Michael Tamblyn of Kobo has just announced an upgrade to their ereader firmware. Here's what the Kobo blog says about it. I'll do without the blockquotes: We are very happy to announce that we have firmware upgrades on the way for Kobo eReader customers. I’m going to give as much detail as I can on this process and will be checking the forum to answer any questions that come up over the next couple of days. This is a big post, with lots of info, so let’s get started. Two Ways to Upgrade Option 1: Download and Install Download...

All sorts of info about fooling around with the innards of your Nook is available on this site. According to the About page: nookDevs was created on November 29th, 2009 (1 day before the nook's scheduled launch) by User:robbiet480 who saw great potential for Android and nook. nookDevs is a MediaWiki-based wiki which means you can edit it to improve it! via Gizmodo ...

Here are two from Resource Shelf. The NFB is in the process of digitally archiving its 70-year film and tape-based archive. This is over 13,000 works that cover over 6,000 hours of content. Additionally, the NFB has released an iPad app which provided free access to over 1,000 films and can even store up to 48 hours of content for offline viewing. There is also an iPhone app, which Resource Shelf says works great with their 3G. You can find more information here. Very exciting! I'm going to download the iPad app as soon as I finish posting for...

Amazon Kindle Review is reporting that the DX can be had for $249, but I just checked and its being listed at $350 (actually $349.99). Still a pretty good deal considering the list price. Here's the Amazon link....

TechCrunch reports that Amazon has launched a 70% royalty option for Kindle e-books (sold to US customers), as a complement to its existing 35% Digital Text Platform royalty. The 70% royalty comes with a number of requirements, none of which seems particularly onerous. The price must be $2.99 to $9.99, and must be at least 20% below the lowest list price for the paper version of the book. It must be offered in all geographic areas to which the author or publisher has the rights, at or below price parity with competition (including physical book prices). And...

Received the following email from Johannes Haupt in Germany: Cyprus-based CE company Prestigio (brand of ASBIS) joins the European ebook reader race with several soon-to-be-released devices. Portfolio includes a 5" mediareader called Libretto with Adobe drm support for epub+pdf (first of its kind), audio + video playback capacity, useful-looking switch-page-buttons and a pretty competitive price tag (110 Euro/130 USD incl. Tax) as well as several e-ink devices. As one of the leading European distributors, Prestigio(.com)/ASBIS(.com) will sell their readers through many retailers (online + offline) across the continent so the devices could have a major impact here. Check lessen.net for some...

As part of our correspondence related to Dan's Taiwan article, below, he related this little anecdote that I thought I should share with you. Dan says: Recently I spoke with a top book editor in Taiwan, Linden Lin: "When asked whether he was concerned that the digital age might do away completely with printed books, the bookish, middle-aged Mr Lin in Taiwan, a book editor, merely smiles and says, “We’re still using candles for some things, aren’t we?”...

Jason Davis of Australia's Book Bee has an important article about the outage at Amazon's website: Yesterday, those who use Amazon Web Services, including our own ebooks search site www.EbookAnt.com, have noticed, um, that their Amazon ebooks catalogue was gone. For the uninitiated, AWS supplies thousands of third-party websites with Amazon product data. Sometimes. And forget about API access (the method used to remotely extract Amazon’s data from its servers). We’re working hard to get the Amazon data back. If a giant snafu can delete Amazon web pages and data, who’s to say it couldn’t happen with customers’ books? There’s a lot to...

Contributor Dan Bloom has published a long article about E Ink in the Taiwan Review. He discusses the company's past, present and future. Here's a snippet about some of the stuff they are working on: PVI is also working to deploy E Ink to render text on devices other than e-readers, Scott Liu says. Imagine a device the size of a credit card with a small screen that runs on E Ink technology and can be used for more than two years on a single battery charge. That is the future, Liu says, and other products could include smart...

I received an email recently from an indie author whose work I reviewed on Smashwords, questioning a comment I made in the review about the ebook being priced fairly high ($7.99) for the sort of book it was. She had some reasons for setting the price at this level: she was basing it on what she thought a 'real' paper book would sell for, and she felt that the availability of a free sample meant that the reader could decide---and if they decided to commit to the novel, why not command a retail price? I wrote her back with my analysis,...

David Rothman pointed me to an article in the Wall Street Journal about Openlibrary.org, a new cooperative initiative between the Internet Archive and a number of public and other libraries. They are creating a digital library containing “more than a million scanned public domain books and a catalog of thousands of contemporary e-book titles” that will be available at member libraries. And a couple of libraries are contributing scans of a few hundred older works that are still under copyright—which is what got Google in trouble. For books that are still under copyright, the library will treat a...

It looks like another chapter in Fictionwise’s existence has come to a close. Fictionwise is ending its Micropay e-book rebate program. Until June 2010 Fictionwise had a Micropay System that allowed deposits by members and supported micropay rebate promotions on some ebooks. Rebates and deposits for this system have been discontinued due to eBook industry changes and other factors. If you have an existing balance you may still use it until it is exhausted, but no further deposits may be made and there will be no further Micropay Rebates other than Buywise Large Transaction Rebates....