L-R: Sister-in-law Karen, me, niece Aeris, brother Aaron I realize I have been a little silent over the last couple of days. I have been spending them with my parents, my brothers, my sisters-in-law, and my toddler-aged nieces and nephews in a delayed Christmas celebration. Yesterday and today was spent in much playing of Rock Band 2.

Also, today when we opened our presents, I was astonished—indeed, downright poleaxed—to discover the rest of my family had gotten together to buy me a brand new MSi A5000 laptop running Windows 7. I immediately installed FBReader and put all my Baen titles on it. Unlike my old Toshiba Satellite, this laptop is light enough that I almost could do the rotate-it-90-degrees trick mentioned a few posts ago.

But I have also been keeping an eye on e-book news. One of the stories today I have not seen on TeleRead yet is that a company called Paradigm Shift is planning to introduce some new color e-book readers at the Consumer Electronics Show—a 5” and a 7” model, selling for $150 and $200 respectively. They are apparently not going the e-ink route; they are stated to have “high resolution screens with high contrast”. Ordinary LCDs, or something else? The article does not say.

However, it does say that these devices will do more than just read e-books (in a variety of formats, including unprotected ePub). The smaller one will have a photo viewer and mp3 player; the larger one will have wifi and be able to access chat programs and play YouTube videos, among other things. Seems like it is being positioned as a competitor in the same Internet tablet market as the Joo Joo nee CrunchPad and the iSlate.

One of the songs I sang in Rock Band today was the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Give It Away Now”. On that note, here is another article pointing out that Amazon’s best “selling” Kindle titles are the ones it makes available for free. It opens by saying that, thanks to Amazon’s $9.99 preferred price point, e-books are often cheaper than paper ones. But, as usual, there is no mention of the pioneering work Baen put into that field.

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