Well, right now it’s snowing down below and the devil is skiing to work. I was convinced that there was no way a version of Fictionwise’s eReader would come out for iPad, now that Barnes & Noble was busy trying to push the Nook and its own tied-in eReader at all costs. In April, Fictionwise’s customer service outright said there were then “no plans to update the iPhone eReader app for iPad.” But in the last couple of weeks, surprise surprise, out came a new iPad-compatible eReader. I’m still not entirely sure why. Are Barnes & Noble still...

Following up to my post about Augen devices last night, I just called the Kmart in Branson and spoke to them, and what they had in stock was the e-book reader, and one remaining unit of an Augen netbook different from the one Engadget found. Engadget’s find was an Android “smartbook” with a 400 MHz processor and 128 megabytes of RAM, but Branson has one clearanced unit of what appears to be this model listed for $75 (currently out of stock) on Geeks.com, or $67.99 + $9.99 shipping at NewEgg (apparently in stock), a Windows CE “smartbook” with...

In a related matter to Paul’s last post, I’ve just gotten off the phone again with my three local Kmart stores inquiring after the Augen devices. At the one where I used to work, it seems that they’ve gotten so many calls about it that as soon as I said nothing more than, “Electronics, please,” the customer service rep who first answered my call said, “If this is about that computer thing in the circular, we’re out of stock…” When I spoke to the electronics department anyway, the electronics associate said they had gotten maybe two of them...

We mentioned the Augen 7" tablet here. Well now there are some reviews - and the reviews are bad. Laptop's review is entitled: Augen GenTouch78 hands-on: Android tablets reach new low. It goes on to say: Android tablets have hit rock bottom. And we’re not just talking about the low, low price of the Augen GenTouch78. This K-Mart special is just that bad. We got our hands on the 7-inch slate this afternoon, and it didn’t take us long to realize that it’s not worth $149. Perhaps not even $49. Liliputing gives it a fairly mediocre review as well. Both...

We reported in May on rumors of a possible Blackberry tablet device flying around. Lately, those rumors seem to have solidified. Our sister blog Gadgetell reports that Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry, has acquired the domain name “blackpad.com” from the previous owner, who had owned it since 2002. CNet ties together some other reports, including a post from Bloomberg in which anonymous sources claim the device is going to be Blackberry’s crack at killing the iPad, having similar specs and pricing to the wifi-only version, and will launch by November. The tablet...

Since last night, we have been deluged by around a thousand spam comments from a particularly persistent free-iPhone-site spammer. At 20 comments per page, that’s a lot of spam to go through for false positives! In that light, it is entirely possible that some comments, including lengthier ones, may accidentally be passed over and lost during our trawl to clear the spam out of our trap. If you post a comment that does not show up on the site for several hours—especially if it was a longer one, mentioned sales or had several URLs in it, or comes from the...

New Features * EPUB metadata: When setting metadata in an EPUB file, if it has a well defined image based cover, update it * Support for Droid X, Samsung Vibrant and Promedia ebook reader * Add entry to Connect/share menu to conveniently stop and start the Content Server * News download: Make the navbars on the section index pages more useful, adding links to net and previous section * Add a button to reset confirm dialogs to Preferences->General Bug Fixes * Fix crash...

Something we apparently missed mentioning in the rush of the other Kindle 3 news is that Amazon has also announced a Kindle e-book store specific to the UK will be launching at the same time as the two new Kindles launch over there, making the UK the only country apart from the US to have a native Kindle e-book store of its very own. The wi-fi and 3G Kindles, $139 and $189 in the USA, will be £109 ($171 at current exchange rates) and £149 ($234) respectively. A bit more expensive than the US, but not the “equal...

I’ve really been trying to ignore this story, as it’s more than a little silly, but it just keeps popping up everywhere! It seems that a survey has drawn the conclusion that iPad owners “are the selfish elite”: “wealthy, sophisticated, and smart but don’t care about anybody else.” According to Tim Koelkebeck of MyType, which carried out the survey, iPad owners are are six times more likely to be ‘wealthy, well-educated, power-hungry, over-achieving, sophisticated, unkind and non-altruistic 30-50-year-olds’. They are self-centered workaholics with an overwhelming interest in business and finance who...

The Guardian has an interview with Penguin chief executive John Makinson, who also runs a small independent bookstore with his brother. Makinson is a newly converted iPad reader, carrying an iPad loaded with a number of books on a trip to India. He has a number of things to say about the iPad, and about e-books in general. "It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us," [Makinson] says. "Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there...

We've written about Copia in the past. They are setting up a social reading platform on the web which will be combined with an ebookstore and a series of ereaders. I was very impressed with them at Tools of Change and we reported on their revised devices about a month ago. According to the Wall Street Journal they have revised their hardware platform for a second time. They will be offering, among others, a $99 5-inch color debice this fall “The iPad disrupted pricing strategy for everyone in the e-reader market, and after the price wars with Barnes and...

Never one to pass up a chance to poke fun at an easy target, Internet humorist Lore Sjöberg has written a hilarious “Alt Text” column for Wired on “Library of Congress Rulings That Could Have Been”. Other rulings give users the right to copy videogames for the purpose of researching the quality and type of security measures embedded therein — obviously the main reason people copy videogames — and the right to turn your electronic book into an electronic audio book, assuming there isn’t a legal audio book version already on the market. ...