Copia has announced new pricing according to Publishers Weekly and they also have reconfigured their line of devices. They are now offering a 5" color LCD model for $99 and a 10.1" color LCD touchscreen/WiFi model for $299. The latter unit will support video and multimedia. There will also be a 7" color LCD non-touchscreen and two 6" b&w e-ink devices. Prices for these haven't been set. According to the article Copia's social networking platform will launch in July and the devices will be available in the fall. I've checked the Copia website and none of...

Sports Illustrated is the latest big-name magazine publisher to offer an iPad edition. It's a nice looking product, btw. The app itself is free and it includes a sample of what's to come. It joins the likes of Time, Wired and Newsweek...but they all currently have the same limitation: You can only buy individual issues, not sign up for a one-year subscription. Worse, most of them seem to think they can charge the full print cover price for each iPad edition. I bought the initial Wired edition for $4.99 but I'm not buying the second one. ...

I purchased one of Amazon’s enhanced Kindle books this morning–Rose’s Heavenly Cakes, because who doesn’t like video footage of cakes?–to see what it’s like to read an ebook with audio and video. Here are some cursory thoughts on the experience. If you’ve ever purchased an enhanced ebook app from the App Store, the concept of an enhanced Kindle book will be familiar. In fact, I think this is basically a way for Amazon to get around Apple’s 30% cut of sales on the App Store, by selling the multimedia editions through the Kindle Store and then routing them to the consumer’s...

This following research paper will be delivered at the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) World Library and Information Congress: 76th IFLA General Conference and Assembly on August 15, 2010 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Collaboration between libraries, users and usability professionals is paramount in building virtual collections of the future. Only users can tell how these platforms are going to be used, as mobile tools for study or as entertainment devices. It is important to learn how usable the e-collections really are and what essential materials are currently incompatible with these devices. Electronic rights management and technical compatibility issues should...

According to Stuff, Whitcoulils says that they have sold thousands of Kobos and sold out their first two shipments. They are now taking pre-orders for the third shipment which is due in mid-July. [Managing directore Peter Kalan said: ]"Demand has been great, it's far exceeded what we expected ." E-book sales through the Whitcoulls website have been building momentum, rather than kicking off with a bang. "People get the device and tend to play around with it and down-load maybe one title or so and then a week or two later they'll actually start to go on and buy. That's been...

New Features Add support for the new firmware of the Azbooka A few speedups for calibre startup, should add up to a few seconds of startup time on slower machines Support for the Sweem MM300 Add keyboard shortcut for Download metadata and covers Bug Fixes Fix regression in 0.7.5 that broke conversion of malformed HTML files (like those Microsoft Word outputs) Don't download tags from librarything, as the tagging there is not very good Add mimetype for FB2 so that it can be served by the content server Ensure cover is not resized to less than the available space in the Edit Meta Information dialog SONY driver: Only update collections...

In Salon Magazine, Laura Miller brings up the conundrum of self- and e-self-publishing turning the Internet into one huge slushpile. (The slushpile, for those who don’t know, is the publishing term for the stack of unsolicited manuscripts on a publisher’s desk, 99.9% of which are guaranteed to be absolute rubbish.) It’s a problem that has received plenty of play in e-book circles over the last few years, with increasing frequency now that e-book devices are actually starting to take off. When everyone is publishing everything they want to publish, how can anyone find anything they would actually want to...

Yuan Tai Technologies Inc. (8069:TW) announced today that it has changed the international version of its name from Prime View International (PVI) to E Ink Holdings Incorporated (E Ink). This change was approved at the Annual General Meeting held today. The full press release is here. Thanks to Dan Bloom for the heads up....

In an interview in the Harvard Magazine, high end author's agent Andrew Wylie says: He’s dissatisfied with the terms publishers have been offering for e-book rights, which were not widely foreseen and are not allocated in most extant book contracts. In fact, Wylie threatens to monetize those unassigned rights by going outside the publishing business entirely: “We will take our 700 clients, see what rights are not allocated to publishers, and establish a company on their behalf to license those e-book rights directly to someone like Google, Amazon.com, or Apple. It would be another business, set up on parallel tracks to...

From the press release: Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced a new update to Kindle for iPad and Kindle for iPhone and iPod touch, which allows readers to enjoy the benefits of embedded video and audio clips in Kindle books. The first books to take advantage of this new technology, including Rick Steves' London by Rick Steves and Together We Cannot Fail by Terry Golway, are available in the Kindle Store at http://www.amazon.com/kindleaudiovideo. "We are excited to add this functionality to Kindle for iPad and Kindle for iPhone and iPod touch," said Dorothy Nicholls, director, Amazon Kindle. "Readers will already find some...

If you don’t care much about politics, you could be forgiven for not paying much attention to last week’s story of how General Stanley A. McChrystal shot off his mouth in a Rolling Stone interview (to such an extent that he actually apologized for his remarks before the article was even published!), and was subsequently canned and replaced in the Afghanistan theater. For me, the most interesting thing is not the story itself—the kind of scoop every magazine editor dreams of—but the rather odd secondary furor that the New York Times reports has surrounded the story’s circulation. ...

For years, I have been a closet magazine freak. I love magazines, love browsing them, love reading them. But I simply don't have the space to buy every favourite and keep them around each month, and I hated buying them and then having to throw them out. So for years, I restrained myself. The iPad Zinio app has freed me, and I am having a blast with it. WHAT IS THE ZINIO APP? The app is the latest iteration of a Mac/PC/Smartphone magazine platform. It's been around for years, but I had not heard of it before. You can shop for magazines...