Mobileread.com

Welcome to another digest entry of MobileRead, where we transform the profound into the bite-sized.

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Should e-Books be Rated (like movies and video games)?
• Apex Books needs your help
• Microsoft Reader News
• Kindle is Amazon's top selling gadget for 2008

E-Book Formats - PDF

• How to Do Everything with PDF Files

E-Book Devices - iRex iLiad

• Improved ContentLister (with more items on a page)

The following article gives a good overview over what you can do with PDF files (without using the expensive Adobe Acrobat):

http://www.labnol.org/software/adobe...tutorial/6296/

Amazon has released its "Best of 2008" Lists.

The Kindle was Amazon.com's top selling gadget for 2008, beating out the likes of the Nintendo DS, PSP, and others. The device topped every list it was eligible for, except the most positive comments category, which was topped by the Samsung 46-inch LCD high-definition TV.

This is based on unit sales (not revenue), and no actual sales numbers were released.

There used to be site at the address www.mslit.com. It was owned by Microsoft and used to support Microsoft Reader ebook format. The site wasn't very pretty, but it had an excellent search function that covered all ebooks in MSReader format.

The ugly but functional site is gone. Sometime in the last two weeks Microsoft started redirecting the URL to www.microsoft.com/reader. It looks like Microsoft has noticed the growing ebook market, and has decided to take it seriously.

I'm sure they are not the only small publishing house in trouble, but Apex Books is asking its readers to buy more books now from their store. See Brother, can you spare $15.95?, which I came across via MikeCane2008. They report a drop of 75% in revenue in December compared to the August. Apex sells "dark science fiction", which won't be for everyone, but they are almost all available DRM-free at FictionWise.

(Almost) no one wants censorship. In the US, we take pride in fighting censorship in the name of free speech. But like any freedom or right, there is always a balance required between that freedom and other rights or goals of society. In the case of free speech, there is a nice article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that points out some of the limits. I am not well enough read to be able to judge how balanced this article is, but it is at least well formatted and addresses topics like harm, offense and pornography.

At any rate, we have ratings systems for movies and for video games, which are probably both enforced to some extent in the U.S. I believe that some music has "adults only" type ratings. I don't know if adult magazines are still sold in stores, but they used to not be available to minors. Certain books are not considered appropriate for school libraries, classes and even bookstores.

Movie ratings are actually somewhat helpful in determining a viewers interest at times. Again in the U.S., a "G" rating is a revenue killer unless the movie is directly targeted at children. Anything worse than an "R" will also kill revenues, will not be welcome in most theaters and will be interpreted as porn or warped. I'd be interested to hear how this all works in other parts of the world.

But now Reuters is reporting that in the U.K. Quote: The kind of ratings used for films could be applied to Web sites in a bid to better police the Internet and protect children from harmful and offensive material, Britain's minister for culture has said. What about books and e-books? Would you like to see a rating system? What would be the benefit and how would the ratings be determined? Or is such an effort just a waste of time? How about those of you with children - do you feel differently?

Hi All,

UPDATED: SEE THE NEW THREAD!
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35374

====== DEPRECATED =====
I have modified contenLister to show more items on a page. I called it newLister so it can coexist with the existing one. It can display anything between 4 and 20 items on a page. I also increased the number of remembered 'recent documents' to 12...

This is a 'developer' version: no installer yet. To run it you have to do the following steps (using ssh):

1. copy newLister somewhere in the flash disk. It cannot be on CF or SD since those devices are not mounted yet when contentLister is started. Personally I use the directory /home/root/my_start/ for this kind of stuff...
2. copy newLister.rc and newcursor.png to /usr/share/contentLister
3. edit /home/root/start.sh to start newLister instead of contenLister:
   Code: old: (/usr/bin/contentLister --sync ; reboot) &
   new: (/home/root/my_start/newLister --items 12 --sync ; reboot) &
4. edit: check that newLister and start.sh are executable (chmod +x)
5. reboot

Of course this is at your own risk :D I've used my improved Iliad without problems for a few days now. I think this is a stable version, but mistakes when editing start.sh can be 'fatal'. Let's be careful out there ;)

Happy new 2009 preview,

Hansel.

Please give some feedback if you try this :o



PS:

1. you can set the number of items with "--items n". The amount of displayed information for each item depends on n: same as with the current contentLister (4-8), title + subtitle or description (9-12), only title (13-20)
2. A safer way to experiment with the start script is described here: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33700
3. The attached file contains a file sources.tgz: after unpacking this can be compiled in the same way as the original Irex contentLister (build_from_scratch.sh...)
4. Comments and questions are welcome.

Attached Thumbnails       Attached Files newLister-1.0.tar.gz (780.4 KB)

If you've been absent and are keen to find out what MobileRead was up to this week, check out the links below:

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• RIAA Abandons Song Sharing Lawsuits
• Salon Opened for Kindles in Maryland
• Sony promises Revolutionary Vaio Laptop

Miscellaneous - Lounge

• Good News Everyone...It's Christmas!

Dear fellow Mobileread.com users,

once again Christmas has arrived. I hope you will all enjoy a peaceful, relaxed and romantic time with your loved ones.

In the name of all members of the Mobileread.com team I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

And to all those who wanted an eBook Reader for Christmas this year, I hope your wish will be fulfilled!

According to Sony Quote: On the 9th of January you will change the way you look at laptops. Forever. This means to me a new display technology. Maybe an OLED laptop. Maybe display goggles instead of a screen? Maybe a screen with an extra wide viewable angle?

And if we're really lucky, it will be a display that catches on for dedicated e-book devices as well.

Who knows, but my hopeful guess is that they are introducing some of that 3D screen technology we have been hearing about. I suppose we'll find out January 9th...

From Engadget.

I took this poor, but interesting photo on my Treo while I was in Maryland a couple of months ago. Forgot I even had it, but figured some of you might get a laugh out of it.

Be sure to click through to the article, and display it full size, or you won't be able to read the sign.

A Kindle salon I can imagine and even get excited about. But I can't for the life of me figure out what a Moon Boom Salon would be!
Attached Thumbnails  

In a move that is long overdue, Quote: The group representing the U.S. recording industry said Friday it has abandoned its policy of suing people for sharing songs protected by copyright and will work with Internet service providers to cut abusers' access if they ignore repeated warnings. This ends a practice that may have only made the situation worse with respect to piracy, and most certainly brought undue hardships to families that were under the RIAA legal guns.

With a new policy of warnings and then loss of internet access, maybe we can all focus on reasonable consumer markets for electronic music sales which are actually a good deal for the consumer.

On the negative side, it is unlikely that anyone will have the money, endurance or desire to fight accusations made by the RIAA. In other words, if someone is unjustly accused of sharing copyrighted music, is there any hope? Probably not. Will this lead to heavy handed and unjust control by the RIAA? One can hope that level heads will prevail, and current file sharers will enticed to become legal purchasers, and innocent file sharers (non-copyrighted music, for example) will be left alone.

Does this matter for e-books? Of course... all content buyers win every time we see DRM usage limited, or we see the consumer enabled to make personal copies of content, or we see heavy handed law enforcement become more balanced. It would be impossible for e-book publishers and sellers to ignore the news of the day for a related industry. Maybe in the book world, some of the pain brought about in the music world will bring perspective that allows everyone to win with e-books - before we make pirates out of every good citizen willing to purchase e-book content fairly.

From Yahoo! Tech.

If you've been absent and are keen to find out what MobileRead was up to this week, check out the links below:

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Sony Reader being marketed on Dear Author
• Foxit eSlick, New eInk based reader for $229

Miscellaneous - Feedback

• Forum restructuring: Device sections

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• MobileRead wiki now multi-lingual
• Forum restructuring: Formats sections added

As Foxit's first-generation e-book reader, eSlick is specially designed to support multiple formats and enables users to view various documents with ease. With the thickness of 0.4” (9.2 mm), the weight of 6.4 ounces(180g) and the introductory low price of $229.99($259.99 MSRP), the Foxit eSlick will become the ideal e-book reading device for users. This first edition will be available very soon. If you are looking for a high quality and low-cost e-book reader, the eSlick definitely is what you’re looking for. Click here to pre-order eSlick right now!

Quote: Screen:6" E Ink® Vizplex screen 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 166 dpi, 4-level gray scale
Size: 7.4" x 4.7" x 0.4" (188×118×9.2mm)
Weight: 6.4 ounces (180g) battery included
Color: Black/Gray/White
Connectivity: USB2.0
Operating System: Embedded Linux
Supported Formats:
- eBook Formats: PDF, TXT, Any printable document(after converted to PDF using included software)
- Sound Formats: MP3
Internal Memory: 128MB
Storage Memory: SD Card (2GB included. Supports up to 4GB) Included Software:
Foxit Reader Pro Pack ($39 license)
Foxit PDF Creator ($29 license)
From http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/

I looked around and didn't see this posted already. Hope it's not a duplicate.

DearAuthor.com is a (mostly romance) book review and discussion site with a large and vocal group of regular visitors.

Sony has donated Sony Readers for all the Dear Author reviewers! They've also donated three additional Readers for the Dear Author folks to offer for contest giveaways.

Jane at Dear Author is a big advocate for ebooks (and reading, in general).

I thought this was exciting, since I love my Sony, but have wondered if they had any chance against Amazon's aggressive marketing strategy.

You can read about it here.

Sony has just released a new version of their Windows side software for the Reader. Called version 2.5.00.09170, the major improvements seem to be:

• Adds support for 64-bit versions of Microsoft® Windows Vista® operating systemAdds support for the Sony Reader Digital Book PRS-700
• Adds support for managing Annotations and Highlights

Sony is continuing with its stated position of not adding additional features for the PRS-500 and such improvements as the 64-bit versions of the operating system is not supported for the PRS-500 as the architecture is different from the PRS-505 and PRS-700.

The full writeup is here.

In anticipation of new e-book readers emerging in 2009 (*fingers crossed*), we're considering reorganizing the forum structure for the e-book devices. The suggestion is that we move "out" of the "E-Book Devices" section and sort the device sections by vendor:

Quote: Sony Devices

* Sony PRS-700
* Sony PRS-505/500 ( merge "Troubleshooting" )
* Accessories
* Content
* Developer Corner

iRex Devices

* iRex Digital Reader
* iRex iLiad ( merge "Troubleshooting" )
* Accessories
* Content
* Software Releases
* Developer Corner

Amazon Devices

* Amazon Kindle ( merge "Troubleshooting" )
* Accessories
* Content
* Developer Corner

Bookeen Devices

* Bookeen Cybook Gen 3 ( merge "Troubleshooting" )
* Accessories
* Content
* Developer Corner

Other Devices

* Apple iPhone
* HanLin eBook
* BeBook ereader
* eREAD STAReBOOK
* Fictionwise eBookwise
* Polymer Vision Readius
* Legacy Devices
* Others Before we do so, I would like get as much feedback as possible. Thank you.

It's long overdue (thank you Harry for your patience), but we've finally added a dedicated section where we can discuss specific e-book formats, their virtues and vices, and the best tools to work with them.

Obviously there is still some overlap with other forum categories. Please bear with us as we're migrating existing threads from other places to their new homes.

Your feedback is - as always - appreciated.

Our wiki is now multi-lingual. If you set the language entry in your "my preferences" entry at the top of the page in the wiki to your preferred language and a page exists in your language it will be displayed instead of the English page.

If you would like to help with the translation effort be see http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Help:Wiki_Translation for details on how to go about it.

If you have never looked at the wiki before be sure and check it out. It can be reached from the top of the forum page or directly at: http://wiki.mobileread.com/

If you've been a bit too busy to keep up, here are a few of our favorite stories from the past week.

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• Algonquin Hotel provides Kindle loans
• Penguin 2.0
• Nintendo DS in HarperCollins Deal

E-Book Devices - iRex Digital Reader

• iRex DR1000S Pressreader Review

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

• Christmas gift: MahJonG game (starting from SD card via autorun)

E-Book Devices - Polymer Vision Readius

• Some Readius hands-on photos

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• 7000 books ! A new milestone for the MR Library !