Posts tagged e-readers
E-book piracy different from music, movies
Dec 1st
By Keir Thomas
While browsing a social news site the other day, I came across a link to an e-book search engine. Sadly, alongside the many free e-books available, such as those from Gutenberg, thousands of pirated e-books were being freely offered. I won’t reproduce the details of the site here and I ask that, if you know of it (or others), you keep it to yourself too.
The way the site was talked about by users indicated they didn’t realize or care that many of the electronic books offered were copyrighted and being shared without the owner’s permission. The attitude reminded me of the early days of MP3 sharing in the late 90s, back when nobody understood the implications of music copyright.
Read the rest of this entry »
iPad surges into the market
Apr 15th
The iPad launch is the death knell for Kindle – 300,000 iPads sold on day one in the USA alone.
The day Apple launched its eagerly awaited iPad, Sony was running ads offering their top of the line Touch Edition e-reader, featuring a 6″ touchscreen display for $299.99. Down from $699.99.
Who wants a small, black and white screen, that really only functions as a book, when you can have a larger, 9.7″ beautiful color screen iPad that lets you read books, manage your e-mail, send and receive photos, handle your Twitter and Facebook accounts, or watch a movie?
The 9.7″ LED back-lit IPS screen (in-plane switching – the liquid crystals are aligned horizontally instead of at an angle providing almost perfect color reproduction) has a remarkably precise Multi-Touch screen.
Right now you will find over 1000 Apps available on-line at the App Store. The new iPad can run almost 150,000 Apps for iPhone, iTouch, including the Apps you already have. Read the rest of this entry »
iPad will revolutionize publishing – someday
Jan 29th
v1.0 shows platform still a work in progress
By now, even my disconnected mother sitting on a beach in Florida has heard about the iPad. And while geeks debate the name, whine about its lack of a memory card slot and USB port and slice Apple a new one for once again handing AT&T a golden egg, I find myself thinking about my mom, and whether her world changed a bit yesterday.
See, she reads books. Lots of them. She’s also a technophobe who views her laptop with a curious mixture of fear and indifference. 
Publishers tend to appreciate folks like my mom because she drives demand for their wares. Unfortunately, printing books is a complex, expensive and often messy business. As the record industry discovered in the 1990s, the Internet is changing the way we consume this content, and the industry would like – indeed needs – to transition my mom and everyone like her into an electronically distributed reality.
But in the absence of a realistically usable device or form factor – no, she’ll never read a book on her Byzantine-for-her laptop – that simply wasn’t going to happen. Amazon’s Kindle showed us the possibilities, but despite its pioneering success in defining the e-book reader market, it’s failed to break out beyond a niche product for cash-flush book lovers. It isn’t, and probably will never be, the reader for the rest of us. Read the rest of this entry »
iPad traces new direction for print media
Jan 28th
With all the hype and hoopla of yesterday’s unveiling of the much awaited Apple iPad, it was surprising to note that Steve Jobs had not uttered the word magazine. 
Yet this is the one industry where Apple’s take on the e-reader will have its largest impact. Long before its debut, tech pundits have already predicted that the iPad would take the publishing industry by storm just as the iPod had with the music industry. Read the rest of this entry »
