Remember how, back in 2009, Wizards of the Coast pulled all its PDF products from on-line gaming store Paizo and announced it was ceasing PDF sales altogether? Apparently it only took about four years for the company to change its mind again. Wired’s GeekDad reports that WotC has launched a new e-book store site, dndclassics.com, in conjunction with on-line RPG e-book seller DriveThruRPG. The site currently offers over 80 products ranging in age from the old red and blue books up to the latest 4E stuff, with prices ranging from $4.99 for older products to $17.99 for...

It was Flann O'Brien, under his byline of 'Myles na Gopaleen' in The Irish Times, who wrote: "When I want to read anything, I usually write it meself." I know this because I have The Best of Myles (1968), published in paperback by Picador, which I found second-hand at a church fête some weeks ago. A quick search of e-book sites reveals that there is, as yet, no other way to read it than on paper. All yez Kindlers, Koboists and Androghedans, as O’Brien might have described you, will have to find some other book. But not me. In a few...

TechCrunch reports that 1DollarScan, a US subsidiary of Japanese jisui (third-party book-to-e-book scanning) company Bookscan, has introduced an improved formatting service called Fine Tune. Fine Tune promises to custom-format its scans so that they work better and load faster on all different platforms. For example, Fine Tuning for the iPhone, Android devices, or e-readers offers compression, margin removal (to make the PDF fit the screen shape better and waste less space on already-small screens), and optimization for the different resolutions or display technologies. CEO Hiroshi Nakano says this approach is particularly important for making inroads in...

O’Reilly TOC general manager and occasional TeleRead contributor Joe Wilkert has a piece up on O’Reilly Radar looking at a survey O’Reilly recently conducted of its e-book customers, asking on what devices and in which formats they planned to do most of their e-book reading. Wilkert reports that the most popular non-PC e-reading device, with a 25% share, was the iPad—but 46% of those who responded said that their primary device for viewing O’Reilly e-books was their PC, and about half of the people who responded said PDF was their format of choice. When...

I found an interesting article on the blog of “technology innovation company” DPCI about how PDF format is an e-publishing dead end. In an era when e-readers have so many different potential screen sizes and different text formatting and rewrapping abilities, the article notes, a format that was primarily developed to freeze a page into a form that would look the same no matter where it was printed is a dead end for screen reading. PDF is a dead-end format. What I mean by this is that the nature of the format mimics what it was...

The Air Force’s plan to use iPads as electronic flight bags in cargo planes, which I mentioned here, has hit a snag, and the Air Force has canceled an order for 2,861 iPad 2 devices. (The original story involved the Air Force purchasing 18,000 iPads. NextGov’s doesn’t have any word about what’s going to happen to the other 15,000. Perhaps the 2,861 was just the first order, so the others have been canceled as well.) It turns out that someone remembered that PDF reader GoodReader, which was going to be used as part of the package, was developed...

When it comes to copyright and piracy, it often seems that some of the most vehement objectors don’t practice what they preach. The Boston Phoenix’s Carly Carioli has posted an editorial to the Phoenix’s blog calling out the New York Times, which published a couple of scorching columns on piracy over the weekend, for at the same time ripping off an article to which the Phoenix holds the copyright. The article in question is a 36-year-old investigative report into football injuries which was scanned and uploaded in PDF form to the New York Times’s website and linked from an...

CNet reports that cartoonist Richard Stevens III has released a free, DRM-free PDF of the first physical book collection of his webcomic Diesel Sweeties. Although the entire strip is archived for free on-line, the e-book represents a PDF conversion of a printed collection which includes a foreword, character information, and edited and recolored artwork taking into account the lessons Stevens learned through experience. The giveaway is, of course, meant to promote Stevens’s web store where he sells merchandise related to the strip (including printed strip collections). But that’s to be expected; Baen’s DRM-free digital giveaways work the same way....

This past week, the Kindle iOS app received an update. We did mention it when it happened, but I think a couple of the features in that update are important enough to go into in detail. First of all, the software can now read PDF files. I tried it out with a TV manual downloaded from the website of manufacturer I support in my day job, and it worked pretty well, including drop-down access to the table of contents. Of course, there are many other ways to read PDFs on iOS by now, including GoodReader, iBooks, Stanza, and Safari...

Google has just added offline reading to its Google Books app for the Chrome web browser. They tout this as offering the ability to read e-books on a plane, or when the Internet has gone down for some reason. To read your Google eBooks offline, you’ll need to install the Google Books app from our Chrome Web Store and ensure your Google eBooks are available to read offline. Please see this article in our Help Center and follow the simple step-by-step process to enable offline reading for your ebooks. Of course, it only takes...

The Pathfinder role-playing game was originally developed under the Open Gaming License as a “replacement” for D&D 3.5th edition after Hasbro announced it would no longer be supporting the game. Hasbro was changing over to its new, streamlined D&D 4th Edition rules, which suddenly left all the 3.5th-edition supplements its OGL had fomented without an available master rule set. However, the Open Game License meant that Paizo, Pathfinder’s developer, was free to take the core of the D&D rule set and create a new, compatible game around them. One noteworthy thing about Pathfinder was that the entire full-length version...

During GenCon, I had the opportunity for a brief interview with Phil Reed, Chief Operating Officer at Steve Jackson Games, in which we discussed e23, Steve Jackson Games’s PDF e-book store. We’ve mentioned the store a time or two in the past, as when “Reverend Pee Kitty” talked about how the program had expanded beyond its original intended goals. I took the chance to find out from Mr. Reed some more about how this program was working. Me: What gave you the idea to do e23? Phil: When I joined the company in '99 it was already in...