Testing a new platform for “Books for all”: By Elizabeth Wood Sometimes it’s important to step back and remember that Worldreader is about reading. We are not ‘the e-reader NGO’, nor ‘the Kindle guys’. We are simply ‘the folks who are transforming reading.’ Our core mission is to enable folks all over the developing world to read.  We do that by using new technology to deliver thousands of books to those who previously had few to no books. For the past two years, we have been doing this using 3G enabled e-readers (the amazing Amazon Kindle) in schools in Ghana and Kenya.  We have...

The name makes me think of uranium and radiation, the proprietary DRM issue remains, and Apple isn’t a supporter. But the Readium initiative, announced this morning, is a still big step forward for the International Digital Publishing Forum, the main e-book industry trade group. A demo reader mixes ePub 3 e-book format, XML, HTML5 standards and the WebKit rendering engine used in many Web browsers. Aided by this “reference implementation, developers will more easily be able to create ePub reading software with “support for video, audio, interactivity, vertical writing and other global language capabilities, improved accessibility, MathML, and styling and layout enhancements” (link added). Demos already exist as extensions for Chromium...

From the press release: Berlin, 13 February 2012, www.corporate.txtr.com – Foyles, Britain’s world renowned bookseller, launches a brand new eBook service together with eReading apps on Android and iOS, under the name‘Foyles powered by txtr’. txtr is a leading eReading solutions provider on numerous branded smartphones, tablets and PCs. Through its partnership with Foyles, txtr adds more focus on the UK eBook market in 2012. The eBook shop is operated jointly by the marketing and merchandising teams of txtr and Foyles. Sam Husain, Foyles’ Chief Executive, comments: “At Foyles we are very excited by the developments in reading and bookselling afforded by...

he international policy of Amazon is mysterious. They ship Kindle Touch to over 170 countries, but they don’t want to sell it to their major markets. They also sell Kindle books to 170 countries, but they successfully prevent authors from those countries to publish in their own language. I self-published via Amazon’s KDP a few books. Two of them in Polish. Tonight an email arrived from KDP, saying that one of the books has been removed: As part of our efforts to provide the best experience possible for customers in the Kindle store, we are taking this opportunity to notify you that your...

So, Penguin has now dropped out of the Overdrive library service. Yikes! It strikes me that all of these 'legacy' publishers who are panicking because Amazon or Apple or Google or Indie Everyman are going to crush them to bits are taking an entirely wrong approach here. What if, instead of clinging to the way things were done before, they actually innovated? What if, instead of locking things down ever further and driving people away from their goods, they opened things up and brought them in? I think an ebook rental service, run in conjunction with the existing Overdrive architecture, would...

New Features Auto-adding: Add an option to check for duplicates when auto adding. Content server: Export a second record via mDNS that points to the full OPDS feed in addition to the one pointing to the Stanza feed. The new record is of type _calibre._tcp. Allow specifying a set of categories that are not partitioned even if they contain a large number of items in the Tag Browser. Preference is available under Look & Feel->Tag Browser Allow setting a URL prefix for the content server that run embedded in the calibre GUI as well. Allow output of identifiers data in CSV/XML/BiBTeX catalogs Driver for Motorola Droid...

From the press release: Copia, the interactive eBookstore, announced that music critic Will Hermes will answer reader questions inside his book, the acclaimed Love Goes to Buildings on Fire. Starting today, anyone who purchases a copy of Hermes's much-lauded book from Copia can use the site's free eReader app to post questions to the author in the margins of the eBook. Hermes will respond to the questions through Feb. 21, 2012. While users have always been able to create and share notes on any eBook purchased from Copia, thanks to the platform's app,...

From the Worldreader blog.  Worldreader aims to put a library of books in the hands of families worldwide, using e-reader technology.  They have a post on their blog thanking volunteer  for his efforts.  Here is part of it: Here are a few things that have us in awe with Carl back in our Barcelona office and excerpts from his blog: 1. His knack for trouble-shooting and encouraging kids to use built-in features on their Kindles: “I suggested they tried out the ‘text to speech feature’ one day, a function of the Kindle Keyboard, which reads out a book’s content with a computer voice....

That's the title of an article in PC World.  Here's a snippet: I am not suggesting that you ditch your laptop and just use the Kindle Fire as your primary mobile computing device (although I have argued in the past that you could conceivably get away with that with the iPad). However, if you are traveling and you only want to take one device, it is nice to know that the Kindle Fire is capable of meeting your needs at least in the short term. Although Amazon targets the Kindle Fire as a consumer device, it does come pre-loaded with the QuickOffice app. QuickOffice...

From an article in Andrys Basten's A Kindle World Blog: This is the new but not yet announced page by Amazon forKindle Touch International, now buyable by customers in countries outside the U.S. finally - for $139 U.S. from Amazon U.S. This is for the Kindle Touch WiFi only, but on that page there is an international table that tells you whether your country is on the list for delivery of this model.  The internationaal page was discovered by the Canadian "Nathan" who is able to see the non-U.S. page(s). Amazon has stores in France, Germany, Spain, and the UK and Kindle...

On a related note to the post about graphical e-book standards I made earlier today, TOC general manager (and sometime TeleRead contributor) Joe Wilkert has written an op-ed for Publishers Weekly decrying the fragmentation of the e-book market through platform lock-in and DRM. Wilkert suggests that EPUB could be a solution to this if Amazon could be convinced to adopt it and drop DRM. (Well, of course it could. Heck, pretty much any e-book format would work if Amazon dropped DRM, thanks to Calibre.) He reiterates the usual music-industry-based arguments for ditching DRM. Several...

New Features Implement the ability to automatically add books to calibre from a specified folder. Conversion: When automatically inserting page breaks, do not put a page break before a or tag if it is immediately preceded by another or tag. Driver for EZReader T730 and Pint-of-View PlayTab Pro Bug Fixes Fix device entry not visible in menubar even when it has been added via Preferences->Toolbars. Fix metadata plugboards not applied when auto sending news by email Fix regression in 0.8.34 that broke recipes that used skip_ad_pages() but not get_browser(). Restore device support on FreeBSD, by using HAL Get books: Show no more than 10 results from the Gandalf store Content server: Fix metadata not...