It appears that either Barnes & Noble played a very low-key April Fool's joke on unsuspecting NOOK lovers this week, or they're bringing a NOOK Audio device to the market very soon. What we're seeing today is a NOOK Audio model number OE250 page on Barnes & Noble thanks to intrepid searchers at The Digital Reader where they also note that the company filed for a trademark for that name all the way back in February (last month.) Will Barnes & Noble be releasing an MP3 player soon?
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‘eBook’ Stories
Harry Potter series now available as ebooks
If you’ve been wanting to read the Harry Potter novels on a Kindle or mobile device, then so far you’ve been out of luck. J. K. Rowling last year that ebooks of the Potter series would be available via Pottermore, promising an October launch for the service. While it didn’t make that date, it has officially launched today.
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Conde Nast magazines on new iPad called out for poor quality
With the incredible resolution that is the Retina Display, a lot of critics are taking a closer microscopic look into the various apps and content that have been around since before the improved technology. One of the companies that has been given such a critical eye is Conde Nast for its digital publications. Obviously, digital magazines and newspapers are a huge industry for tablets, especially the iPad, since publishers see it as their big chance to remain relevant. But Conde Nast might not be doing such a good job of that.
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Samsung ElectroWetting tech destroys e-ink in 2013
It's been announced this week by Samsung LCD Netherlands R & D Center (SNRC)'s Johan Feenstra that the company will begin mass production of their own next generation e-reader displays starting in 2013. Through the company that Samsung purchased specifically to make their own company bring such technology to the market, we've already had a glimpse of what was once just known as Liquavista's ElectroWetting display. This new-world e-reader-bound technology is able to not only display text and black and white images with great success and next to no power consumed, it's able to play videos and flip through pages of content without the relatively massive refresh time an e-ink display still does today.
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Hello Google Play, RIP Android Market
Today Google has rebranded its massive set of markets into one: Google Play, “Pure Entertainment, Anywhere You want it to be.” This new market is taking the place of the Android Market, the Music store, Books, and Video stores as well. Google has taken this evolution of their market structure and put it at the forefront of not only their digital sales for each of these different medias, but for their cloud storage services as well. What you’ve got here is not just a store, but a place you can access your purchases at any time from whatever device you’ve got that can hook in.
Pottermore brings Harry Potter e-books to public libraries
Pottermore, the company that is in charge of handling the digital side of the Harry Potter book series, has made the magnanimous decision to bring all of the iconic wizarding tales to public libraries throughout the country. The OverDrive platform, which helps libraries offer e-book rentals and lending programs, will help with distribution. This is a nice turn of face for the industry after major publishers decided to end library e-book programs.
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Lost original Star Trek script to be published as an e-book
I was never a big fan of the original Star Trek series. It seemed like during the summers a kid it was on TV all the time, and I couldn't get past how cheesy it seemed. I am much more camp Piccard than camp Kirk. This is an interesting story about the original Star Trek, and if you're a fan of the original series, you may remember "The Doomsday Machine" episode. That episode was apparently one of the more popular episodes of the original series and was written by Norman Spinrad.
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Amazon pulls 5,000 Kindle books after distributor fails to pay more money
One of the largest distributors in the market of small and independent publishers, IPG said it did not buckle under pressure from Amazon to pay more money from its e-book sales. And as a result, the online retail giant has disabled the electronic versions of all IPG titles, which is somewhere in the range of five thousand. IPG's contract with Amazon had just come up for renewal and, according to IPG, Amazon asked for new terms that would have given it a bigger cut of IPG's sales.
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B&N NOOK only bright spot in drooping earnings
Barnes & Noble's cheaper NOOK Tablet can't come too soon: the book retailer's overall sales increased in the most recent financial quarter, but that wasn't enough to avoid a drop in net income. B&N's NOOK business - including digital ebook sales, other downloads, and accessories - rose 38-percent in Q3, pushing sales to $542m, with hardware growth up 64-percent year-on-year. Nonetheless, pre-deduction earnings dipped year-on-year, from $170 million to $150 million.
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iBooks Author Hands-on
It’s taken a special kind of ebook to make headlines over the past year or so: anyone can throw together a basic document, but a rarified breed of immersive, interactive app/ebook hybrids has also developed. Often seen targeting children or delivering iPad versions of print magazines, they’ve invariably taken big money and plenty of time. Now, with iBooks Author, it’s simple enough for the layman. Check out our hands-on impressions after the cut.
iBooks 2 Hands-On
Apple’s original iBooks app tried to do to ebooks what iTunes has done for music; now, with iBooks 2, Apple is throwing textbooks into the mix. We’ve just headed out from the Apple keynote in NYC this morning to spend some time with the new ebook app, and on one level it’s more of the same: an incredibly straightforward way to access books – in this case for education. More after the cut.
iBooks Author is here
Apple has only just finished announcing iBooks Author, its ultra-simple drag & drop interactive book creation tool, and already it's up for download. A 136MB OS X application, you can download iBooks Author through the Mac App Store [iTunes link] and be creating ebooks in minutes. Although Apple's focus today was on education, the scope for iBooks Author is a lot broader than just classroom and lecture hall tools.
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