On Xconomy.com, Wade Roush has a comprehensive and lengthy interview with Russ Wilcox from E Ink. In its three pages, the interview covers a great deal of ground. It looks at the eleven-year history electronic ink technology, how the Kindle 2’s E Ink screen differs from the Kindle 1’s, and what is on the horizon for e-ink. Apart from E-Ink’s upcoming products—different-sized screens, better contrast by the end of 2010, color displays in 2011—and the way that the new Kindle’s screen is advanced over the older, there are quite a few potentially interesting tidbits in the article. ...

I picked up an Asus 1000HE this week. This is the new netbook with a 10" screen, the new Intel Atom N270 chip and a 6 cell 8700 mAH battery. The machine is touted as having a 9 hour battery life. I gave it a bit of a test today. The Asus ran steadily for 7.5 hours and at the end of that time had 25% of the battery left, as indicated by the built-in battery meter. During that time WiFi was on for about 4.5 hours straight. The screen brightness was set one notch above the...

In the New York Times’s “Bits” blog, Saul Hansell ponders why it is that iPhone (and iPod Touch) users are willing to pay for content for their devices. For example, the iPhone app version of David Pogue’s iPhone: The Missing Manual (which I reviewed here) was the best-selling edition of that book. Hansell looks at the app store and marvels that applications are being sold that contain information—such as public domain e-books—that could be found for free on the web. He finds it interesting that “iPhone users are willing to spend money in ways that Web users are...

Such is the title of a thoughtful post on Smart Bitches Trashy Books (I just love that title!).  SB Sarah discusses the pricing of e-books relative to their p-book counterparts. Here’s a snippet: Digital book devotees should be treated like frequent flyer customers, and FictionWise, with that alluring, sexy, and oh-so-confounding MicroPay rebate system, knows it. But publishers and booksellers don’t seem to get that the only creature as loyal as a romance reader is a digital book reader. If publishers and sellers are going to insist on pricing ebooks between paperback and...

Received the following press release from Pan Macmillan: Today, GoSpoken.com, mobile platform for audio andeBooks, and the book publisher Macmillan announced an extension of their already existing partnership on audio books for the mobile; the full catalogue of more than 320 ebook titles from MacMillan will be made available to all UK mobile phone subscribers. EBooks have successfully entered the market on several portable eReaders. Macmillan has been one of the most active publishers to engage with mobile channels and is now extending its activity through GoSpoken. Whilst the portable eReaders cost up to a few hundred...

Moderator's note: Alan Baxter's RealmShift, the SF-and-fantasy novel shown here, is one of the five-star-rated titles on Smashwords, a site for self-published writers and their fans. "Samuel Harrigan is a murderer," reads part of the plot descrption. "He used ancient blood magic to escape a deal with the Devil." Mark Coker, CEO and himself a self-pubbed novelist (photo), sees Smashwords as a chance to help the Baxters of this world to bypass publishing's gatekeepers and connect directly with readers. Down in Australia, Baxter is also working through his own small press, putting out a paper editon, as Mark would encourage him...

I love this type of stuff and am a great reader of diaries and autobiographies.  From the  Holt-Atherton Special Collections website:  Delia (Hammond) Locke was the matriarch of the family. Born in 1832, she married Dr. Dean Jewitt Locke and moved to California in 1855. That same year Delia began keeping a daily diary, a practice she continued for the next 67 years until her death in 1922. Her diaries from 1855 to 1879 have been digitized to create this online collection. The diaries provide a remarkable documentation of life in rural northern California in the 19th century....

From the Foxit website:  The first set of eSlicks have sold out and the next set will ship out around middle to late April. If you have preordered before February, your eSlick will ship around late February or early March. You may remember that the eSlick is new e-book reader that is optimized for reading in the PDF format. Credit to eReport for the link....

DRM is tough on anyone who wants to own books---not just lease them in effect. Will Company X exist a few decades from now? Even Amazon isn't necessarily for eternity. I say this regardless of any visions that Jeff Bezos, the outer-space entrepreneur, may have of Kindle 15s in hotel rooms on Mars. If Amazon dies and your machine does, too, so might access to the books you paid for. Now here's another Kindle-related thought. What about DRM's special hassles for people in their 50s and beyond? I'll get to the inheritance issue in time---the pesky...

Nokia says it might enter the laptop biz. And why not? Cellphones and laptops are converging. And Nokia's Internet tablets, like the N810, shown here, pack the wallop of the laptops of yore. Perhaps Nokia could also think about putting out an app-rich tablet---with a  screen six inches or bigger---if Apple keeps ignoring this niche. Related: New screens, $200 prices could boost netbooks as e-readers. Plus, tablet capabilities from Asus in March....

It was more than a year ago that I encouraged Amazon to consider adding an eye-resting feature where the Kindle reads to you. I doubt my post had anything to do with it, but I was pleased to see they've implemented this on Kindle 2, calling it "Text-to-Speech." The big question now is whether Amazon will offer the same functionality to all its Kindle 1 owners, via either a firmware or software update.  Since the hardware capabilities exist for this in Kindle 1, there's no reason the company shouldn't offer it; not doing so would be a sharp poke...

I'm old enough that this news item really resonates for me. From Boing Boing about the Timothy Leary archives: Timothy Leary was a visionary. Realizing the importance of the events of the day, he tenaciously saved records of each phase of his life, capturing not only the budding psychedelic movement and its history, but years later, trumpeting the coming of the digital age of personal computers when this concept was still foreign to most. His archival collection contains over 500,000 documents, including hundreds of letters from luminaries of all kinds (Allan Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Abbie Hoffman, Robert Anton Wilson),...