Here’s a bit of sad news. The beleaguered Palm Inc. has put itself up for sale, working with Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners to try to find a buyer, Bloomberg reports. As we previously reported, Palm has been having a hard time lately as its devices simply failed to find a market. Word of the sale comes as no surprise; sooner or later something like this had to happen. In a way, history is repeating itself, because the original Palm ran out of money and had to sell itself to US Robotics shortly after getting started. If...

Here’s a blast from the past. In 2008, we covered StyleTap’s plan to create a Garnet Palm OS emulator for the iPhone, and the difficulties it ran into due to Apple’s “no emulators” clause. Now Engadget reports that StyleTap has finally come out with the software. There are just two catches, however: first, it only works on jailbroken iPhones (since Apple has not changed its stance on emulators), and second, it costs $49.99—an astronomical amount for an iPhone application. (In fact, for that amount you could probably find a pretty good used Palm on Amazon or eBay.)...

Where the iPhone conquered your pocket, the iPad will conquer your backpack. So says Tim Carmody on the Snarkmarket blog, where he puts down his thoughts about why e-books on the iPad will be more successful than some people think. Carmody starts with five common reasons skeptics give that e-books won’t take off on the iPad, and notes that most of them aren’t all that new. (Though he does not address the oft-heard complaint that people will not want to read from LCD screens.) He points out that those who buy the least expensive, 16-gig...

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...

Steve Riggio has stepped down from the CEO position of Barnes & Noble to become B&N’s Vice Chairman. The new CEO will be William Lynch. In addition to serving as President of the Barnes & Noble website, bn.com, Lynch has an impressive amount of e-commerce experience with HSN.com and Gifts.com (which he co-founded), as well as a lot of involvement with e-commerce and websites for Palm. As Gizmodo’s headline puts it, “Barnes & Noble has no illusions about what it’s becoming.” It seems like a pretty clear indication of what B&N sees in its future to appoint an e-commerce...

A couple of weeks ago, Paul reported on self-e-publishing site Scribd’s plans to add direct mobile download capability. CNet reports that Scribd has now done so: Scribd-hosted documents can be sent to any of a dozen different e-book devices (including Kindle, Nook, iPhone, Palm, EZReader, and others) with two mouse clicks. The documents are sent as PDF files via e-mail or SMS message link. At present, only DRM-free titles are supported, but Scribd CEO Trip Adler has plans to expand to copy-protected versions in the future. Another part of Scribd’s mobile strategy is creating device-specific...

Update: Tobias Buckell has linked to this piece, too. Thanks for the follow-up and the kind words, Tobias! And welcome to all the readers who come here from there! Over the last few days, the angry Amazon/Macmillan rhetoric has been flying fast and furious from several positions. Recently, we posted an impassioned piece by Ficbot with the attention-grabbing headline, “Maybe we should be hurting the authors,” which was linked in a post on author Tobias Buckell’s blog and has brought us a great deal of traffic today (not to mention the liveliest comment thread we’ve seen in...

Happy Birthday, eFictionReaderWise! Just over one year ago, on January 9th, 2008, Fictionwise bought its oldest, largest surviving competitor, eReader, marking the end of eReader's long journey through a series of four previous owners. E-book hot potato eReader began life as Peanut Press, one of the first e-book vendors for the Palm Pilot platform. The company had the distinction of being the only e-book vendor for the Palm to offer both its own e-book reader and its own e-book file format. (I suppose you could count Mobipocket.com, but Mobi was more of a software company first and a bookstore second;...

On jeffkirvin.net (formerly writingonyourpalm.net, where I blogged on e-book-related issues before coming here), Jeff Kirvin writes about recent statements by Palm CEO Ed Colligan that the new Nova line of Palm will feature "game changing hardware." According to Engadget, echoed in TreoCentral, Palm has hired Matias Duarte, the designer behind the Sidekick and Helio, to create its new user interface. On another note, the New York Times writes that Palm has brought in John Rubenstein, who helped revive Apple with the iPod, to help it recover market share. Changing the Game? Writes Jeff about the "game changing" claim: This is an interesting phrase. New...

Thanks to Chris for such a useful post. Let's see more articles like this---I can't do both news and in-depth tips constantly. Meanwhile Alan Wallcraft says Mobipocket will also run under Garnet, but not with DRM capabilities. - D.R. Today I looked at a Palm emulator for my Nokia 770, with the intent of using it to run an eReader client. My overall verdict: mixed, but promising. The screenshots were captured using VNC from my Windows box. Click on them to see larger views. Going (Pea)nuts about ebooks It started with a problem. My first PDA, way back in the late '90s, was a Palm...