The Augen 7” Android tablet that Paul mentioned yesterday is proving to be hard to find. I called all three of the Kmart stores in the Springfield area, and none of them had received either it, or the 7” “smartbook” I mentioned Engadget reviewing yesterday. (The tablet was the only device featured in the sales circular—the smartbook was nowhere to be found, and the electronics associate didn’t know about it.) I was able to get a rain check for the tablet, though that does not necessarily mean the store will actually carry it. I probably won’t buy...

DigiTimes is reporting that 1.35 million ereaders shipped to the global market in 2Q10, and that this is 33.2% fewer than the projected 2.02 million units [I presume the projection mention is by DigiTimes, itself]. This is because, they say, that shipments of new models were delayed 'till the third quarter, China Mobile Communications subsidized sales were lower than expected and volume of SiPix's epaper shipments were delayed. The article goes on to say that Barnes & Noble was in first place in Q2 with a 33% share, as opposed to Amazon's 27%. However, they say that Amazon's "new...

 A report by Lynne Neary that aired on All Things Considered today. Access the Complete Audio Report and Text Summary And there’s the still-simmering dispute between the publisher Random House and the powerful Wylie Agency over an exclusive deal Wylie recently signed with Amazon to sell digital versions of some bestsellers — books like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man that came out before e-books even existed. “When an agent becomes a publisher, that is sort of contradictory,” says bestselling author and Authors Guild President Scott Turow. Turow says the guild is concerned that Wylie may have...

Douglas Cootey has a cautionary tale on his blog about his inablity to get a refund on an iBook that was replaced by a newer version. Unfortunately, "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card was a different matter. The book was so full of errors I swear it had not been scanned by OCR software as much as it had been scrambled by it. I bookmarked 32 pages of errors, and those are just the ones I was able to find. It seemed every occurrence of "ru" was turned into an "m". There were other issues, too, like runtogetherwords, etc. ... Several weeks...

D - All Things Digital has an article about how some magazines are really unhappy with Apple's App Store policies - or lack thereof. As Chris mentioned a couple of days ago, Sports Illustrated's app was rejected at the last minute by Apple because it was a subscription version. This forced the magazine to go to a single copy version using iTunes as the middleman. According to the article Time, Inc. executives have been "going nuts" trying to get Apple to approve a subscription plan. Evidently Time, Inc. thought its plans for a subscription model had been approved, especially since...

Read Write Web has a story on literacy organization Worldreader.org (which we previously covered in March and April), which is using Kindles to bring literacy to Ghana, Africa (“kind of like One Laptop Per Child, but with Kindles” as one site we quoted in March put it). The organization’s March trial, with 20 Kindles, went very well, and Worldreader reports obtaining permission to do a larger trial, with 336 Kindles in 4 schools, in October. They already have plans to go even larger in the future. Despite the group’s connections with Amazon, its spokesperson notes it intends...

On the Press Gazette blog, Dominic Ponsford notes an interesting fact about the Financial Times’s paywall, which has come in for relatively less press attention than the London Times’s (perhaps due to lacking the polarizing figure of Rupert Murdoch to act as a focus). Although (or perhaps because) the Financial Times‘s paywall is considerably less rigid than the London Times’s (allowing visitors from Google, and letting unpaid subscribers read up to 10 articles per month), the Financial Times seems to be experiencing considerably more success, recently claiming to have 149,000 paying digital subscribers. Ponsford writes: ...

I do realize this is an e-book blog, not a video gaming blog, but digital media do share a lot of commonalities—and Valve just keeps doing things that prompt me to draw direct comparisons to things e-book stores and publishers should be doing, but aren’t. Our sister blog Gamertell, which is a video gaming blog, has the details. Over the last two weeks, Valve’s game distribution platform Steam’s anti-cheating system mistakenly banned about 12,000 Steam accounts from playing Modern Warfare 2, for cheating. Steam’s system is simplistic, usually accurate, and there is no appeal—the only way to start playing a...

Not only is Kmart selling Augen’s 7” Android 2.1 tablet for $149 (as Paul mentioned earlier), it is also selling a 7” Android 1.6 “smartbook” from the same company for $99. Engadget has a review of the device, which appears to be one of those el-cheapo Chinese netbooks that turn up every so often for sale from disreputable companies and/or on eBay. This particular netbook can now be found at the much more reputable Kmart, but Engadget suggests that it might not be the best value for the price—it boots terribly slowly, they had difficulty getting apps to...

Under normal circumstances, it would take something pretty special for me to recommend more than one app in a particular category for the iPad. Does anyone really need more than one CBR reader when Comic Zeal does the job so well, for instance? Or more than one Twitter app, or RSS reader, etc.? (E-book readers are, of course, a special case, given that so many of them only read their own DRM-laden formats.) So when it comes to PDF readers, why would someone want anything other than the inexpensive, powerful, and fairly easy-to-use GoodReader? Actually, there is a pretty good...

Publishing Perspectives is reporting that the Spanish Association of Publishers' Guilds and Spanish telecom Telefónica have teamed up. Telefónica will be providing help with digitizing and access to its customer base through the company's web portals and mobile technology. The initiative is oriented toward small and medium-sized publishers and its announcement coincides with the launch of Libranda, the e-book distribution platform backed by Spain’s largest publishing houses. Telefónica has been mentioned as a potential partner for Libranda from the beginning (see the Telefónica mobile brand Movistar listed under Stores on the Libranda website), with the telecom giant positioned to...

Okay, this is just stupid. Three iPad users have filed a lawsuit against Apple (PDF), seeking class-action status, because reading on the iPad isn't “just like reading a book” after all—books don't shut down from overheating if left in the direct sunlight too long. As I learned the other day when I came back out to my hot car, the iPad has a built-in heat sensor which shuts off the device when it reaches 95 degrees Fahrenheit, safeguarding the electronics from heat damage. Therefore, Apple’s advertising that “Reading on iPad is just like reading a book” represents...