Sun September 08 2013
The college textbook ripoff charted by Bloomberg |
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:
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] |
[ 37 replies ] |
Sat September 07 2013
Anti-piracy watermark in e-books gets disassembled, it's a tiny barcode! |
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.
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. |
[ 30 replies ] |
The morality of circumventing geographical restrictions only to buy cheaper ebooks |
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] |
[ 208 replies - poll! ] |
Sony PRS-T1 (refurbished) with cover now CDN$60 (deal, Canada) |
08:53 AM by BadBilly in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No... Sony Canada is now selling a bundle of refurbished T1 (with one year warranty) and unlit cover for $59.99. I got this bundle at Christmas for $79.99 and have had no trouble with the Reader. This reader features MP3 playback and a bunch more bilingual dictionaries than the T2 and T3. No Facebook or Evernote integration, though. Edit: Free shipping in Canada too! |
[ 0 replies ] |
Prestigio MultiReader 3664 entry reader to enter Russian market |
08:42 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News Cyprus-based Prestigio is gunning for the Russian e-reader market with the release of a new entry-level reader called Prestigio MultiReader 3664. There is absolutely nothing outstanding about this device, other than that it's relatively inexpensive. It's heading to retail and will be available for about 2700 Russian rubles (~US $80). Availability in various European countries will follow. The specs:
Link product page: MultiReader 3664 [via it-world.ru] |
[ 0 replies ] |
On vacation: 71 percent prefer paper over e-books, survey claims |
07:49 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | General Discussions As the saying goes, the only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself. That said, according to a survey conducted by Heathrow Airport, seven out of ten people going on vacation would rather schlep paper books than opt for a slim e-reader. Heathrow Airport Retail Director Muriel Zingraff-Shariff said: "There’s no doubt that the popularity of eBooks has boomed in recent years, but when it comes to relaxing on holiday it seems you just can’t beat a good book. People want a break from technology whilst they’re abroad, so it’s understandable that people would rather swap their Blackberry for Malorie Blackman." Which makes sense of course since the retail director of an airport would much rather have you buy paper books from the local WHSmith bookstore than buy them online, let's say via Amazon Whispernet. The survey also found that people worry about e-readers not coping well with sun, sea, and sand, which is true, I suppose, especially if you run out of ziplock bags. Related: Taking e-books to the beach - share your tips, E-Reader on the beach |
[ 55 replies ] |
Fri September 06 2013
R.I.P. (Ann) A.C. Crispin |
03:23 PM by AnemicOak in E-Book General | News Sad to hear that author A.C. Crispin passed away from cancer earlier today.
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[ 12 replies ] |