Remember that $300 do-it-yourself rapid e-book scanner I mentioned in my post the other day about ethics and legality? Instructables has gone that scanner one better, with instructions for building a $20 photographic-scanning rig. The entry describes creating a roughly pyramidal framework out of hardware including tie rods, angle brackets, and shelf tracks. Into the framework one mounts a digital camera, which is then used to take photos of the book between turning the pages. While not as sophisticated as the $300 model, the simplicity and economy of this approach is nonetheless remarkable and may still very...

Fifteen years ago, the device that singlehandedly created the PDA market, and also probably did the most to start the e-book ball rolling, was the humble Palm Pilot. It was truly a marvel for its time—which is why it is so sad to see Palm floundering today, an also-ran in the smartphone market behind Apple and Android-powered devices. Palm’s stock prices hit a 52-week low on Friday after a lackluster earnings announcement, and analysts have downgraded their opinion of the stock to “sell”—with two analysts even lowering their price target to $0 (meaning that they think Palm’s stock prices will...

Plastic Logic has announced it is delaying the Que for several more months. As CNet points out, with the advent of the iPad this may be a product whose time has already come and gone. It is hard to see paying $649 for a black-and-white-only reader, no matter how big it is, given that the iPad starts at $499. Speaking of the iPad, from order numbers it was estimated that it sold 50,000 units in just the first two hours of its presale period yesterday. Not a big surprise that people are anxious to get their hands on it. Meanwhile, Gizmodo...

Gizmodo has kicked off a series of articles called “We Miss You, Sony” about how Sony, a company that used to be on top of the world thanks to the Walkman, the compact disc, and the Playstation, ended up a struggling also-ran. The first piece in the series is called “How Sony Lost Its Way” and talks about Sony’s knack for making bad decisions. It puts this fall down to a combination of three factors: proprietary formats (such as the Mini-Disc or Memory Stick), unwillingness to commit (coming out with a multitude of mediocre products rather than picking...

Gizmodo reports on a temporary art installation in New York City that blocked off Water Street for a few hours with…a street-covering expanse of books with LED flashlights on top. Spanish art design team Luzinterruptus explained we want literature to seize the streets and become the conqueror of public spaces, freely offering to those who walk by a space free of traffic which for a few hours of the night will succumb to the modest power of the written word. So to promote reading and literacy, you…put books where...

Earlier today, I touched on mobile device demographics showing that Apple by and large rules the mobile device roost (the iPod Touch more so than the iPhone). Here’s some more interesting stats from Gizmodo, sourced from AdMob’s January mobile metrics report. Fully 65% of the iPod Touch’s owners are 17 or younger, versus only 13% for the iPhone. This is only natural, of course; non-wealthy parents are going to be somewhat reluctant to foot the $70/mo smartphone service plan bill for an iPhone when an iPod Touch does most of the same things. (In fact, one...

Slashdot has a comment thread about what the best e-book device currently is. There is quite a lot of talk of e-ink vs. LCD, open format vs. DRM, and other interesting discussion. Have you ever wished it was easier to read a book (or e-book) while lying flat on your back? Either your neck gets tired craning to see it, or your arms get tired holding it up. Well, these $50 prism glasses I found in Gizmodo might offer a solution: they point your vision straight down, so you can read a book held upright while lying on...

Now that the Macmillan books are back on Amazon, a number of sites are coming out with analyses of what Amazon gained or lost over the week-long incident. I’m going over them as I prepare for my panel show podcast on the matter this afternoon. There is some good discussion going on in recent Making Light threads about the Amazon/Macmillan dispute, particularly this one about the agency pricing model. Gizmodo has a good piece on how Apple played the same game with the publishers to put pressure on Amazon’s price structure that Amazon played with the record...