Love Wikipedia and Have an eReader? Check This Out

Over at the excellent blog "How-To Geek" they have outlined a way to turn any Wikipedia article into a PDF eBook. This eBook then can be stored on your computer or transferred to and eReader. The process is simple, and when you are finished you have an offline copy of any Wikipedia article available wherever you go.

Check out the full step by step instructions here.

Amazon's Kindle App is Now Available for Android

Android and ebook fans can rejoice! Amazon has just released their Kindle app for Android devices.

Here's a list of the major features from the Kindle for Android website:

• Get the best reading experience available on your Android phone. No Kindle required
• Access your Kindle books even if you don't have your Kindle with you
• Automatically synchronize your last page read and annotations between devices with Whispersync
• Adjust the text size, add bookmarks, and view the annotations you created on your Kindle, computer, or other Kindle-compatible device
• Read in portrait or landscape mode
• Tap on either side of the screen or flick to turn pages

The Whispersync technology seems to be one of the most unique features of the Kindle app. It will synchronize where you last read on multiple kindle devices (iPhone, Android, Kindle, iPad). This a cool feature, that might help transition regular book readers into ebook readers.

You can find the Kindle application on the Android Market and the App Store for Apple Devices.

eReaders Become More Affordable

If you are interested in buying an eBook reader, now is the time. Several new models of readers are coming out soon. Also, several popular eReaders have recently dropped in price.

As we have mentioned previously, Borders is getting into the eBook game. The company is launching its own eBook store, and will soon be selling two new eReaders. In addition to the Sony eReaders it currently sells, Borders is adding the Kobo eReader and also the Libre Pro from Aluratek to the lineup. The biggest thing about these new eReaders is their price. The Kobo eReader costs $149.99, while the Libre Pro is only $119.99. Each of these new eReaders, if purchased through Borders, will also come preloaded with 100 free classic books.

Barnes and Noble is also releasing a new version of its popular Nook eReader. The new Nook Wi-Fi costs $149, and has almost all of the same features as the Nook that was released last year. The only difference is that the Nook Wi-Fi does not have built-in 3G connectivity, so you can only directly donwload books to your Nook if you have a Wi-Fi connection. Barnes and Noble has also dropped the price on the older version of the Nook, now called the Nook 3G, to $199.

Not to be outdone, Amazon has dramatically cut the price of its Kindle 2 eReader, to $189. Just recently, it was selling for $259. The Kindle is now also available for purchase in Target stores.

Meanwhile, sales of the the Apple iPad show no signs of slowing down. Apple announced that, in only 80 days, it has sold over 3 million iPads. Compare this to estimated sales on the Kindle, which in approximately 2 years has sold 3 million units.

With the many different eReaders now available at a wide range of price points, now is an excellent time to try one out.

Amazon: eBooks Outsell Print Books on Christmas Day

Amazon.com recently reported that it sold more ebooks than physical books on Christmas, a first for the company. The online retail giant also announced that its Kindle ereader has become the most gifted item in the company's history, but didn't provide specific sales numbers.

Read more at Yahoo! News.

Amazon Releases Kindle for PC Application

Competition for ebook readers has been heating up.

Sony has introduced new versions of its Reader. Barnes and Noble's new device, the Nook, will be shipping soon. Instead of a new device for the holidays, Amazon has launched a new, free, application that allows Kindle books to be more accessible. Kindle for PC joins the Kindle for iPhone app that allows Kindle books to be read on devices other than a Kindle, like on your home computer.

Still a beta release, Kindle for PC, like the Kindle for iPhone app, features Whispersync technology which keeps tracks of your place in a book when you switch between devices. It is currently only available for Windows, but a Mac version is promised.

For some reviews, check out this story at wired.com and this review from PC World.

Apple to Launch Kindle Competitor this Fall?

Apple is getting ready for a Fall launch of a tablet computer with a touch screen like the iPhone or iPod, reports the Financial Times. The new computer will not run the full Mac operating system, but a slimmed down version limited to running one application at a time.

Apple hopes that its new machine will increase the sale of its music downloads. The new tablet will have a larger screen than an iPod or iPhone, to give users the experience of looking at a 12" album sleeves from the recording industry's past, when music was recorded onto vinyl. The bigger display might include videos, photographs, sleeve notes and lyrics for a song or album.

The device is expected to have Wi-Fi capabilities and to be able to download and stream music and run applications. There are no indications about the price or screen size of the machine.

Some of the impetus for this new tablet is believed to have come from record companies which have seen their incomes plummet because far fewer now buy entire albums; Apple's iTunes Music Store, launched in 2003, allows people to download single tracks rather than buying the whole album at once – drastically cutting the income for the record company.

There is also speculation that the computer will contain ebook capabilities, making it an immediate rival to Amazon's Kindle. "It would be a color, flat-panel TV to the old-fashioned, black and white TV of the Kindle," one publishing executive told the Financial Times.

[via Guardian Online]

Amazon Releases Kindle eBook App for iPhone

Amazon has released a Kindle ebook app for the iPhone, which allows users to read books already purchased through their Kindles, buy new ebooks from their phones, and access Amazon’s 240,000-title catalog even if they don’t own a Kindle.

Chris Gaylord rounds up the pros and cons in Kindle on the iPhone, from the Christian Science Monitor.

New Hampshire Library Offers Kindles to Library Users

The Howe Library in Hanover, New Hampshire, has three Amazon Kindles ebook readers that it is loaning to Library users. Though each device holds approximately 200 titles, the Library is offering a limited number of titles because its goal is “to simply give our patrons the opportunity to try out new technologies.” The readers circulate for a one week period and can be reserved.

Bravo.

[via librarian.net]

The Kindle is So Yesterday...

Technology marches on. Today, the Kindle. Tomorrow -- literally -- Plastic Logic? Yep. Sorry Jeff Bezos of Amazon, but your 15 nano seconds of fame concerning reader technology appear to be up.

Imagine what comes after tomorrow.

[Hat tip to coolhunting.com]

Kindle 2 Reviewed

Now that gadget geeks have had their chance to take a look at Amazon's new generation e-book reader -- Kindle 2 -- released two days ago, the Christian Science Monitor blog has gathered some early reviews:

Review round-up: Amazon Kindle 2

Amazon Announces Kindle 2

Amazon has announced the release of Kindle 2, a new, updated version of its popular e-book reader. To celebrate the new reader, the company also announced that author Stephen King has written a Kindle-only novella – Ur – specifically for Amazon.

The Kindle 2 is slimmer (.36”), lighter (10.2 ounces), and sleeker, and has a longer battery life than the original. It can hold more than 1,500 books, and can convert any text to audio, so it can "read" books to you.

However, the Kindle 2 still cannot use e-book formats other than Amazon's.

The Kindle 2 will start shipping February 24.

To read more, see Wired.com’s Amazon's Kindle 2 Slims Down, Adds Audio.

Kindle 2 eBook Reader to Be Released Soon

According to several technology blogs, Amazon will announce its new Kindle 2 eBook reader at a February 9 press conference at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

Writes Techcrunch: “It’s a longer device but not as thick as the original Kindle, and fixes some of the button issues that plague users (like accidental page turns)... If our sources are correct, the new Kindle will be quite a bit nicer than the original model. It was originally described as being what the iPod Touch was to the original 1st gen iPod - a quantum leap in gadget styling and technology.”

We've followed the growth of eBooks and their readers on The Tech Desk. Will the Kindle 2 be as big a hit as its predecessor?

Stay tuned.

The Future of Book Buying?

Today's issue of Shelf Awareness has a very interesting letter by author M.J. Rose describing her experiences using the Amazon Kindle to buy and read e-books. Though e-book readers are not widespread yet, this article is a great glimpse of how they will affect traditional book publishing as they become more available.

E-Book World: Quandries and 'One Hell of an Exciting Time'

People of the Screen?

Maybe the question shouldn't be "Are we killing books?" but "Are we killing reading?"

This wonderfully in-depth column on implications of our new media and its impact on the mundane task of reading is thought-provoking. We've been debating a bit here in the Tech Center about the differences in reading online versus the printed page and I think this column makes a very persuasive case that we're underestimating the risk of something very basic as we plunge ahead in our love affair with technology with a seemingly tacit acceptance that any change is good change. Things change. People evolve. Get used to it. I find this attitude, especially in a library, to be rather odd and this really gets to the heart of my side of the argument.

From the column:

How strategic and targeted are we when we read on the screen? In a commissioned report published by the British Library in January 2008 (the cover of which features a rather alarming picture of a young boy with a maniacal expression staring at a screen image of Darth Vader), researchers found that everyone, teachers and students alike, “exhibits a bouncing/flicking behavior, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically....Users are promiscuous, diverse, and volatile.” As for the kind of reading the study participants were doing online, it was qualitatively different from traditional literacy. “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that new forms of ‛reading’ are emerging as users ‛power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages, and abstracts going for quick wins.” As the report’s authors concluded, with a baffling ingenuousness, “It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

I think there is a legitimate point here. Now I wouldn't argue that reading online (if that's what we can call it) is bad, just very different. And hopefully in some ways it's better. But I would argue that clearly, in some very specific ways, it's worse. Much worse.

Take the time read the full column. Hopefully it will create a good debate.

E-book Sales Still Small, But Growing Quickly

Recently, The Tech Desk has been covering the switch from print to digital format in the news business. Whether or not you are ready, more and more media are reducing or eliminating print and moving to all online, electronic publications.

But what about the book publishing business? Will book readers really forgo their paper texts for digital ones, viewable on Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, or one of the dozens of other devices now available?

Well, increasingly, evidence shows that they will. According to a recent article in The New York Times:

“For a decade, consumers mostly ignored electronic book devices, which were often hard to use and offered few popular items to read. But this year, in part because of the popularity of Amazon.com’s wireless Kindle device, the e-book has started to take hold…

Many Kindle buyers appear to be outside the usual gadget-hound demographic. Almost as many women as men are buying it… and the device is most popular among 55- to 64-year-olds.

So far, publishers like HarperCollins, Random House and Simon & Schuster say that sales of e-books for any device — including simple laptop downloads — constitute less than 1 percent of total book sales. But there are signs of momentum. The publishers say sales of e-books have tripled or quadrupled in the last year.

Amazon’s Kindle version of “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” by David Wroblewski, a best seller recommended by [Oprah] Winfrey’s book club, now represents 20 percent of total Amazon sales of the book, according to Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide.

So you want to give electronic books a try? The Troy Public Library has e-books that you can download to your computer. Visit our website at www.libcoop.net/troy, and click on Downloadable eBooks, Audiobooks and Videos in the left side frame. From here, you’ll be able to access our OverDrive and netLibrary collections, each of which has hundreds of ebooks for you to download and view.

Let us know what you think.

Detroit News and Free Press Considering Cutting Back Home Delivery, Focus On Web

News is coming from multiple sources that the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News may be ending daily home delivery and promoting their websites instead.

Courtesy of Yahoo Finance:

[The Wall Street] Journal said home delivery would be limited to Thursday, Friday and Sunday, with an "abbreviated" print edition available at newsstands on other days. Readers would also be directed to the papers' Web sites.

The changes likely would mean major job cuts, the Journal said.

The Free Press, owned by Gannett Co., had a daily circulation of 314,554 at the end of March; 618,324 on Sunday. The News, owned by MediaNews Group Inc., had daily circulation of 178,280. It does not publish a print edition on Sunday.

Bassett said the papers recognize the "tremendous importance of digital communication and finding ways to better deliver news and information to people in ways that are most convenient to them."

Reporter M.L. Elrick, vice chairman of the Free Press unit of the Detroit Newspaper Guild, said there's anxiety in the newsroom.

"Everyone here is afraid we're going to have staff cuts," he said. "I wish I had my sources call me as often as my colleagues have called the past couple days. No one knows where this is going to end up."

This news follows the growing trend started by the Christian Science Monitor, and more recently PC Magazine, of newspapers pushing towards digital. Unfortunately, this news from the Free Press and News, show the downsides of switching to a more digitally focused medium, as workers fear for losing their jobs.

Ultimately this decision, if made, will benefit the consumer by providing more up to the minute news, and easier delivery. Though it appears that the effect on the workers may be more negative, with job cuts and layoffs in their future. According to Freep.com, the Detroit newspapers will have a major announcement at 11 am. This post will be updated with the breaking news as it happens.

Who knows, we might all be holding Kindles in our hands sooner then we thought...

The Kindles Are Coming, The Kindles Are Coming!

While I remain highly skeptical of how technology will deliver a death blow to the printed newspaper (not to say it won't force dramatic evolutionary changes), news such as this adds fuel to the other side's argument.

Of course at about $359 a pop, the Kindle remains a luxury for most. For interesting commentary make sure to read the posted comments under the article. Don't miss numbers 10, 11 and 16 for thoughtful additions.

Library 3.0?

More fuel for Phillip's view the death of paper publishing is upon us. Seems the Kindle is doing very well. J.K. Rowling's feeling's aside, not to mention current cost considerations, but what are the long term implications to the vast shelving requirements of your favorite library? Will the library of the future simply be a server with electronic titles, databases of information, and social networking cafes. Sounds efficient and cheap. And sterile.

Maybe of more concern should be this ongoing study. Does anyone really believe this process does not effect the outcome of learning? What do you think? What do we gain? What do we lose?

Amazon Kindle: The End of the Local Newsstand?

The Amazon Kindle is a wireless, portable reading device with instant access to more than 185,000 books, blogs, newspapers and magazines. Entertainment Weekly editor, Rick Tetzeli challenged himself to use the Amazon Kindle as his only source of books, newspapers and magazines for two months. The result? Read it here.