Gear Diary blogger Douglas Moran has an entertaining and extremely true rant on one of the big problems with the commercial e-book world these days—the proliferation of differing formats, each of which requires its own reader application. On TeleRead, we call this problem the “Tower of E-Babel”, but Moran just calls it extremely irritating. Moran looks at the old Barnes & Noble e-book reader application, based on Fictionwise’s eReader. All in all, he writes, it was a very good application, and did everything he wanted it to. Then B&N essentially abandoned it in favor of their much-less-functional Nook application,...

For those adventurous people who have messed about with their Nook Color and now need to return it to normal, Android Central has a forum post that tells you how to do this.  The post tells you how to: - restore to Stock 1.0.1 via ROM - restore again to Stock 1.0.1 via B&N Factory reset (which actually works) - Update to 1.1.0 (which will now work w/sideload file) - Root 1.1.0 via Auto-Nooter 3.0 Detailed instructions on each step are given....

Read an E-Book Week is right around the corner (March 6-12, 2011), and Rita Toews is, as usual, providing great tidbits about ebooks and giving people encouragement to check ebooks out.  For instance, did you know the ebook is 40 years old this year? Yes, I had to be reminded of this one, myself... but it was in 1971 that Michael S. Hart created the first ebook, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer.  And Rita has other great material on the site, such as: An article by the selfsame Michael S. Hart; Comments by Warren...

NOTION INK'S ADAM, WITH PIXEL QI, VS KINDLE AND PANDIGITAL NOVEL IN DIRECT SUNLIGHT The long awaited Adam Tablet by Notion Ink has a combo display of LCD switchable with an E-Paper display, with backlighting Off. Good E-Reader Blog has a report and VIDEO and I've linked you to the larger YouTube one. Here's an image-link to another, separate video, by Charbax, that also shows the e-paper display with backlight off. When the backlight is On, the display is a sort of light blue-gray in the videos. Nevertheless, both videos show reflections from the glass from the lighting above. The first video gives you...

Pew Research has released an interesting breakdown of gadget use by age and device type, which includes ebook reading devices.  The graph is very effective in showing how the ages view their "toys"--in fact, I suspect a lot of data can be inferred regarding what ages consider what devices as "toys" and what is considered more useful/practical.  It's no surprise that cellphones, arguably the most practical of gadgets, top usage by all ages, and (unfortunately) ebook reading devices bottom out the usage by all ages, even below game devices in the oldest segments.  It does peg younger boomers (47-56) as...

On a vaguely-related note to my last story, Wired reports based on a C-SPAN clip (embedded below) that Supreme Court justices who use e-reading technology to deal with legal briefs do so in different fashions. Justice Elena Kagan uses a Kindle, but Justice Antonin Scalia is an iPad owner. Wired has some fun with this revelation, asking questions like Would Scalia see things differently if he read opinions on the monochrome Kindle? Does Kagan need a dose of iPad color, and maybe a round or two of Flight Control HD between court sessions? ...

E Ink and Hanvon have announced the first color e-ink e-book reader, scheduled for release in China in March. The new color paper will be capable of displaying thousands of colors and 16 levels of greyscale. As with old-fashioned black-and-white e-ink, it will only use power to change the display, not to maintain it. The New York Times notes that Hanvon is the largest e-reader seller in China, with a 78% share of the market. In a country with as many potential customers as China, that’s a pretty good position to be in. The device will cost about $440,...

Plastic Logic may have abandoned the Que, but a new development around the company makes me inclined to say “¿Que?” PaidContent reports that Plastic Logic has announced “a significant investment” by the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies for the purpose of building a factory in Russia to manufacture “a next-generation electronic reader for business that is currently under development,” The facility will supposedly be “capable of producing hundreds of thousands of units a month.” Given that the Que’s launch was first delayed, then canceled altogether, I find myself a trifle skeptical. Is anybody really going to want to pay...

Well, what do you Kno? All Things D’s Kara Swisher reports that Kno, the company making huge (14.1”) single-screened and double-screened tablets for educational purposes, has announced it is commencing manufacture and disclosed the units’ pricing. The single-screened device will be $599, and the double-screened, clamshell-like device will be $899. The devices are being built by Foxconn, the suicide-plagued Chinese manufacturer of the iPhone, and Kno’s CEO Osman Rashid has said the initial run will number “in the thousands” and are targeted at 10 US college campuses (though he would not say which ones). Rashid said...

What’s the most popular way to read an e-book? Not what you think. According to a recent Forrester survey, Wired reports, for e-reading the Kindle actually comes in slightly behind laptop computers as consumers’ e-book reading platform of choice. More than 1/3 of those surveyed preferred laptops. Laptops only slightly trump the Kindle, 35 percent to 32 percent. Coming in third was the iPhone, with 15 percent, followed by a Sony e-reader (12 percent), netbooks (10 percent) and the Barnes & Noble Nook (9 percent). Also at 9 percent was the iPad. Only 7%...

On our sister blog Appletell, Ed McKell reports on the way that his iPad apps have, over time, started taking longer and longer, until lately he started the backup before he went to bed and it still was only 2/3 done when he got up seven hours later! McKell learned from research in forums that others were having similar (pardon the pun) issues caused by magazine apps, and decided to experiment with deleting the Wired magazine app which was storing 3GB of back issues, to see if it had any effect. To his surprise, without the Wired app...

The LA Times reports on a Cowen & Co. survey that says Amazon’s Kindle has 76% of the e-book market, and is expected to have sold $701 million worth of Kindle e-books by the close of 2010—up 195% from the previous year. The report notes that the iPad (and other platforms that have the Kindle Reader app) has helped Amazon by making it possible to buy Kindle e-books without having to own a Kindle itself. In fact, the survey notes that 20% of Kindle e-book purchasers don’t actually own a Kindle. The "iPad is not having a...