New Features Kindle Touch/4 driver: Upload cover thumbnails when sending books to device by USB to workaround Amazon bug of not displaying covers for sync-enabled books Support for updating metadata in FB2 files Set a different background color when choosing formats to not delete as opposed to choosing format to delete. E-book viewer: Add an option to prevent the up and down arrow keys from scrolling past page breaks Get Books: Remove ebookshoppe.com at the website's request Bug Fixes PDF Input: Support image rotation commands in PDF files. Fixes the long standing problem of some images being flipped when converting from PDF in calibre. Fix a regression in...

From an article in TechNewsWorld: ... To get a better feel for the effects of e-textbooks on student productivity, the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine's Health Sciences launched an iPad pilot program and study. With the aid of a US$10,000 Technology Improvement Express Award grant from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Middle Atlantic Region, Hofstra set out to determine the effectiveness of the iPad and apps as a tool for medical education. The grant paid for 10 iPads and cases, along with textbook, productivity and medical applications. Ten out of the 40 first-year medical students and 10 out of approximately 30 faculty members...

Gizmodo has a list of “10 gadgets you’d be a fool to buy right now” (that it reprinted from Laptop Mag but thankfully de-slideshow-ified)—devices that are soon to be replaced by something better. Weirdly enough, you can read e-books on all but one of them—including, naturally, e-readers. (Amazon is expected to launch new e-readers within just a few months.) The others include iPhones, Sprint phones, Windows phones, and Blackberries, as well as Windows and Android tablets. Ultrabooks and Macbook Pros are also due for refreshes, and smart TVs—the one device that doesn’t read e-books—aren’t a smart purchase with upcoming...

James McQuivey, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research:  It is an iPad world right now.  34% of the US population will have a tablet  by 2016. That's 112.5 million tablets.  No other device in the history of consumer electronics has achieved such a high penetration in such a short time. Future will not be made only of tablets.  Now have 35 million ereaders and 30 plus million say they are thinking about getting one. Over 70 million iPads out there.  Kinnect for Xbox 360 has sold 22 million devices.  Means that Microsoft can move into the market. Apple two years to sell 1...

From the press release: Diesel eBooks has just rolled out a suite of new mobile products designed to deliver more choice and freedom, and to counteract what it sees as a totalitarian eBook environment which tethers customers to specific devices and eBook Stores. In addition to the new Diesel Reader software for iPad/iPhone and Android, the launch includes a universal mobile app called the “eFreedom” app http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/static/educz-devices_freedom/1.html. “Our customers have increasingly shared their frustration with eBook devices being isolated to a specific store,” said L. Scott Redford, Founder and CEO of Diesel eBooks. “In response, we’ve built the eFreedom app which can be reached...

OnlineUniversities.com has a post by Justin Marquis Ph.D. looking at the alarming trend of declining reading rates over the last few decades, and bringing up the recent Pew study showing that e-reader owners read more as a possible harbinger of ways to reduce the trend. People who read more, Marquis points out, become more “interesting, engaged, and intellectual”. They have a higher degree of emotional as well as standard literacy, developing empathy through repeatedly putting themselves in the place of the characters they read about. Adolescents who don’t develop good reading habits are at a disadvantage in college where...

A few days ago I mentioned the Harvard Book Store, which features an Espresso Book Machine which it uses to help it stay relevant in its market, and pondered why it is that more stores aren’t following its example. As it turns out, Alan Beatts has a definitive answer to that on the blog of his San Francisco bookstore Borderlands Books. Beatts ran the numbers for the cost of the machine, materials, and operations, versus how long it would take to pay down those costs at various rates. He determined that if he averaged one book an hour over...

It all started harmlessly enough with Amazon's Kindle with Special Offers. That's the cheaper Kindle that displays ads when the device is in sleep mode or at the bottom of the screen when paging through the owner's catalog of books. It is very unobtrusive and, since it lowered the price of the device, has made that Kindle an extremely popular device. Now there are rumors that Amazon is selling ad space on the Kindle Fire's welcome screen. That sounds pretty reasonable too as it's a simple way for Amazon to drive a bit of additional income that's pure profit for them. Given that...

From The Unoffical Apple Weblog: If you're someone who does a lot of work on the road, and needs to reference PDF source material, you'll find that QuickSearch PDF (US$4.99) from Olive Toast Software is the tool you didn't realize you needed. It has one job to do -- to help you find information inside large PDF files -- and it does that job well. You type search terms into a text field, and QuickSearch PDF finds every occurrence, in every document that's been added to it. It lets you flip through each match until you find just the information you need. It's a...

From an article by Farhad Manjoo in Slate: ...   It’s taken time for the magazine industry to catch up to the new iPad—only in the last few weeks have some of my favorite magazines, including the New Yorker, released apps that take advantage of the Retina display. But now that they have, the iPad has become transformative. The Retina display has brought iPad magazines up to par, as a reading experience, with their print counterparts. And when you consider the other advantages of iPad mags—you can have lots of them on hand, you can read them in the dark, you never lose your...

Here's part of an article by Chris Walters from his BookSprung blog: Kobo’s new web app, released earlier this week, is a great first move at breaking free from Apple’s App Store extortion. Good for Kobo, I say. Unfortunately, it keeps the same design and user experience as the official Kobo app, which means it’s designed to be a storefront first, and a reading app second. Unless you’re stuck with Kobo, there are better options out there. Like Amazon’s Kindle web app from last August, the Kobo web app is really a website that can store data on your device even when...

Last week I wrote about my experience with Barnes & Noble’s customer service and how frustrating I found B&N’s attitude. Ted Weinstein twitted about the article and received back a suggestion that ‘Dan’ at B&N be contacted, with an e-mail address. Ted was kind enough to post that reply as a comment to the article. So I did write Dan and I commented, in reply to Ted’s comment about the response I got. However, the story does not end with that reply. I’m a firm believer that when an effort is made to rectify a situation, that effort is deserving of attention,...