Speaking of Apple and closed-vs-open, Apple has occasionally been known to reverse controversial decisions, eventually. Such a reversal happened today. Earlier this year, Apple’s refusal to allow the use of third-party development platforms to create iOS applications touched off a minor furor (and an FTC investigation). Among other things, this meant that Wired Magazine would have to create an entirely separate version of its tablet magazine app for the iPad, instead of being able to create one version in a Flash-based Adobe development environment and export it for multiple platforms including the iPad. Today, Apple has changed...

Shane Richmond, Head of Technology (Editorial) for Telegraph Media Group, has an editorial in the Telegraph about the way that DRM breaks up even the same file format of e-books into a Tower of e-Babel. He tried to open Adobe-DRM EPUB files in iBooks and of course was told that wouldn’t work. Richmond writes: Can we pause for a moment to remind ourselves just how absurd this situation is? It’s been a problem for so long that sometimes it’s easy to take it for granted but we are being sold products that work...

PaidContent reports that Barnes & Noble may be ready to take the unusual step of selling itself in order to raise its stock price. (That seems like a bit of an extreme method, but what do I know about corporate finance?) The article notes that B&N faces the problem that the Nook simply isn’t as well-known as the Kindle, but points out that this has the potential to change given that B&N has the ability to promote its device through its physical stores, which Amazon does not. Meanwhile, eBookNewser reports that Amazon is holding a Kindle commercial...

Gawker’s Valleywag section posts a tip it’s gotten, that Wired editor Chris Anderson is reportedly preparing a cover story for the magazine in which he declares that “the Web is Dead”. He will apparently argue that content is moving to more restricted corners of the ‘net, such as iPad and iPhone apps. According to Valleywag, this comes at a time when there is a “cold war” on between the print Wired Magazine and the on-line Wired Digital (Wired.com/Reddit) divisions—Anderson has reportedly called Wired.com a “business failure, generating little cash for publishing company Condé Nast” (though he claims he was...

The Kindle 3 was released to much Amazon fanfare late last week; in the sea of iPad and general tablet news at the moment I wonder how many people have even noticed. My girlfriend didn’t know what a Kindle was until tonight, and I really don’t know how this has happened. I can only assume that I’ve been right every time I thought she wasn’t really listening to me. She’s been mocking my iPad cravings for a little while now (I maintain it’s not iPad-lust (iLust?), but borderline-usable-tablet-lust, it’s just I happen to think that that’s a very narrow category...

Apabi Technology, a major player in the Chinese (mainland) ebook market is going to challenge Adobe PDF. According to Information Week, Apabi already has contracts with about 500 Chinese publishers and provides technologies for electronic publishing and electronic libraries and sells ebook readers. Its new CEBX technology stands for Common E-document Blending XML. A CEBX file can store document data and is fully compatible with PDF, but technically superior, the company says. There are currently three software packages that work with the CEBX format. Apabi Reader is a home-grown equivalent of Adobe Reader, and it only allows users to...

From the Adobe website: A critical vulnerability exists in Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems. This vulnerability (CVE-2010-1297) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat. This advisory will be updated once a schedule has been determined for releasing a fix. Adobe...

As Paul just said, Wired’s Chris Anderson has proudly reported that the iPad edition of Wired Magazine has gone on-line at last, and the version for other tablets is coming soon. This is the actual print magazine Wired, not the Wired News site that contains original stories and reprints from the magazine. The magazine was affected by Apple’s 11th-hour ban on third-party development environments. Instead of creating one version for all platforms, Adobe had to create a separate Objective-C-based version of the magazine to meet Apple’s requirements. While I haven’t bought it myself—I’m saving my money for...

The Adobe Reader PDF viewer is now available for Android (requires version 2.1 or higher). I don’t use Android so I don’t know how well this reader works versus whatever PDF viewing capabilities already existed for the platform, but if any reader wants to send in a review we would be happy to run it! Speaking of Android, apparently a Verizon employee left a next-generation Motorola Droid Shadow in a corporate gym. Gizmodo has the details and some tech specs (though they didn’t get to buy and disassemble this one). With a 4.3” screen and 16GB...

Three big publishers and a number of smaller publishers have signed onto a “made in Spain” e-book platform called Libranda, Publishing Perspectives reports. It will use EPUB with Adobe DRM, and allow purchased books to be read on up to 6 PCs and 6 mobile devices by default (though publishers may choose to use more restrictive settings). Unfortunately, e-books in Spain will be sold with a value-added tax of 18% rather than usual 4% for printed books. For taxation purposes, e-books are apparently considered computer software rather than books.(See also the discussion topic in which Edward Nawotka asks...

I wasn’t sure whether to cover this story, given that it does not seem to have a great deal to do with e-books on the face of it. But on the other hand, it relates to the viability of developing for the iPhone and iPad as a whole, and e-book applications (both reader apps and stand-alone encapsulated appbooks) have to be developed just like anything else. Apple’s OS 4.0 SDK includes a new license agreement—new terms that developers must abide by. And one of these terms is a prohibition on “applications that link to Documented APIs through an...

We’ve given a great deal of coverage to the iPad lately, but another tablet device has come out at about the same time. How does the much-anticipated Fusion Garage JooJoo, nee TechCrunch CrunchPad, do? Engadget has a pretty comprehensive review, including an 8-minute video walkthrough that puts the device through its paces. The results are not encouraging: when compared to the iPad, the JooJoo consistently comes up short. It has a much shorter (as in, 2.5 hours under average use) battery life (and the device gets quite warm under load), heavier weight, screen not viewable from...