Dreamwidth blogger synecdochic has taken an in-depth look at the allegations against Megaupload and agrees with Ars that the prospects look dim for the company’s execs. The problem is not so much what Megaupload did—indeed, synecdochic suggests that a sufficiently skilled legal team would have had a decent chance to get the execs off the hook for a lot of it, except for the real problem. The real problem is that Megaupload’s employees regularly emailed each other to discuss how wicked they were—and the company kept email logs that the feds could—and did—subpoena, providing more than enough rope...

There are plenty of read-it-later style applications that save web documents to a special application on your tablet or smartphone, but what if you want to load them onto your e-reader instead? There’s a Google Chrome extension for that. DotEPUB will allow one-click saving of web content into EPUB files that you can load into your EPUB-compatible reader. (Kindle owners are out of luck.) Of course, it’s been possible to do the same thing with Instapaper plus Calibre for a while now, but that does add an intermediate step. (We did mention this a year ago, but it’s...

Here’s another story of Amazon malfeasance, from the Consumerist. Writer Laura Northrup tells the story of a Kindle owner named Ryan who discovered in October that he could not log onto his account, containing over $1,000 worth of e-content for his Kindle. He contacted Amazon representatives, and they explained that his account was “on hold” but they could not tell him why. Now it’s the end of November, and he still can’t access the content he paid for. Ryan writes: I have filed a complaint with the BBB, emailed everyone I could at Amazon, called...

Long has my inbox-on both LinkedIN and Facebook-been filled with inquiries on various ePub creation software, especially regarding two specific platforms: Sigil and Calibre. Both are free, open-source creations of unselfish and brilliant folks that saw the eBook industry coming a long time ago. I've fiddled around happily with Calibre for over a year and been fairly happy, but only just this week did I pay heed to the various forum posts praising Sigil. After watching a few video tutorials and scrolling through the basic crash course I downloaded the open source system in less than a minute. The pros of...

I’ve been using my Kobo reader for a while now, and will get into my own experiences with it soon. But for this review I’m going to concentrate on the experience of getting my Dad set up with his Kobo today. I went down to visit over the weekend, and took the opportunity to get it all set up for him.(He had already ordered a smart tough zipper case for it.) Dad found the set-up instructions rather confusing—he said after reading them he didn’t know anything more than when he’d begun. But since he had me...

Paul linked to a positive Project Gutenberg review of Ibis Reader a few months ago, but it first came to my direct attention when I tried out Jolicloud and discovered what it was: a web-based EPUB reader. It was an interesting idea, I thought, but I wasn’t sure what it was really good for. But a couple of days ago, my perspective changed. One of the great things about Baen Webscriptions and the Free Library is that they allow people who have access to Baen e-books to read them on-line as well as download them. Not too many other...

New Features Nook Color driver: Send downloaded news to the My Files/Magazines folder on the Nook Color. Also when getting the list of books on the device look at all folders in My Files, not just My Files/Books. MOBI Output: Use the book uuid as the ASIN field and set cdetype to EBOK to allow Amazon furthest read tracking to work with calibre generated MOBI files. Comic input: Add an option to override the image size in the generated comic. Useful if you have a device whose screen size is not coverred by one of the available output profiles. Add a restore database option...

New Features A new 'highlight matches' search mode RTF Input: Improved support for conversion of images. The bug where some images were shrunk should no longer happen Template language: Allow you to create your own formatting functions. Accessible via Preferences->Advanced->Template functions News download: Convert various HTML 5 tags into to support readers that cannot handle HTML 5 tags RTF metadata: Add support for publisher and tags. BibTeX catalog: Add support for custom columns TXT Input: Support for textile markup Various minor tweaks to improve usability of Preferences->Plugins TXT Output: Convert to scene break marker. Support for the Archos 70 SONY Driver: Add an option to automatically refresh the covers...

New Features * Reduce startup time when using a composite custom column * Template language: Add a list_item function for use with tags like columns. See User Manual for details * TXT Input: Attempt to detect the input encoding when not specified. Auto detect paragraph structure and formatting markup. * Search & replace: Add ability to manipulate number and boolean columns. * Add type ahead completion to the advanced search dialog. * Double click on plugin in Preferences dialog to customize ...

One of the best surprises I got this Christmas was the gift of a used iPod Touch by my sister-in-law. She belongs to an iPhone family, and they’ve gotten so many iPhones over the course of the last few years that the Touch, originally bought for the kids to play with, was relegated to sitting around unused for months since the kids get to play with the older-generation iPhones now. And as a result, I have an iPod Touch again for the first time since losing my original one in June. It’s just a 1st-generation model, and only 8...

New Features Tag browser: Add subcategories and search Device drivers for the Google Nexus S, Motorola Backflip, Samsung Galaxy Tablet, PocketBook 603/903, EEEReader DR900 and the NextBook Tag editor dialog now remebers its last used size OS X dmg: Add a symlink pointing to the Applications folder for easy installation Catalog generation: CSV/XML catalogs now support custom fields. Also write UTF-8 BOM to CSV output file. EPUB/MOBI catalogs: Various new features SONY driver: Allow the creation of an All by Something category via the tweaks. Add a tweak to control the delay when sending mails using gmail or hotmail. Add output encoding option for TXT/PDB/PMLX output plugins to...

New Features Language sensitive sorting Add an action to merge only formats and leave metadata alone (Shift+Alt+M) Add a tweak to control which custom columns are displayed in the Book details panel. Implement a more sophisticated 'functional programming' template language. See the User Manual for details. Speed up deleting of large numbers of books and show progress while doing so Adding books: Dont refresh the Tag Browser while adding multiple books. Should speed up the adding of large numbers of books. Edit metadata dialog: When trying to download metadata, if there are multiple matches indicate which matches have a cover and summary in the list. Also add...