Editor's Note: This is from Johannes Haupt. I really like the idea of AA batteries. I hate carrying chargers; and what good do they do you if you are in the Bolivia and you lose the unit, as happened to me?. After that I try to use only stuff that contains plain old batteries. You will have no trouble getting an AA battery in La Paz or Port au Prince!  If you play the video you'll hear them mention that they have a deal done with Barnes & Noble.  Parts of the video are in English. - Paul Biba Hey: Ectaco announced...

“A new virtual academic bookstore/library has been founded by Berlin students for students. The platform, called PaperC.de, provides free access to academic texts and can be searched by key word, author, title or ISBN. BuchMarkt reports that users can pay extra for certain services, like copying and pasting, printing pages, or marking certain passages. What’s more, it’s all completely legal.” – Publishing Perspectives (via Book2/Book),...

Over at MobileRead Dr. Drib has a long review of the jetBook. It's the first full review I've seen of the unit and he does a great job. He got it for $159 at Bed Bath and Beyond. You can find the full review here, and the following is a little excerpt: The jetBook, for the uninitiated, does not use e-ink but rather a high-resolution monochrome TFT screen as its 5” display. In my opinion, this display is not quite as clear as e-ink technology, but nonetheless it is quite legible and very enjoyable to read on, one...

I'm going to be moving in two weeks, and as part of my preparations, I have been decluttering. My new apartment is brighter, bigger and in a much better location than my present home. I'd love to be able to entertain a little more and have a more adult social life, and piles of towering, yellowing paperback impulse buys are not exactly the epitome of the clean, open look. So if it's available in e-book, I am chucking it, secure in the knowledge that I can buy it later if it begs to be re-read. Magazines a...

That's almost a throw-away price! The reader will handle PDF, Mobi, HTML, TXT, MP3, BMP, JPG and includes a Fodor's travel guide and the CIA World Fact Book. Here's the link. Thanks to DealNews....

A color screen COOL-ER e-reader for less than $300 by Christmas? Perhaps. So goes some intriguing scuttlebutt from Galley Cat, which talked to the founder of the company, Neil Jones. In other gadget news at MobileRead, we learn that FBReader will show up in the Jetbook in the next firmware update. FBReader, for the benefit of newbies, can read the ePub industry standard and can call up public books from within the program....

The jetBook e-reader is a mere $199.99 at New Egg, $50 less than at Bed, Bath and Beyond. Big thanks to Brian for the information! Meanwhile we’d welcome yet more thoughts on the jetBook’s pros and cons. It uses an LCD screen, nonbacklit, rather than an E Ink display. Anyone able to confirm that the JetBook has no DRM support? Will support be on the way? Of course, in a better world, we wouldn’t have to worry about best-sellers requiring the presence of such a “feature. Technorati Tags: JetBook...

So says MobileRead. As they point out, it is available on Bed Bath & Beyond's website. It is also supposed to be available in their stores. It is selling for $249 and according to the website it will read Mobi, PRC, ePub, RTF, TXT and PDF. This is great news. The more we can get this stuff into mainstream distribution the more traction ebooks will get. I'm going to try to find a store near me and see what sort of display they are using. ...

St. Joe News, the Kansas City Star, and the Associated Press are all carrying stories about Northwest Missouri State University's e-textbook program, which is expanding this year from 200 students to cover about 4,000 of the university's 6,500 students. Dean L. Hubbard, the university's president, says that they are limited in that some textbooks they need are not yet available as e-books. "But I would think as a realistic measure we could be totally out of the printed textbook business in three years." The pilot program used Sony Readers, but students felt the devices had some shortcomings in terms...

Thanks to our reader Dr. Ellen V. Hage for pointing this out. Newegg is selling the black ECTACO jetBook Reader for $198 with free shipping. The white version is priced at $299, so this is a good deal. According to the write-up on the site the unit only supports txt, pdf and jpg, but it might be good for some our more technically inclined readers. Anybody else see any good deals out there?...

In a step forward for open standards, ECTACO has announced that its jetBook will support EPUB in the first quarter of 2009. Additionally, the jetBook will also support MobiPocket at that time. Fodor's Travel Guide will also be included as a pre-load on every jetBook. You can find the full press release here....