I have lately been thinking about writing an e-book guide for the average consumer—something very simple and basic that breaks down some of the complex issues surrounding e-books into something easy to understand for people who don’t currently know anything about them. Before I begin, I’d like to know what members of the TeleRead community might think such a guide should contain. My new tech support day job has brought home to me once more just what a gap there is between how much the average person knows about computers and how much computer geeks know. In a...

I released a new revision to the Smashwords Style Guide that makes it easier to produce, publish and distribute a great-looking multi-format ebook with Smashwords.In parallel, in the last 30 days we developed, tested and introduced new EPUB and MOBI Meatgrinder conversion blades that give authors and publishers more control than ever over the final look and feel of their ebooks.The new Style Guide marks the 42nd and most significant update to the Style Guide since we first released it in November 2008. Our last major revision was in April, which is when...

The Bookseller’s FutureEBook blog has a interesting post today on the process of converting textbooks into digital textbooks. The textbook publisher that writer John Pettigrew works for, Cambridge University Press, is in the process of exploring the market for e-textbooks. In looking into the matter, it ran up against the problem that there simply isn’t much information available about the success of e-textbooks versus printed ones—most of the headlines about e-books relate to fiction. So, to get its feet wet, the company chose two textbooks—one fairly well-known and the other relatively new—to convert and market to...

If refurbished $109 Kindles aren’t your thing, perhaps you might be interested in a penny Blackberry. TechDealDigger reports that Amazon is offering the normally-$200 Blackberry Bold 9000 for one cent when you sell your soul to activate a new service plan with AT&T. Though the Blackberry has largely become an “also-ran” to the iPhone, I gather that there are still a number of e-book apps available for it (including Kindle, eReader, and the official MobiPocket reader that is still missing from the iPhone). Of course, compared to the amount you would be shelling out over the life of...

How many hours do you spend sitting at your computer for work and pleasure? How many hours are you willing to spend reading an ebook on your work computer? How many additional hours are you willing to spend to search through ebook websites to find an ebook to read? I find these latter two questions to be the ones that haunt me as I try to find an ebook to buy and read. I broached this topic in an earlier article, Finding the Needle in a Haystack of Needles (II): eBooksellers, but didn’t really delve into the problem of reading on...

My dad was one of (I'm sure) many fathers who was gifted with an ebook reader this father's day. I had suggested the Libre to my stepmother---I thought it would be easier for him to manage since he wants to read mainly classics and it has folder organization---but she was horrified by how ugly the Libre is, and she had an Indigo gift card burning a hole though her wallet, so Kobo it was. He seems happy with it. It's always instructive for me, the techie, to see how the newbie does! POSITIVE FIRST IMPRESSIONS I think techie me was a little...

From the Diesel ebook blog. Mobipocket, one of our formats here at the Diesel eBook Store, was created by the lovely French couple, Thierry Brethes and Nathalie Ting. Their smart and lofty goal was to introduce an eBook format that could be rendered on a multitude of devices. It’s no wonder that Mobipocket quickly become as popular as it is. Whereas other earlier formats were designed for a particular device or company, Mobipocket strived to unite all eBooks on any and all reading devices. Democracy in action. Vive la liberté! But, like all good murder stories, this one gets complicated. In 2005, Amazon...

Here are a couple of stories related to taking a stand on principles concerning DRM: In Cory Doctorow’s latest editorial for Publishers Weekly, Doctorow sets his sights on the iPad and bangs the “DRM Is Evil” gong for all he’s worth. He talks about Apple’s infamously restrictive policies that promulgate device lock-in, and warns against publishing e-books for such a restricted system: Think about what that kind of control means for the future of your e-books. Does the company that makes your toaster get to tell you whose bread you can buy? Your dishwasher...

I began writing this as part of the review of eReader that I posted earlier, brought on by thinking about eReader and Stanza’s failure to get high-resolution iPad versions, but I thought that it deserved its own separate post. Make no mistake, there has been a certain amount of anti-corporate paranoia going around about smaller, much-beloved e-book companies bought up by larger corporations ever since MobiPocket planned to release an iPhone version of its reader but was allegedly stifled by its new owner Amazon. Just look at what happened when Stanza vanished from the app...

Dear Publishers, Now that you have your 'agency' contracts (such as they are) in place and are moving on, in your own heads anyway, to Ebook 2.0, can we please start tightening things up a little with some standards? Customers need to know that they can have a reliable, consistent experience in getting the content they want to pay you their hard-earned money for (and at over 1 billion downloads, the iTunes music store has proven people will pay for their content!) They don't have that now, and it needs to happen fast. Here are the first two areas you should work...

Related: Chris Meadows’ unboxing video of the iPad. In-depth review on the way! – D.R. Apple, Kobo and Amazon dissed iPad fans who prefer e-reader apps to be able to bold all the text on the screen---one way to increase LCD readability when you’re outside or if you suffer vision problems. Stanza, yes, offers the Arial Rounded MT Bold font, but without a so-far-AWOL update, it won’t display full size in high-res on the iPad screen. readMe keeps crashing. But good old BookShelf, one of the early iPhone apps, is out with an iPad-friendly version that offers...

Sometime this coming week, I should be receiving a Pocketbook 302 e-book reader to review—and Joanna, nee Ficbot, will be reviewing the smaller Pocketbook 360. We have mentioned Pocketbook a few times already; it is a Ukrainian/Taiwanese company that uses e-ink-based hardware from Netronix (the OEM that makes the Cybook, COOL-ER, and others) with its own Linux-based firmware. The 302 is Pocketbook’s most advanced model so far. It seems to be a pretty standard 6” e-ink reader (with the standard USB interface), with the addition of wifi and some apps including RSS, Sudoku, and—according to the Nate’s Ebook...