This weekend, Tim Carmody at Wired had a summation of the Blio Windows app’s first few days and the flak it’s taken from reviewers. It reportedly suffers from accessibility problems and text-to-speech conversion issues. Kurzweil has responded that the app was still undergoing improvements and a revised version will be released next month. An iOS 4 version is still in private beta. Carmody also mentions the controversy over Blio’s use of Feedbooks feeds without permission, and the fact that the Toshiba Blio store only has a little over half the titles of the main Blio store for reasons...

Speaking of Apple and closed-vs-open, Apple has occasionally been known to reverse controversial decisions, eventually. Such a reversal happened today. Earlier this year, Apple’s refusal to allow the use of third-party development platforms to create iOS applications touched off a minor furor (and an FTC investigation). Among other things, this meant that Wired Magazine would have to create an entirely separate version of its tablet magazine app for the iPad, instead of being able to create one version in a Flash-based Adobe development environment and export it for multiple platforms including the iPad. Today, Apple has changed...

Internet humorist Lore Sjöberg has been paying attention to the furors over “dying” industries that have been erupting lately—including one I haven’t covered here, since it didn’t have anything to do with e-books. A proposed deal between the RIAA and the National Association of Broadcasters/musicFIRST would see cell phone manufacturers required to put an FM tuner in every cell phone they make. Sjöberg thinks this is a great idea, but why stop there? He proposes some similar restrictions in the name of saving newspapers, mapmakers, and travel agents. (The newspaper one involves parakeets.) Related: ...

Chris Anderson has finally posted the article I mentioned Gawker’s post about a few weeks ago: “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet” (though it’s actually a pair of related articles—one by Anderson, the other by Michael Wolff). It’s certainly interesting and worth reading, and perhaps my Chris Anderson vs. Prince article was a little unfair. The thesis is that consumers are moving away from the web and toward apps (such as those on the iPhone or iPad) because the apps can present specialized information in more convenient formats, while the media companies are moving in...

Wired’s “Gadget Lab” blog has an article (or had an article, anyway; though it’s still in my Google Reader feed, it has vanished entirely from the Wired website—the link to the original article returns a 404) looking at how much publishing business arcana are unexpectedly turning out to matter in the new world of e-book publishing. After touching upon the Wylie/Amazon and Amazon 1984 imbroglios, the Gadget Lab staff mention talking to former book distributor and digital publisher Don Linn about it. Publishing metadata, for instance — things like ISBNs, trim size, etc. —...

Gawker’s Valleywag section posts a tip it’s gotten, that Wired editor Chris Anderson is reportedly preparing a cover story for the magazine in which he declares that “the Web is Dead”. He will apparently argue that content is moving to more restricted corners of the ‘net, such as iPad and iPhone apps. According to Valleywag, this comes at a time when there is a “cold war” on between the print Wired Magazine and the on-line Wired Digital (Wired.com/Reddit) divisions—Anderson has reportedly called Wired.com a “business failure, generating little cash for publishing company Condé Nast” (though he claims he was...

Never one to pass up a chance to poke fun at an easy target, Internet humorist Lore Sjöberg has written a hilarious “Alt Text” column for Wired on “Library of Congress Rulings That Could Have Been”. Other rulings give users the right to copy videogames for the purpose of researching the quality and type of security measures embedded therein — obviously the main reason people copy videogames — and the right to turn your electronic book into an electronic audio book, assuming there isn’t a legal audio book version already on the market. ...

As the iPad emerges as a powerful force for e-reading, the fate of dedicated e-book devices is either dim or bright, depending on who you talk to. Last week, Jeff Bezos made a lot of sound and fury about how well the Kindle is selling, but since he keeps all sales figures close to his chest it’s not at all certain what it signifies. Now Wired has a story about how the iPad is killing off some of the shakier e-reader companies, whose prospects were unclear even before its launch: Audiovox, iRex, Plastic Logic, and Cool-er have all...

Wired reports that Richard Branson, owner of the Virgin conglomerate, announced plans for an iPad magazine, Maverick (headed by his daughter Holly), which will have no printed counterpart the way many other iPad magazines do. Branson thinks this will be an advantage in terms of marketability: AdAge’s insiders (via Columbia Journalism Review) said Richard Branson thinks his iPad-only Maverick magazine will have a big advantage over traditional publications when it launches in the fall because it lacks a paper version. By Branson’s logic, the publishers of print magazines cannot price their digital versions low enough, because...

A pair of items about e-book readers that aren’t the big three (or, considering Borders’ entry into the market, perhaps I should say the “big four”). Wired reports that the Korean iRiver Story is now on sale at the UK bookstore WHSmith. It supports the usual formats (EPUB and PDF being the most-used ones on the list) and also the CBZ comic book reader format (in greyscale, of course). It also offers wifi connectivity. However, Wired notes that the SRP is £250, which works out to about $380 at current exchange rates. Of course, electronics tend...

Given that only yesterday I wrote about how Valve is converting pirates into paying customers with its computer game distribution system Steam, it seems to be good timing to note that an e-book on the sociological and cultural significance of video gaming can now be read for free on-line. This Gaming Life by Jim Rossignol is a collection of essays looking at different aspects of the gaming experience. It is posted online at the University of Michigan Library’s website in HTML format, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license. (While it does not seem to be available...

It’s no news that magazine publishers have begun to focus extensively on tablets such as the iPad, coming out with pricey tablet editions that cost the same as single print issues and usually do not have the same flexibility of use as viewing the same content on the web. (Though it is worth mentioning that Wired has dropped the price of its iPad magazine from $5 to $4 with the latest issue—a small improvement, at least.) However, some magazine publishers are passing up both tablet and web and releasing direct e-magazine editions for the PC. Folio has a...