively deny Atwood approximately 50% of her royalties on that sale. I say approximately 50% because the list price show an even bigger difference, and I think authors probably earn their royalties on that price.

In addition to the authors, I'm obviously also denying publishers some profit and possibly Amazon as well, although I'm less sure about the latter.

So yeah... thoughts?

[image: Pen Waggener via Flickr]