From the press release: WingedChariot, a pioneer in digital picture books, today announces plans to make its award winning multi-lingual apps for the webOS and the new HP TouchPad. Neal Hoskins, publisher at WingedChariot says: I have long admired the polish and beauty of webOS. With HP rolling out a whole ecosystem of devices running the webOS we'd love our rich and colourful children's stories to be available to HP customers. We look forward to bringing a new look and feel to our story apps on HP's webOS and to exploring the links between digital and...

“Hey! Hey! Get onto my cloud…” In an update to my story of yesterday, Amazon has announced its cloud-based music locker service. No mention of e-books or movies yet, but perhaps they’re just starting small. The service can be used over the web, or via a player app on Android. No word on an iOS app; perhaps they’ve decided it’s a foregone conclusion in light of Apple’s in-app purchase policies. (Oddly, the service doesn’t even work in iOS’s Mobile Safari browser, apparently because Amazon has expressly told it not to.) The plan provides 5 GB for free, plus...

If DigiTimes can be believed, the Nook Color has really been doing well for Barnes & Noble. The site reports that Barnes & Noble has already taken delivery of an estimated almost three million of the devices from its manufacturer, Inventec, say unknown sources close to the supply chain. The article suggests that the Nook Color “has actually taken up over 50% of the iPad-like market” in North America (though it’s not really clear what it means by “iPad-like market.” Devices that are like the iPad apart from the iPad itself?). By comparison, Apple sold that many iPads...

In the “it doesn’t only happen on Wall Street” department, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the bankrupt Borders bookstore chain expects to hand out $8.3 million in executive bonuses in 2011 as part of its bankruptcy proposal. 70% of the recipients of a $7.1 million bonus package that makes up the bulk of the award have been with the company for less than 18 months, and many joined less than a year ago. Saddled with leases on big stores, Borders has said it will try to get out of bankruptcy by August or September....

I haven’t been paying a whole lot of attention to the New York Times’s controversial paywall since its announcement a couple of weeks ago. It seems like a fairly complicated proposition, with a number of interesting nuances—different levels of charge for subscriptions on different devices and the like. Those who read via the web (and aren’t already paid NY Times subscribers) get 20 article views per month for free—certainly more articles than I’ve ever read in a month. And as if that weren’t enough, redirects from search, blogs, and social media don’t count against the total. (This led...

From the Digital Book World site (blockquotes omitted): This Wednesday, F+W Media will join the efforts of the international publishing community providing assistance to Japan in the wake of the tsunami. Pledging a donation through the American Red Cross, the company will donate 50% of all profits received from the sale of products and services via the company’s 23 ecommerce stores. The campaign will run for a 24-hour period, beginning at 12:01am (EST) on March 30th. “Just one month ago none of us could have envisioned the tragedy and devastation now impacting the people of Japan,”...

Here's an interview done by Bloomberg. Steve discusses libraries and the Google Book Settlement. The interview runs about 4 minutes. ...

Publishers Weekly has an article on this topic today.  Anyone who is interested in poetry should take a look.  Here's a snippet: But poetry publishers do have one issue that most publishers don't in terms of e-books: those pesky line breaks, the things that happen to make poems what they are. It turns out it's pretty hard to preserve line breaks in EPub and other e-book file formats: one of the ways reflowable text adapts to readers' preferences in terms of font size and reading device is to wrap lines on the screen differently depending on...

This weekend I went down to my parents’ house, spending half of Saturday and most of Sunday visiting with my parents, brother and sister-in-law, and two-month-old niece, and blogging from home. (That’s me at left, blogging from my parents’ kitchen table with my Kobo and iPad visible in the background.) When I went, I took my new Kobo Wireless reader and the Literati I was reviewing with me. While the Literati didn’t last long, the Kobo made a lasting impression on my father. (I wish I’d remembered to photograph him reading it.) A longtime fan of Anthony Trollope,...

Mike Shatzkin has an interesting essay on his blog about how sales of e-books seem to concentrate amid bestsellers—while the percentage of e-books sold seems to be in the teens generally, some bestselling titles report moving as many as 50% of their units as e-books. Shatzkin places the blame for this on the relatively few choices that can be presented at one time on a screen compared to a bookstore. Bookstores, Shatzkin explains, know all about the value of facing titles out on a shoulder-level bookshelf to bring them to readers’ attention. It used to be that as...

NPR's Jon Kalish has an article on using the tablet-like features on e-readers, titled "Cheaper than a Tablet: Rooting" your E-Reader," something that can be done with the NookColor to remove its mild Clark Kent eyeglasses and strip it down to the full-flying Android operating system capability, for a decent price. Google's Android OS, coming on strong against the Apple operating system (iOS) allows use of the Android Marketplace without the restrictions of the curated Apple app store, giving access to all Android apps, but  recently to some carrying malware, as they are...

The idea of scribbling electronic notes in the margins of e-books is not new—David Rothman mentioned it back in 2006, though I’m sure it’s actually older than that. But last month the New York Times covered the fact that e-books meant scribbling in the margins would be much harder. ReadWriteWeb reports on an API created by ReadSocial, a new project from the founders of BookGlutton, to try to make e-reading more social. Through a proof of concept Firefox and Chrome extension called Readum that uses Google Books, users can highlight, annotate, and share on Facebook passages from a Google...