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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics

Palm shows off new “Palm Pre” in keynoteToday

Palm is giving a keynote about its new device and operating system at CES today. Gizmodo’s live coverage has plenty of photos and descriptions of the “Palm Pre.” Here’s the new device in a nutshell:

Palm Pre "will help you live your life more effectively." The design looks like an oblong rounded rectangle.

It has EVDO rev.A, WiFi, bluetooth, a gesture area on the screen for navigation and use, a removable battery, micro USB, USB mass storage support, a 3.5mm Headphone Jack.

11:21 AM: The new UI is called Web OS, and it’s designed to be so simple, you only need to focus on the information and content you want, not the OS itself.

I would just like to congratulate Palm for choosing a name for its new device that will Google-match to every single “Palm Pre-Owned” or “Palm Pre-Announces” post on the Internet.

Technorati Tags: Palm,Palm Pre,Web OS,

E-book gizmos I’ve known: The Rothman versionToday

Real men read e-books only on desktops.

Some e-book pioneers felt that way. I, on the other hand, believed that desktops weren’t right—well, not unless you owned a really comfortable chair.

A tablet or handheld would have been better for my back. But resolution questions and others arose with handhelds.

So while I sampled e-books on obscure brands of IBM PC clones and looked ahead to the future and ideally a TeleRead approach, I didn’t really get serious about E for my personal enjoyment until the arrival of the Dell Axim and similar machines.

I still have trouble understanding how brave souls could live with the resolution of the early Palms or at least the nonbacklighted variety.  I myself tried and quickly spurned a Franklin Bookman, shown in the photo (mine perhaps was a different model).

Other TeleBloggers’ gizmo memories

Those are a few of my thought in response to

Will Verizon be Amazon’s next e-book competitor?Today

In his blog on Computerworld, Mike Elgan covers a recent statement by Verizon Wireless executive Tony Lewis that Verizon might sell Kindle-like e-book devices to Verizon customers, bundled with wireless data plans just like cell phones.

Elgan is initially skeptical at the idea of a cell phone company—known, historically, for nickel-and-diming customers on everything from bandwidth to ringtones to SMS messaging—competing with Amazon, who gives the Kindle’s wireless service away for free. He then offers some tips for how Verizon could succeed with such a device—make it better than the Kindle, minimize bandwidth charges, support wi-fi, bundle it with cellphones, and partner with Amazon on sales.

Verizon would make an interesting entrant into the e-book biz. The current big two e-reader companies, Amazon and Sony, made their names in selling content and hardware, respectively. We have not yet had an e-book vendor who starts from the perspective of selling the network.

Technorati

How Japanese Anime house Gonzo avoided pirating by dropping DRMToday

Here is a reader contribution from author Eugene Woodbury.

Gonzo versus the pirates

The Anime Almanac reports here and here on how Japanese anime studio Gonzo beat Internet piracy by abandoning DRM. Rather, they responded quickly with a quality product at a reasonable price that was easy to download. This seems painfully obvious, but as Scott VonSchilling points out, getting media execs to grasp the obvious can be painfully difficult.

I’ve long wondered why anime studios didn’t crank out a subtitle/dub script at the same time they finished the Japanese master (what U.S. studios do with closed caption scripts). Even in Japan, it’d be a blip in the budget. Mostly, VonSchilling explains, because the importance of quickly addressing demand in a wired world hadn’t occurred to them.

This reminds me of an anecdote related by David Halberstam in The Reckoning, about the decline of Detroit a

Overdrive pulls out of Fictionwise distributionToday

Found in the MobileRead forums today: one of Fictionwise’s e-book servers, Overdrive, is terminating its contract with them as of January 31st. Because these files are actually DRM-encrypted and delivered by Overdrive’s servers and not stored on Fictionwise itself, this means that customers who purchased them will no longer be able to download those files as of the end of the month.

According to Fictionwise’s FAQ about the Overdrive matter, this affects 300,000 e-book units sold to customers (less than 4% of Fictionwise’s total sales). The affected units include some Secure Mobipocket, Secure Microsoft Reader, and Secure Adobe Digital titles, but Secure eReader and Multiformat are unaffected.

Fictionwise is in negotiation with the e-books’ original publishers to allow them to provide replacements in Secure eReader format for affected Overdrive books. They have covered about 80% of the affected titles so far, and continue to negotiate with other publishers to try to cover the rest. For more information, see the FAQ at the link above.

Kudos to Fictionwise for their efforts to make sure their readers don’t lose access to the books they’v