07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Feast your eyes on some of the discussions from this week at MobileRead...

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Firmware update for PRS-500 available - EPUB!
• eReader for Android just announced
• Bookeen releases new model of CyBook: CyBook Gold

E-Book General - Deals, Freebies, and Resources

• University of Chicago Announces free Monthly ebook

E-Book Software - Calibre

• Calibre + Dropbox = unclouded happiness

E-Book Devices - Sony Portable Reader PRS-500/505

• PRS-500 owners: Will you take advantage of Sony's upgrade/trade-up offer?

E-Book Devices - Amazon Kindle

• Kindle finally released in Canada

05:22 AM by HarryT in E-Book General | News and Commentary

Our good friend Kurt, from BooksOnBoard, informs us that Bookeen appear to have snuck out a new model of the CyBook, apparently without telling anybody!

The new model, the CyBook Gold, has 1GB storage space (up from 512MB on the previous model), an 8 greyscale eInk screen (previous models supported only 4), and supports ePub and PDF with Adobe ADE. The package includes the CyBook itself, a black cover, earphones, a USB cable, and a European AC adaptor (which will not be supplied to US customers).

The package is priced at US$349; there appears to be no mention of this device as yet on Bookeen's site.

For more information, please see the BooksOnBoard site here.

07:51 PM by arshield in E-Book General | Deals, Freebies, and Resources

The first book in the program is below. epub format

Link http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ebooks/free_ebook.html

The Birthday Book
Edited and Translated by Holt N. Parker
120 pages, 9 line drawings 5 x 7 © 2007
E-book Free! See form below (about e-books)
ISBN: 9780226099774
Cloth $25.00
ISBN: 9780226099743 Published February 2007
“[Roman grammarian and writer] Censorinus distills the wisdom of several strains of philosophy, extracting whatever seems to have any bearing on births, days and birthdays: theories of the origin of the human species, the formation of the individual foetus, the principles of astrology, the ages of man, the nature of time, eons, centuries, years, months, days and hours.”—London Review of Books

11:26 AM by dpierron in E-Book Software | Calibre

I'm pretty sure a lot of people here know Dropbox, the (free at first) file sharing and synchronization service...

I use it to sync the files on my two Macs, and my work PC ; it's a very easy to use and efficient service.

Recently, I began syncing my Calibre library, so the books I edit/add/remove on either machine would be available on all the others ; Calibre is a multi-platform marvel, so this syncing makes a lot of sense.

And I thought of something : if I generate the stanza.xml file from the Calibre database (using the calibre-db command), maybe it could be automatically accessible from my iPhone, now that the whole Calibre library is synchronized and available on my Dropbox account ?

Guess what ? It works ! Unfortunately, it's still a manual process, but I'm pretty sure it could be possible for our generous Kovid to change it into something automatic...

Here are the steps needed to make this happen :

1. Publish your Calibre library in a directory of the Public part in your Dropbox account

   The library must be in a public part of your Dropbox account, because you will need the URL to the stanza.xml file in the last step. If you do not want to make it public, you will still be able to browse your (private) dropbox account website from inside Stanza, but it's another story...
   To get the URL to your Calibre library, simply right-click on a file in the folder and select "Copy public link" from the "Dropbox" menu. Mine is http://dl.dropbox.com/u/788541/calib...ary/stanza.xml (fake number, of course).

2. export the Calibre database into a stanza.xml file

   Using the following command in the Calibre library folder, generate the stanza.xml file :
   calibredb list --output-format stanza --prefix http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/788541/calibre_library > stanza.xml
   (replace the URL with the one you got at step 1, this one is mine)

3. correct the stanza.xml file

   Some characters are encoded in a way that make Stanza frown : simply replace them using a plain text editor ; replace '%28' with '(' and '%29' with ')' (skip the quotes, obviously).

4. configure your Stanza program to make it access your new online library

   In Stanza (on your iPhone for example), create a new online stanza catalog and enter the URL to your stanza.xml file (mine is http://dl.dropbox.com/u/788541/calib...ary/stanza.xml).

That's all !

Of course, if the stanza.xml file could be generated automatically with every modification of the database, it would be even better, but even now it's very convenient...

Thanks again Kovid for Calibre, the Lexycle people for Stanza and Dropbox for being free...

PS : if I made a mistake in my explanation, or if something was not clear enough, ask questions and I'll be happy to try and explain better...

06:46 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News and Commentary

I just got this email from Fictionwise:

> ANDROID EREADER NOW AVAILABLE!

Do you have a Motorola Droid, T-Mobile myTouch 3G, Motorola CLIQ
or T-Mobile G1? The wait is over! eReader for Android is now
available. eReader for Android is an award-winning application
used to read eReader eBooks on Android-based devices. eReader Pro
has more features than ever before, including free eBooks, the
ability to read dictionaries and more! To celebrate this exciting
event, use coupon 'android15' and save 15% off any purchase. see
below:
http://www.fictionwise.com/Z425328TB...androidfaq.htm

Shiny.

04:58 PM by FligMupple in E-Book Devices | Amazon Kindle

A friend just sent me this link:

http://technology.canoe.ca/2009/11/17/11774336-qmi.html

12:51 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book Devices | Sony Portable Reader PRS-500/505

Sony has made PRS-500 owners a great offer (MR News and Sony Offer):
* A free firmware upgrade to support ePub, including free shipping, or
* A trade-in discount on a new device ($50 or $75 depending on the model)

What will you do? (Please participate in the poll, and share your thoughts in the thread.)

So now the reality sets in - I don't want to part with my PRS-500, even if I buy another device and the 500 goes into storage in "museum mode"! Am I willing to part with it for a "measly" $75??? And am I willing to part with the custom navigation hacks just to get e-pub support? Do I want to upgrade - the new devices are a significant upgrade in usability. Or, heaven forbid, after such a nice offer do I want to consider a Daily Reader or even a non-Sony device like the Daily new Plastic Logic large screen device? These are some serious questions!

Can't wait to hear what others are going to do. Share your thoughts!

10:05 AM by igorsk in E-Book General | News and Commentary

Alas, it's not updateable by user and the device must be sent in.

Update your Reader firmware, compliments of Sony.

Sony has created a firmware update for your Reader, allowing it to remain compatible with the new eBook Store format. This update will allow your PRS-500 to support the ePub and Adobe DRM format and add the ability to re-flow PDF documents. Due to the nature of the work required, you will need to send your PRS-500 Reader to the Sony Service Centers for updating.

All you need to do is complete the request for firmware update through the link below, or call 866-962-7669. We will provide you with a pre-paid UPS label for sending in your Reader. You should have your PRS-500 back within 14 days, with the firmware update installed.

Alternatively, you can trade it for a newer model.

Trade in for a new Reader Pocket Edition or Reader Touch Edition:
Trade in your PRS-500 when purchasing a new Reader Pocket Edition or Reader Touch Edition. You will receive $50 off of the Reader Pocket Edition or $75 off the Reader Touch Edition.

Linky.

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Another week, another steady stream of e-book goodness here on MobileRead. Our authentic roundup of what's been going on:

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Kindle For PC is now available.

E-Book Devices - PocketBook

• PocketBook 360° review

10:54 PM by kacir in E-Book Devices | PocketBook

EDIT: There is Part II of the review available in the thread.

I was looking for an e-ink device to upgrade my aging Sony PRS-500 reader for quite some time.

Ever since I have seen first proposals for Pocket Book 360° design on The-ebook.org forum I was planning to get one eventually.

So I did get one. Finally. I purchased an original Ukrainian package from our member Forgosigan.

Originally I wanted to purchase black unit, because I thought the screen would appear lighter when surrounded by a black bezel, and I am used to black reader from my PRS-500 anyway. Forkosigan persuaded me to buy "ivory" colored unit. He said that the text appears blacker on a screen with light bezel. Besides, he did not have any black units left ;-)
I have purchased light colored one and I am happy.
The color of the unit is not bright white, it is light "PC case" beige with pearly - silvery, almost metallic surface. There is grey plastic border around the screen. The resulting combination is very pleasing, and indeed, the letters look *almost* "like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth" :-)

I LOVE the detachable lid. It protects the screen very well without adding bulk to the device. I like the user replaceable battery. You should update the manual, however, there are no markings at the back of the device indicating that this is the door to the battery compartment and reset button. It is also not apparent how to open the door once you start looking for the Reset button. (I did not need it yet, despite my furious tests).
There is only one thing I do not like in hardware. It is audible click when you press the button. I can still read without disturbing my sleeping partner, but I would have prefered a little bit quieter click.

With a few books in internal memory the device boots in under 21 seconds. It also takes less than 21 seconds to boot the machine with an SD card with over a thousand files on it freshly inserted. I am very impressed. Everything is configurable. You can configure the device to take you after the boot directly to the book you were reading when you switch it off, and I used that option when timing "cold boot".

When you insert SD card with 10 folders on it and you have another 15 folders with books already in main memory you are presented with a library that combines those top folders, so in a main library you see all 25 folders plus whatever books you have on the root of the card or in the root of the main memory "disk". You do not see folders with names starting with dot (which is standard Unix and Linux behaviour). There is an icon indicating whether the file resides on a card or in memory.
There is another icon present next to file name. No icon means the book was not opened, an "open book" icon means you are reading the books and reader remembers your position, a "checkbox" icon means the book was finished. The states are saved in a file accessible from main memory when you connect the reader to PC, the "not yet opened", "being read" and "finished" flag can also be reset from the menu described below.
You can manage files directly from PocketBook user interface. Just press and hold the OK button to get menu.
you can do following actions
- Open book
- view information and metadata
- mark as Read (or finished)
- File
. - rename
. - Move to folder
. - copy to SD card (or main memory, depending on where the book is)
. - Move to SD card
. - Delete
. - Mark group
- set view for files as
. - list
. - thumbnails
. - details
. - set screen orientation (any angle 0, 90, 180, 270, or gyro sensor)
- Sort
. - by title
. - by author
. - by series
. - by creation time
- Show names as
. - book titles
. - file names
- find book
I havent, yet, discovered how to create a folder.

There are basically three kinds of book files you can read on PB. Files with rigid layout, such as pdf and djvu files, files that are reflowable, such as fb2, fb2.zip, txt, rtf, html, chm, doc, epub and tcr and comics. In this review I will not talk about pdf files, that will take another long post. I said that pdf files have rigid structure, but according to the manual you *can* reflow, zoom or read in column mode pdf files.
Reflowable files are opened in an application FBreader. FBreader is very configurable. It discards most of the formatting information from rtf, doc and displays text fully justified, in an user selected font.
In FBreader you can configure
- font (face, size)
- encoding (there are quite a lot of options missing, but you can use UTF-8, so I do not see a problem. Encoding options are: auto, Win-1251, Win-1252, Win-1255, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, IBM866, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-5, UTF-8)
- line spacing (from 70 to 200%)
- page margins in three steps, starting with no margin
- hyphenations
- line breaks (auto, new line, empty line, line with indent), so PB can display "raw, plain vanilla" Project Gutenberg text file surprisingly well

There are further settings that affect the FBreader under settings icon on the main menu. Among many, many interesting things you can set Apperance - theme, interface font, boot logo, text rendering (Not antialiased, Antialiased, embolded)

Let us get back to the FBreader.
There is a very thin status bar at the bottom of the screen when you read the book, It contains following info:
[page #] / [number of pages], name of the book in a very tiny font, percentage of the book you have read so far, a graphical progress bar, time and battery indicator. When you open the book, or when you change screen orientation or font or size of font there are just three dots displayed instead of page number and progress bar - this is indication that the device is repaginating the book.

You can use custom fonts. Just copy ttf font into Fonts directory on the main memory when you connect reader to the PC. If you provide device with just one variant of the font, the bold and italic text is simulated, just like on Sony reader. When you load all for variants of the font - normal, bold, itallics and bold itallics the device uses that and you get real italics. (Just have a look at the shape of the 'a' letter to see if you have real italics. See? 'a' versus 'a'. I strongly recommend font Droid that was developed specifically for small displays on Android operating system and released under Apache licence. I very much like the way fonts are displayed, rendered, antialiased, and hinted on PocketBook

I have only one question concerning FBreader for our resident PocketBook resellers. How do I configure FBreader to use left justification instead of full justification? I think have seen description of how to modify a FBreader config file (easily accesible in main memory when you connect the reader) somewhere on the-ebook.org forum, but I can not find it right now.
Another question is, what happens when user deletes system files from main memory? (Do not worry dear readers, there are only some configuration files, files with state of the books and such things in the user mountable main memory, so you can not delete some important system file.) How can this be corrected? Can this be remedied by using "factory default option" oe perhaps by formatting internal memory from Settings or by reflashing firmware? I am NOT going to try, but sooner or later somebody WILL delete some files.

To be continued ...

Now let us see some unpacking photos, shot with a mobile phone camera under very adverse lighting conditions. During weekend I will try to borrow a better camera and make better shots, might be even a video.