Reminder: These are Tamas Simon's individual opinions. - D.R. I read a lot of posts and comments nowadays on the need for a reflowable e-book format. ePub is said to be a "solution" for this. I understand the frustration; I just don't think reflow is such a big deal, especially not if we look at the long term trends. When do we need reflow anyway? I think there are two cases: First scenario is when we have some content on a device and we want to change the font size. Honestly, how often does this happen? Once you've set...

The Web is the place for valuable but free texts---government, legal, technical and scientific information, for example. But there's a problem, literally a big one. The format is often PDF, with letter-sized pages in North America and similar A4 pages in Europe. Unfortunately, e-book readers like the Sony, the Kindle and the iLiad can't do full justice to PDFs in that size range. The root cause of the problem is that PDF is a final format, not suited for reflow. So you could well be out of luck if your reader has just a six-inch screen. Making Mohammed go...

I've tried Sophie 1.0, and here's the news: It's more exciting to me than either E Ink machines or the IDPF's .epub standard. Ever since I heard about E Ink, I've been a big fan of it. But although I own a Sony Reader and read a lot, I don't use the Sony. Let me explain why. The main benefit of E Ink is readability. Unfortunately this resulted in slow page-refresh times. Negatives of today's E Ink Current E Ink devices: Are monochrome black and white. Offer slow page turns and screen refreshes---no video. Have slow...

Amazon is beta-testing a new payment service that will take the e-tailer into Google Checkout and PayPal territory. Could micropayments for text and videos---perhaps even blog articles and by-the-chapter books---be on the way? I'm surprised people aren't discussing the possibilities. If the charge were a cent, Amazon might take just 0.0025 of that as a transaction fee. Better yet, customers could combine small transactions into a single one and save on fees, using prepaid or postpaid methods. Similar to iTunes: Way to help finance blogs? The prepaid idea might be similar to buying a $10 card for iTunes. Once you prepaid the amount, it...

Amazon is beta-testing a new payment service that will take the e-tailer into Google Checkout and PayPal territory. Could micropayments for text and videos---perhaps even blog articles and by-the-chapter books---be on the way? I'm surprised people aren't discussing the possibilities. If the charge were a cent, Amazon might take just 0.0025 of that as a transaction fee. Better yet, customers could combine small transactions into a single one and save on fees, using prepaid or postpaid methods. Similar to iTunes: Way to help finance blogs? The prepaid idea might be similar to buying a $10 card for iTunes. Once you prepaid the amount, it...

What's the next step after you've found the book you like on the Internet? Of course, you'll download it and convert it if you must get it onto the reading device you're using. But could there be a better approach? Instead of downloading an e-book file, why not bookmark the location where you've found the book---something I've made easier via a new service at DigitalReading.net? Bookmarking has lot of advantage, as I'll show you later in this article, and you can benefit from others' efforts, not just your own (screenshot). But for now the main reason is that you don't have to...

J.K. Rowling writes in longhand and probably wouldn't authorize Harry Potter e-books online even if Brinks armored trucks could protect them. But suppose consumers do succeed in enlightening her. Here's free public advice from the TeleBlog's latest contributor. - David Rothman In one of the Harry Potter movies, a photograph came alive in a newspaper. Was that a next-generation E Ink screen with good refresh rate so you could embed videos? If J.K. Rowling can live with such techno-magic, maybe she'll eventually change her mind about e-books. Just think how she could single-handedly bring e-books into the mainstream, or at least...

I am a 33-year-old software engineer, expert in enterprise architecture and Web development. Currently I work for Boeing Canada. I live in Vancouver, B.C., with my wife and my 11-month daughter. An ardent e-book enthusiast, I run a Web site at DigitalReading.net where I try implementing various ideas of related services such as e-book search, e-book ratings and review, and collaborative book authoring. I am also a former member of Mensa (behind on dues). ...