AppCraver is carrying a press release from app publisher Nosy Crow, announcing that its Cinderella iOS appbook has won Digital Book World’s Publishing Innovation Award for Best Juvenile App: “The Cinderella story isn’t new, but Nosy Crow’s developers use the app platform in new ways to make this an entertaining experience with extremely high play value and a long engagement time,” said the Publishing Innovation Awards judges of the Juvenile App category. “Clever design decisions, excellent navigation, and enhanced content allow young readers to play in a very natural way with the story. Readers can...

TechCrunch has an article looking at an iOS hacking project that has the potential to be rather interesting. Whited00r is a custom version of OS 3.1.3, hacked to include features such as app folders and multitasking from later versions of the OS. It’s meant for older-generation iPhones and iPod Touches. Of course, it’s a jailbreak, which means losing access to some official Apple stuff such as the App Store and notifications. It looks like it might be fun to try out, but I don’t think it will fix one of my biggest annoyances with having a 1st-generation iPod...

On ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick has a piece on the rise of robotic manufacturing and what it might mean for online educational tools. It cites iPhone/iPad manufacturer FoxConn’s plan to improve working conditions by building 1 million new robot workers over the next 3 to 5 years, increasing the number it currently has by 100 times (that’s 10,000 percent). Human workers, FoxConn says, “will move up the value chain.” (Apparently hiring more “mature” workers didn’t work out.) The article discusses what this means in terms of the one million unskilled laborers FoxConn currently employs, and unskilled labor versus automation. A...

On the New York Times Bits Blog, Nick Bilton suggests that both Apple and Google are engaged in (separate) projects to turn smartphones into more wearable devices. Apple has already been wearable in some respects—you could clip the iPod Shuffle to your clothing, or attach the iPod Nano to a wrist strap to make it impersonate an oversized watch. Now it seems like Apple wants to make it so people can wear their iPhone on their wrist, and perhaps interact with it with Siri. And Google may be working on something similar. This all might lead, in the...

A couple of popular British novel series, one for children and one decidedly not, are coming to e-books, The Bookseller reported last week. The children’s series is Paddington Bear, the adventures of a small, talking bear named for the London railway station where he was found. The series already has a £3.99 (US $6.23) multimedia iPad/iPhone app, which among other things will let parents record video readings of the story, and children take photos of themselves “with” Paddington to send to family and friends. HCB said the digital adaptation had been done "carefully" to...

Yesterday, when pondering whether newspapers might eventually use free Kindles to rid themselves of print costs, I was reminded that advertising revenue is one of the major issues tying newspapers down to the print format. Which is why I found it interesting when I noticed a Reuters report that the Financial Times expects its online content sales revenues to equal or exceed its print advertising revenues in 2012. The Financial Times is known for its successful paywall strategy in which it allows readers eight free articles per month but requires they subscribe beyond that. It recently launched an HTML5...

On the Daggle blog, Danny Sullivan asks the question, “Why do Amazon & Apple hate families?” He points out that a number of the products services the companies offer are not exactly family-friendly—not in terms of inappropriate content, but because they make it harder for families to share devices. For example, lots of children like to play games on their parents’ iPhones or iPads—but since those children can’t have iTunes accounts of their own (due to child-protection laws that place limits on what information Internet sites can collect from children under the age of 13), that leads to...

Publishing Perspectives has a brief piece on UK publisher b small publishing (which, like danah boyd, eschews capital letters in its name), which is producing multimedia parallel-text bilingual e-books to help young students learn foreign languages. The 32-page books feature a 16-page story divided into English and the language being taught (so far, French or Spanish), with read-aloud buttons to hear a native speaker read the story aloud in either language. The books are available as appbooks on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. [b small Managing Director Catherine] Bruzzone said, “Here at b...

It’s time for the tri-yearly circus to kick off again. Ars Technica reports that it’s just about time for the Library of Congress to consider granting exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s DRM anti-circumvention provisions. This process comes every three years, and the exemptions last only until the next exemption granting—which means that even already-granted exemptions have to be requested and argued again. The last go-round resulted in six exemptions, including allowing circumvention for incorporating clips into new works for purpose of criticism or comment, including educational purposes. (Apparently the MPAA’s suggestion that professors should just point a...

I mentioned Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a couple of years ago as a great argument for the usefulness of the public domain. Over on eBookNewser, Nate Hoffelder noticed that the e-book now has an interactive iPhone/iPad app available for $4.99 in the app store. While I’m a bit “iffy” on the utility of stand-alone appbooks, I have to admit that this one has some interesting features. Some of them, such as the “original music score” or “buckets of gory animation”, sound like needless gimmicks, but I am intrigued by the way the app incorporates both the “And Zombies”...

Have you ever read on the toilet? I know I have. Indeed, the one-handed form factor of the iPod Touch means it’s perfectly suited for me to read with my right while I wipe with my left. And indeed, people have been reading on the toilet in real life and literary works for decades or even centuries. But have you considered whether it’s a sanitary habit? The Guardian’s books blog reports that one pediatric gastroenterologist was curious enough about the practice to issue a survey on the matter. Some doctors point out that the process can lead to...

Marco Ament, the developer of Instapaper, discusses a critical problem with iOS 5 that will affect any application that stores its own content—including e-book readers. It has to do with iOS 5’s iCloud backup system. Apple wants to reduce the amount of data that has to go out over wifi, and is asking developers not to store such data in Documents folders within the app itself that would get automatically backed up. Instead: Data that can be downloaded again or regenerated should be stored in the <Application_Home>/Library/Caches directory. Examples of files you should put in the...