Posted 02/24/10 at 09:02:53 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Spring Design’s Alex e-reader was slated to come out on February 22nd. It didn’t happen. There was a bit of concern around the interwebs as Spring Design didn’t really release any information. The company did eventually come out with a statement to assure us all that the Alex wasn’t vaporware. The release date has apparently been pushed to early March.

We were a bit baffled when we first saw the Spring Design Alex. Not because of any particularly confounding element of the Alex, but because we thought it was the Barnes and Noble Nook. The Alex fit all the rumors: color touchscreen, additional eink display, Android powered. Turns out that the Alex was just very similar to the Nook, and Spring Design even claims the Nook is based on the Alex (hence the legal issues).

The Alex will have a tie to Borders stores in an effort to compete with Barnes and Noble's Nook. It is expected to retail for $359 when it launches… whenever that is.

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Posted 02/17/10 at 09:06:09 PM by Ryan Whitwam

If you had asked us what electronic device had no business running a multitouch display, we’d have said eInk-based ereaders. Apparently, we don’t know what we’re talking about, because the Bookeen Orizon is an ereader with a multitouch screen. Why? So you can adjust the zoom level. No one wants to use buttons for that, right?

The Bookeen Orizon will be out in May and will retail for $250. When the current price of a Kindle or Nook is just a bit higher, they must really be banking on people going crazy for the multitouch. The screen is 6 inches and the device will come with 1GB of built-in storage. There’s no book store for this product, but it supports whatever ePub files or PDFs you’d like to put on it.

Even if you don’t need an integrated book store, why get this over a Sony reader? Is anyone really hankering for multitouch zooming on their ereader?

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Posted 02/08/10 at 08:04:51 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Are you searching for just the right outing for you and your special someone this Valentine’s Day? Well, look no further, Barnes and Noble will have Nooks available in stores for you to actually buy. Name just one thing more romantic than swinging by your local retail establishment to buy a new gadget. We sure can’t come up with anything.

The bookseller was caught off guard by demand for their ebook reader this past holiday season, with preorders spilling over into January. Barnes and Noble has had limited numbers of demo units in their retail locations since shortly after launch, but now you can actually take one home. This was cited as a main advantage over Amazon’s offering.

The Nook is a compelling alternative to the Kindle for some. The Nook runs the Android operating system, and a dedicated modding community has even gained root access to its Android core. Now that the production delays have finally been sorted out, we’ll see just how many people walk out of a Barnes and Noble with a Nook.

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Posted 02/05/10 at 02:30:56 PM by Bart Salisbury

One advantage in today’s technological world is upgradability. The product you buy today, no matter its limitations, has a reasonable chance of being transformed into the product you really want. All you have to do is wait for an update. An example of this is the second nook software update in as many months. Good news for users of the Barnes & Noble eReader, as they are now one step closer to having the eBook reader of their dreams.

The update, version 1.2, starts over-the-air distribution today. Registered nook users will  see the update sometime in the next week, either on Barnes & Noble’s Fast & Free wireless or Wi-Fi. The process should take less than 15 minutes, depending on your connection. If you are impatient you can get the update manually, but you will have to download the update, connect your nook to a computer, and update it via USB. Instructions are available at the nook support site.

What’s new and improved in version 1.2? Better in-store connectivity, for starters. More reliable Wi-Fi and more in-store content will be available for visitors to Barnes & Nobles brick-and-mortar locations. Probably more important are speed improvements for opening eBooks and periodicals, better responsiveness for Reading Now and Settings buttons, properly saved current page and bookmarks, easier navigation of daily subscriptions, sorting of personal files, battery optimization, plus the obligatory, but indefinite, catchall “overall system improvements”.

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Posted 01/27/10 at 07:17:18 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Regardless of how you feel about the newly announced iPad, it’s probably going to do a few things very well. But will it be the reading device we’ve all been waiting for? Steve Jobs pushed the iBook store in the keynote, and discussed how the Kindle pioneered ebooks. Jobs then said Apple would “stand on [Amazon’s] shoulders”. Can it work?

The obvious benefit of the iPad is that it has a color screen. There will be more options for text size, search, and even font choices. Magazines and newspapers will look nice, but reading an old fashioned book may not benefit much. The Kindle and other eReaders have a 16 level eInk display meant to be easy to read. The screen on the iPad, being a conventional LCD, may not be quite so easy on the eyes.

Content wise, the iPad may be in good shape. Out of the gate it will have content from Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Harper Collins and Hachette. It will also support the open ePub format, which is more than we can say for Amazon. This means the iPad will have access to Google Books. The Nook has ePub support also, so it’s not a total win for Apple.

Price is certainly of concern. The iPad is clocking in at $499 for the 16GB version sans 3G. That’s quite a bit more than the Kindle and Nook at $260. To get data on the go, you need to purchase an AT&T data plan for the (more expensive) iPad, whereas the Kindle and Nook come with free wireless. Granted, the iPad does much more than eBooks, but buying it primarily as a reading device may be a questionable move.

Check out this much more exhaustive rundown at MacLife.

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Posted 01/14/10 at 04:25:25 PM by Jason Barry

LG has released a new display technology that not even Rupert Murdoch can turn a blind eye to. With the e-reader consumer market continuing to grow, LG insists on not being outdone, and they may have succeeded.

LG unveiled an e-paper prototype about which, they claim is the largest produced using current technology. The 19-inch display uses a metal foil in exchange for the usual glass backing, which gives it its flexibility.

LG will likely be marketing this towards newspapers, and newspapers should be so lucky. Traditional e-readers, like Kindle and the Nook, stumble when it comes to executing the same comforting experience as print. Utilizing technology like this might help consumers more widely adopt the e-reading concept.

Image Courtest of TomsHardware

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Posted 12/27/09 at 12:02:23 PM by Justin Kerr

Although sales figures are hard to hammer down, its seems like e-book readers were a smash hit this year. Amazon alone is claiming that the Kindle was the most gifted item in its history. No numbers were mentioned, but when you consider that it is up against everything from game consoles to GPS’s this is no small milestone. Another interesting stat is that on Christmas day, e-books outsold their paper brethren by a pretty healthy margin. No doubt this was all the new Kindle owners firing up their devices in search of content, but it only further fuels speculation that all reading will eventually shift to digital distribution in the future.

The Kindle seems to have been a raging success, but the Barnes and Noble Nook appears to be suffering a bit with early reports showing that its content servers became overloaded preventing users from downloading purchased e-books. This might end up being but a small blip of bad press in the products long life cycle, but its definitely not the kind attention Barnes and Noble was hoping for over the holiday. In this case the success of the Nook can be attributed to its failings, but that’s small consolation for its owners.

Did you get an e-book reader over the holidays? What do you think of it?

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Posted 12/27/09 at 11:18:54 AM by Justin Kerr

If you don’t want others knowing what your reading, you should probably stick to paper. That’s the conclusion of an Electronic Frontier Foundation study that looked at how our e-book readers collect information, and what the device maker has access to during our daily use.

Not surprisingly always on connected devices such as the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes and Noble Nook log everything from what you read, to how long you read it, while more limited devices without wireless such as the Sony Reader can’t track you quite so closely. The EFF suggests anyone concerned with their privacy stick with the open-source FBReader, but lets face it, we prefer having our e-books delivered in seconds over a high speed wireless network don’t we?

Anyone else concerned with the privacy of your e-reader? Or did you check all your expectations of privacy at the Ethernet jack when you first logged on to the net in the first place? Let us know what you think.

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