Two weeks after Apple unveiled its iBooks Author program for designing interactive e-books, template king Jumsoft was there with its first set of iBooks Author templates, dubbed Book Palette. Jumsoft has now expanded that collection to 25 with the announcement of five new designs that offer “ … upmarket design quality at a reasonable price.” The five new templates include the crisp Decorum, the elegant Royal Title, and the colorful Taste Buds designs. All 25 templates contain the full set of standard sections and page layouts provided in the iBooks Author app, including covers, chapter pages, text pages, tables of contents, glossary pages and more....

  By Kirk Hiner | for Technology Tell With the price of 7″ tablets now plumbing the sub-$200 level, should these entry-level units be considered disposable computing devices? ZNet’s Jason Perlow posed that question in a commentary last weekend, in which he relates an anecdote about his wife falling asleep in bed while using a Google Nexus 7 he’d recently passed on to her, dropping the tablet onto a tile floor, the impact of which shattered its glass screen. Perlow vetted out the cost of replacing the screen, discovering that ASUS charges about $170 to replace the digitizer/screen/glass assembly, and the parts for a DIY repair would cost about $140. The Nexus 7′s touch digitizer,...

  By Kirk Hiner | for Technology Tell Didn’t we just do this? Not content with the iPhone 5 announcement and release last month, Apple will be holding another media event on Tuesday, October 23rd. (That's tomorrow!) It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that we’ll finally be seeing the iPad mini, something for which tech pundits have been clamoring pretty much since the original iPad was originally announced. The question is whether consumers want one as badly, and whether Apple has found a way to make them want one. You can find out this Tuesday, right here at the Technology Tell network, on the live blog that'll be...