How are newspapers going to survive the e-revolution? Dan Pacheco of BookBrewer thinks he has the answer: e-books. He points to the recent Huffington Post decision to start organizing and curating years of journalism work on particular subjects and releasing it in the form of e-books. E-book revenues, he suggests, could supplement flagging on-line ad revenues by targeting people who would like to read on given subjects in depth with materials that probably already exist in many newspaper archives. Why settle for a paywall when you can aim specific stories at target audiences who might never bother trolling...

Last week, we reported on Ars Technica’s release of writer John Siracusa’s 27,000-word review of the new version of OS X, Lion, as a $4.99 Kindle e-book. In case you’re wondering how it did, the Nieman Journalism Lab reports that it sold over 3,000 copies in the first 24 hours. The entire review was and still is available for free on Ars Technica’s website as a 19-page article. In fact, the web version is continually tweaked and updated, whereas the e-book version only gets changed for major mistake fixes. But some people just wanted an e-version of their...

From their site: Until recently, the Indesign EPUB features for creating e-books felt tacked on. Features were missing that just made the solution lacking as a whole, and you'd invariably have to use other tools to hack at the unzipped EPUB code to really have it render the way you want within e-readers. Indesign CS5.5 looks to fill these workflow holes: covers can now be embedded, flow can be strictly controlled, and it looks like one app can finally handle the e-book creation process from start to finish. ...

Arc90 is implementing a major change in its article de-cluttering service Readability: it is going to an at-least-$5 per month subscription model for continued use of the service. Of this $5 (or however much readers wish to kick in), 70% will be set aside to pay the content providers whose advertisements get stripped out of pages by using it, and 30% will go toward funding the continued maintenance and improvement of the service. The bare-bones “read now” de-cluttering service will apparently continue to be free (and in fact, it has even seen some interface improvements over the previous...

The great e-magazine control freak strikes again: CNet and AppleInsider are reporting that Apple has told a number of European newspaper and magazine publishers that they will not be allowed to offer free iPad magazine e-subscriptions to print subscribers through Apple’s e-newsstand app. The publishers are not terribly pleased about this, but from a neutral point of view it’s hard to fault Apple’s position. After all, Apple can’t extract a 30% agent’s fee from money that doesn’t pass through their store. This is also why the only e-book app allowed to offer in-app purchases is iBooks. Publishers may...

A number of sources, including Ars Technica and Bloomberg, report that Research In Motion is rumored to be turning to embedded software company QNX to provide the operating system for its new tablet, allegedly to be called the “BlackPad”. RIM actually bought QNX Software Systems from Harman International Industries in April for $200 million. QNX embedded software is used in a variety of devices, ranging from BMW and Porsche car audio systems to medical devices to nuclear power plants to the Crusher robot tank. It has also been released as a downloadable bootable floppy disk distribution, and has...

That's the title of an Ars Technica article today. The article discusses, at length, the problem with Google's metadata and says: Google's counting method relies entirely on its enormous metadata collection—almost one billion records—which it winnows down by throwing out duplicates and non-book items like CDs. The result is a book count that's arrived at by a kind of process of elimination. It's not so much that Google starts with a fixed definition of "book" and then combs its records to identify objects with those characteristics; rather, the GBS algorithm seeks to identify everything that is clearly not a book,...

Ars Technica has an overview article about current ereaders and accessibility - the Kindle and the iPad lead and the Nook and Sony aren't in the running. We already covered the National Federation of the Blind commending Amazon on the new accessibility features of the 3rd generation Kindle. Here's what Ars has to day about the iPad: Similarly, the iPad excels in this area, thanks largely to its sort-of-computer status and Apple's accessibility support in the OS. Screen reading is not a setting within the iBooks app, but the iPad itself—users can turn on VoiceOver so that every object, menu item,...

When I saw the article in Google Reader, I had already clicked “mark as read” before going, “…what?” and hastily going back to see if I’d read what I thought I’d read. Ars Technica has a piece on the Overbite Project, an open-source effort to bring the Gopher format to modern computers which already has an alpha release for Android devices. Gopher is the hypertext network protocol that was in use before the development of the World Wide Web. I still remember using it back at college in the early ‘90s to find information on the...

As the print newspaper business goes steadily down the tubes, one of the straws that news agencies are clutching at is the “hot news doctrine.” This doctrine, originally developed during World War I, was supposed to protect news agencies that did their own legwork by preventing others from simply rewriting and republishing their reports. Ars Technica reports that big news agencies are trying to revive the doctrine, filing an amicus brief in a case that hinges around a Wall Street investor news site’s ability to republish information snagged from a financial analysis firm before that firm in question...

I’ve been trying out Safari 5, most notably the Safari Reader feature. At this point I doubt I will be switching away from my preferred browser, Chrome, but Safari Reader does make it more than a bit tempting. I find that Safari Reader works remarkably well for article reading, especially on sites such as Ars Technica where there is no way to request multi-page articles as single pages without paying for a subscription. Unlike Readability, which just renders the page you’re on, Safari Reader will actually detect the multiple pages of the article and display them all...

Last year, I wrote about an Ars Technica article covering a new IEEE study group looking at the idea of “Digital Personal Property”. The idea is to use DRM to make electronic property act more like physical property—you can lend it to a friend, but you lose access to it while your friend has it and your friend might choose not to give it back. Yesterday, I received an e-mail from Paul Sweazy, the chair of the IEEE working group that is taking over for the study group in question, pointing me to the group’s press release (PDF),...