Materiality matters

Starting out from the fact that there is a crucial link between the sensory–motor experience of the materiality of the support and the cognitive processing of the text content, the study conducted by Morineau finds that the e-book does not provide the external indicators tomemory in the way that a print book does.

In the e-book, the connection between the text content and the material support is split up, allowing the technological device to display a multitude of content that can be altered with a click. The book, by contrast, is a physicallyand functionally unitary object where the content cannot be distinguished from thematerial part. Hence, they conclude that the e-book ‘does not serve as an unambiguous index to indicate a field of knowledge on the basis of its particular physical form’ (Morineau et al., 2005, p. 346). This is an interesting conclusion in a time when different versions of the e-book (iRex Technologies’ iLiad, or Amazon’s Kindle, for instance) and other mobile technologies (such as mobile phone novels in Japan: see Ito, Okabe &Matsuda, 2005) are again being launched as potentially replacing the print book (both inand out of schools), after their dismal and quite spectacular failure a decade ago. Once again, the question begs itself: will we be reading novels on screen – perhaps on our mobile phones – in the future?

see Anne Mangen

see FrenchTheory

Long form textuality

With E-Readers here are the potential gains: edgier, riskier books in digital form, new forms of narratives, invention. New modes of storytelling. A rise in importance of texts and meaning. And, yes — paradoxically — a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed

The thing is to understand why we historically haven't read long-form text on screens and how the e-readers are wedging themselves in the middle of everything.

We got to separate good and bad hypertextuality.

The key difference between Formless and Definite Content is the interaction between the content and the page (their fusion actually). Formless Content doesn’t see the page or its boundaries. Whereas Definite Content is not only aware of the page, but embraces it. It edits, shifts and resizes itself to fit the e-page. In a sense, Definite Content approaches the page as a canvas — something with dimensions and limitations — and leverages these attributes to both elevate the object and the content to a more complete whole.

Formless Content is unaware of the container.

Definite Content embraces the container as a canvas. Formless content is usually only PDF. Definite content usually has some hypertextual elements along with text.


- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Apple Mac Tablet

Steve Jobs on iPod Touch cameras, ebook readers and the iPod Nano 5G

Steve Jobs: he's back!

We're happy to see Steve Jobs back in the black polo neck and on stage in San Francisco and it seems he's even up for interviews. The New York Times's David Pogue got a few minutes with him and it was quite illuminating. If, like us, you're reeling a little from the lack of a camera in the latest iPod Touch, Jobs has an explanation. For him, the iPod Touch has become a pocket gaming device and it needs to be affordable.

He said: “We don't need to add new stuff – we need to get the price down.” Don't be surprised if we get a camera in the iPod Touch eventually though. On the subject of the iPod Nano 5G and its new video recording smarts, Jobs blamed the lack of stills snapping skills on the sensor: “Sensors for doing video are fairly thin. The sensors for doing a still camera…and we'd really like to have autofocus…are just way to thick to fit inside the Nano.”

Pressed for his opinion on ebook readers, Jobs was rather dismissive of standalone devices pointing instead to the convenience of general-purpose devices. It was a broad statement but could point to Apple's potential plans for the mysterious and possibly non-existence Apple Mac Tablet.

Another interesting hint on the future of the Apple Mac Tablet came in Jobs discussion of what went on at Apple in his absence: “A lot of things that were started before I left…were continually worked on…and there are some things I'm focusing a lot of attention on right now.” ??Steve, you tease! He continued, noting that the new products needed “polish” and that he doesn't think Apple will “miss a beat”. If you were disappointed by yesterday's announcements, I have a feeling you won't be next time.

(via The New York Times)


Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor

Fujitsu Color Ebook

Fujitsu Color E-Book Better Than Amazon Kindle

The new Amazon Kindle 2 was revealed to the world earlier this week, but it has already been rendered obsolete.

Sort of. While the new Kindle will certainly be a hot item on everyone’s shopping list, the Fujitsu eBook Reader takes it one step further by offering a full color display.
The trouble with the Kindle, as you may already know, is that the e-ink display is only able to show you images in grayscale. This isn’t a huge issue when you’re reading through something that is mostly text, but it does become a concern when you have an e-book with a few more images. Black-and-white is so last century.

While the e-ink panels used on the Fujitsu handheld are similar to those used in the Kindle 2 and the Sony Reader, it is able to offer color through the company’s FLEPia technology. This is great for newspapers, books, and especially magazines. Since it uses the same kind of e-ink panels, you wouldn’t burn through your eyes reading this either.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Replacing textbooks to get Kindle-type devices

Chris Dawson over at ZDNet Education wrote a great post about what it would take to get Kindle-type devices or paperless educational curricula to replace textbooks and reading lists in elementary school and high school, and some of the problems that would have to be addressed.

Indeed, to get Kindles in the hand of 5th graders, we’re going to have to think about battle hardening the devices (think a companies like Motorola Symbol Technologies or Panasonic’s Toughbook division stepping in to help) and having them owned by the schools, because unless the prices of these things drop to the point where the replacement costs are roughly equivalent to what it currently costs to outfit kids with textbooks and literature for a wear and tear lifetime of 3 to 5 years, it’s going to be a non-starter — kids are going to lose these things and destroy them.

This of course, is assuming your kids don’t go to a school district where textbooks are 30 years old because of budgetary issues.

Also Read: OLPC is dead… What Kindlenomics taught us

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Wi-Fi connection with Ebook reader

The Kindle ebook reader is sold by Amazon for $359. The electronic book reader offers a free Wi-Fi connection. Kindle can hold over 200 books.

Oprah Winfrey has recommended the Amazon Kindle ebook reader. She says the wireless device is life changing. The book gadget offers instant access to over 190,000 books, blogs, newspapers, and magazines.

The Amazon Kindle ebook reader was featured on NewsOXY's latest computer technology Web site on Friday. At first glance, I thought the $359 price was a bit steep. However, after further review, the electronic book reader does offer many features.

Kindle comes with a free Wi-Fi connection. The ebook reader offers instant access to over 190,000 books, blogs, newspapers, and magazines. Here's more information from the article:"The ebook reader is sold by Amazon.com for a price of $359. The electronic book reader features free WiFi connection. Users can connect using the Wi-Fi connection to preview or purchase electronic books. Book titles can be auto-delivered in less than one minute."Moreover, Kindle has a high-resolution digital display that is easy to read. Kindle comes with a power adapter and a USB 2.0 cable to plug into other devices. I was also surprised that it offered a cheaper rate ($9.99) for online magazines. It's worth a look. The article has more information on the page.

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

We need broadband connectivity with ebooks

The focus on sales of eBook readers is misleading, because the first challenge is to change the book itself, so that it delivers far more value than the paper edition with which we are familiar.

Kindle sales, which is estimated are approximately 160,000 units as of this writing, are a great indication that people do want an alternative to hauling a pile of books or to reading on a PC. BeBooks has sold 30,000 of its reader devices—people want this option.
However, we are at precisely the same stage in the digital book reader device market as when Audible saw the first challengers to its portable digital audio player emerge, in 1998. Music had not changed—that is, it hadn’t been unbundled from the concept of an “album”—and did not change until the iPod appeared.

Amazon’s Kindle, which I have used extensively, remains the most impressive device based on price and functionality, in my opinion. The Sony Reader needs broadband connectivity and substantially improved navigation and note-taking ability in order to keep up with Kindle. The iRex Reader 2nd Edition, a $699 Linux-based reader with Wacom pen technology, is really impressive, but way to expensive to be a viable competitor in a world where readers of this blog want a device that is $99 or less. New flexible display technology from Plastic Logic promises good things, too, however the main problem remains not how to display text, rather it is how to link different versions of the same text together for use across devices, because what we call “books” today are now available in many different contexts and interfaces. (from Mitch Ratcliffe

)

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - PHONEREADER Libray - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Sony's ebook reader and outside publishers

Sony opens e-book reader to outside publishers

Posted by Elinor Mills

Sony announced on Thursday that its Reader Digital Book will be able to read electronic books published using the .epub format that many of the largest book publishers are using.

Until now, Sony's e-book reader could only read books available from the Sony e-book store, PDF documents, and DRM-free text. Starting next month, the new PRS-505 Sony Reader model will be able to access secure DRM- and non-DRM-protected content in the .epub format, formerly called the Open eBook format. (Here's a review of the device.)

The Sony Reader Digital Book is the first e-book reading device to support the .epub format, which is the XML-based standard format proposed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. It allows publishers to convert books to different formats, protect the copy using DRM (digital rights management) and has the ability to resize PDF e-books and other text to better fit the reader's screen size.

Publishers including Harper Collins, Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin are offering texts in the .epub format. (Simon & Schuster is owned by CBS. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)

"This upgrade opens the door to a whole host of paid and free content from third-party eBook stores, Web sites, and even public libraries," Steve Haber, senior vice president of consumer product marketing for Sony Electronics, said in a statement.
The announcement is the latest move in a standards war over e-book formats pitting Sony against Amazon. Amazon's Kindle e-book reader and e-books it sells support the proprietary .azw format. Amazon also acquired Mobipocket, which offers a format for texts read on PDAs and BlackBerrys and its Kindle can read DRM-free .mobi files.

Amazon has a much larger selection of e-book titles than Sony's store has. Meanwhile, Sony's reader is priced less ($360 versus $300) than the Kindle.

Sony also offers a BBeB (BroadBand eBook) proprietary DRM-encrypted format for the Sony Reader and PRS-505 Readers will continue to support BBeB formatted e-books.

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Get Free eReader eBook Application with iPhone

iPhone and iPod Touch


By Calvin Azuri
TMCnet Contributing Editor
Fictionwise, Inc. today announced the availability of its popular, free eReader eBook reading application for the Apple (News - Alert) iPhone and iPod Touch. Currently, users of the iPhone and iPod Touch can read almost 50,000 eBooks, including NY Times best sellers and titles from popular authors, large publishing houses, and fine independent publishers.



The eReader eBook application is the only one to support best selling eBooks on Apple devices. Some of the authors whose works are available include Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Crichton, Ann Rice, James Patterson, and Harlequin Romance.

The eReader application is available as a free download once the Apple devices are upgraded to the 2.0 operating system through iTunes 7.7. The Apple iPhone (News - Alert) 3G, which was recently released, is pre-installed with the 2.0 operating system. This means that eReader can be immediately downloaded to the new iPhone without the need for an upgrade. eReader can be found in the reference section of the Apple on-device application store or with a search for the keyword "ereader."

"The Apple iPhone and iPod touch devices make killer eBook reading platforms," stated Steve Pendergrast, co-founder of Fictionwise, Inc. "They have large screens compared to most PDAs, and those screens are sharp and clear. Battery life is solid at 6 to 8 hours, enough for reading nonstop on a typical coast to coast flight, for example. Wireless connectivity makes uploading eBook content a breeze."

The eReader application is available on more than 300 different handheld devices, and the iPhone and iPod Touch devices are expected to be among the most popular for reading eBooks. This is because the screen quality on the iPhone and iPod Touch is crisper, clearer, higher contrast, and includes a built-in backlight for easy reading in low light situations. They feature small form factors that fit easily into a shirt pocket and can be used for many purposes beyond reading eBooks. The touch screen interface renders it more natural and easier to use than a number of higher-priced dedicated reading devices.

"The value proposition for reading eBooks on the iPhone and iPod touch is far more compelling than the dedicated eBook reading devices," remarked Scott Pendergrast, co-founder of Fictionwise, Inc. "With eReader, your purchased content is not locked in to a single vendor's hardware. We have customers who bought eReader books eight or even ten years ago for other devices who are today reading those same eBooks on their iPhone or iPod touch without having to repurchase them in a new format. Our system protects our customer's investment in eBook content."

Calvin Azuri is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Calvin’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Textbooks via Ebooks for universities

With the announcement that universities in the US are looking to distribute textbooks via e-books rather than the tower of paper we were all used to, is it time for the e-book to make its way into the mainstream?

But who are the runners and riders, what does the future hold, and it is the end of the paperback as we know it? Let's quickly look at what an e-book is before we go on to see which e-books are leading the pack in the market. All the devices here use a technology called E Ink. E Ink is a type of electronic paper manufactured by E Ink Corporation.

Basically electronic ink displays are made up of millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair. Each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule to become visible to the reader. This makes the surface appear white at that spot.

At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that spot. To form an E Ink electronic display, the ink is printed onto a sheet of plastic film that is laminated to a layer of circuitry. The circuitry forms a pattern of pixels that can then be controlled by a display driver. This in the real world means a number of things, but most importantly that you don't get the glare normally associated with LCD displays, and additionally battery power is only needed to change the microcapsules on the display you can achieve greater battery efficiency.

So what are the players (or should I say readers) in the market?

The Sony Reader Digital Book .

The iRex iLiad reader

The Bookeen Cybook Gen3

The Kindle

The Readius

The HP e-book reader

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

F-Origin, which closed a $5 million third round of capital a few months ago, sees eBook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle as a natural market for its touchscreen technology, which provides tactile user feedback.

But the company already has orders from a mobile phone company, a firm making touchscreen picture frames, and a point-of-service kiosk product maker. CEO Joe Carsanaro is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded venture-backed Bloodhound Software. “I started Bloodhound in my closet in France,” Carsanaro tells TechJournal South. “I got it going and on my first trip back to the United States I came to give a pitch at a venture conference, and got two term sheets.” RTP-based Bloodhound sells software for claims overpayment protection services for health care payers. F-Origin evolved from another of Carsanaro’s previous gigs. As general manager of a Motorola phone business, he was asked to start a group to develop innovative products in the messaging space. A company that wanted to sell its touchscreen phones to Motorola approached the new group. “I didn’t like the phone per se, but liked the technology,” Carsanaro says. When the company failed, he joined several other investors to buy its software and licensing rights to its patents. They include patents on motion (gesture) control of devices, haptics (touch feedback) and innovative touchscreens. The 10-employee company wants a chunk of the estimated $2.6 billion touchscreen market.

Carsanaro says F-Origin’s HaptiTouch products not only provide pressure-sensing touch feedback, they also have good light and low power consumption, he says. “They have the ability to drive the user interface via a finger, a stylus, or a pen,” he says. That means that medical professionals could use a device equipped with the technology while wearing gloves. Its touchpads can be programmed to provide different responses depending on touch force, and the touch sensitive area can be any shape. HaptiTouch supports devices of all kinds, and displays ranging from small mobile phones to screens as large as 15 inches. Its customizable API can be implemented with multiple operating systems. In a previous interview, Carsanaro noted that while portable devices are becoming very sophisticated, that means users have to navigate a bewildering plethora of multi-function buttons. “The result is function fatigue syndrome,” he says.

The company introduced its first product in the third quarter of 2007 and expects to ramp up sales in the third and fourth quarters this year. Carsanaro says the company will likely increase its staff up to 15 to 17 in a year.

On the Web: http://www.f-origin.com/

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Dual Display

It's no surprise that more displays is always better, but when it comes to mimicking the act of reading a book, dual displays is a clear step forward. Researchers at Maryland and Berkeley Universities developed a prototype dual-face, modular e-book reader that allows readers to fan pages to advance in a book or via trackball. If you're doing some serious research, the displays separate from one another, allowing one to display in landscape mode while the other runs in portrait. To complete the book meme, the device can be folded over to run in a more compact manner, and a simple flip changes the page. Possibilities for future e-book readers are endless here, so we applaud Maryland and Berkeley for using those research dollars.

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Ebook market

Select O'Reilly Books Soon on Kindle, and as Digital Ebook Bundles



Update: On his New York Times blog, David Pogue has noted O'Reilly's pilot in the context of the recent discussion prompted his column on ebooks and piracy (which brought insightful responses from Adam Engst and Mike Masnick, along with a follow up from David).



Ebooks are certainly nothing new for us at O'Reilly. We've offered PDFs of hundreds of our titles for some time now, and as noted here before on Radar, until quite recently Safari Books Online (our online-publishing joint venture with Pearson) generated more revenue than was typically associated with the entire downloadable ebook business.



But it's clear that things are changing in the ebook market (though precise numbers are proving hard to come by), so we've decided to officially announce two new e-publishing programs that have been in the works for some time:



First, through oreilly.com we will soon offer a select number of books as a bundle of three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single price -- at or below the book's cover price -- starting in early July. Since we began selling PDFs directly some time ago, we've given those customers free updates to the PDFs to reflect published changes in the books; the same will apply to the ebook bundle, which will replace the PDF option on those titles. That also means that although the ebooks aren't yet available, if you buy the PDF now, you'll receive the EPUB and Mobipocket versions as a free update once they're available in early July. These files (like all our PDFs currently for sale) will be released without any DRM, though we are exploring some custom watermarking options. With these three formats, customers should be able to read the books with most current ebook software and devices, including Adobe Digital Editions, Kindle, Blackberries, and Sony Reader (Sony announced in May that EPUB support is forthcoming in a firmware update for their Reader).


Second, O'Reilly has agreed to sell select ebooks for the Kindle through Amazon. We hope to see those ebooks available for sale through the Kindle store in the near future.
Full details over on the TOC blog.

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Books as dead things

The Guardian,
Tuesday June 17, 2008

"Books," John Milton observed nearly 400 years ago, "are not absolutely dead things." What he would make of the new lease of life they are taking on now can only be guessed at. They are starting to migrate in earnest to electronic reading devices, and the interesting thing is that early adopters are surprised at what an agreeable experience it is. So-called "ebooks", such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony eBook and the iLiad, enable you to read on a device lighter than a paperback but with electronic ink. The ebook can be read comfortably in almost any light conditions, including on beaches. It has no need for a backlit screen that fades away at inopportune moments.

In important ways they are better than traditional books: they save paper and can be reproduced at low cost; users can increase the type size and read while eating, using a finger as a page-turner; hundreds of books can be downloaded from the web. On the downside, they are expensive, difficult to lend, easier to steal and could be destined for oblivion if formats change in the future.

More worryingly, as with so many innovations, manufacturers try to build a walled garden around their products in the hope that they will become the standard for the world. Thus Sony's impressive eBook offers the books Sony wants to sell (without internet access so far) and Kindle, which has been well received despite problems with some screens, aims to sell books that Amazon stocks. That is an extremely large library, and already ebooks account for 6% of Amazon sales of books with dual formats. Both of these ebooks are only sold in the US at the moment. The main European competitor, the iLiad, is based on open source software (built by volunteers) and has web access, but is more complicated to operate than the others. Users can download anything from the vast free library of Project Gutenberg on the web.

It would be nice to think that ebooks will avoid the format wars between the likes of Apple and Microsoft that have dogged the development of digital music players, but that seems unlikely. An ebook without a proprietary walled garden would offer the best opportunity for books, not least because it could provide an outlet not just for mainstream works but also for self-published books. This would create an online marketplace in which they could be sampled and voted on by peer groups, as digitised music is. This doesn't mean that the writing is on the wall for the traditional book. Its texture and the ease with which it can be browsed makes it almost perfect for purpose. But in future books will have to welcome a new member to the family with which they will share more similarities than differences.


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Browers and ebooks

Newton ebook reader for Mozilla now supports newest builds
By Erik Kennedy Published: June 15, 2008 - 09:19AM CT

Are you burned out on iPhone 3G news following the whirlwind events of the past week? How about a little old-school portable computational device news instead, then?
The developers behind the Newton Book Reader Mozilla extension released version 0.3.6 this week, which brings compatibility with the most recent versions of Firefox and Mozilla. The update builds on the 0.3.5 release, which fixed several bugs and laid the path for compatibility with newer versions of the Mozilla-based family of browsers.

A Newton Book, for those of you who aren't me, is an open format for PDA-based text, supporting Unicode, hypertext, and character styles. Despite the discontinuation of its primary user platform over ten years ago (NEVER FORGET), the Newton Book format is still in use today. A number of titles can, not coincidentally, be found at Newton's Library, or of course you could delve into your personal collection...what?

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Endless ideas and Bebook

The latest ebook reader to market is called the BeBook and it prices around $400.

The BeBook is produced by a company named Endless Ideas. The device sports a six-inch screen and makes use of special E-ink technology so you can read on-screen contents in bright daylight. The BeBook has an internal rechargeable battery which lets you get an estimated 7,000 page turns of an on-screen book, which is plenty for most travels.

Other features of the BeBook include internal memory for book storage which can be increased via SD memory cards, support for a variety of related digital document formats such as .doc and .pdf, and USB connectivity. It should be available for purchase now.

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Worm operates

An adware package has turned up on the latest e-book devices from iRex, and will install itself automatically onto a connected PC if it gets the chance.

The infection appears to be the imgInSOY worm, which copies itself between removable media and uses autorun.inf to infect any Windows system it comes across. In addition to copying itself onto any more removable devices the worm operates as adware.

The Iliad is a Linux-based e-ink device which synchronises with a desktop PC to download books or other documents the user wants to read, as well as uploading sketches or annotations the user has made to existing documents. But when connected over USB the device also appears as a removable drive, and that's when the infection can occur.
iRex has sent out emails to everyone who's recently purchased an Iliad with instructions on identifying and removing the adware from the device, along with a recommendation to run some anti-virus software on their desktop PC (if they're running Windows). The company tells us the infection has been traced to a factory worker in the Philippines, where the Iliad is manufactured, who used a USB key to transfer documents between work and home.
The Iliad is one of the more technically-advanced e-ink devices, with Wi-Fi networking and an open OS, but the infection is a major embarrassment to the company. It does demonstrate that no matter how strong the firewall, there are many ways to get a dose of malware.

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New Kindle Magazine

PopMatters.com, the independent arts and culture site on the Web, has joined with Tribune Media Services (TMS) to launch a new Amazon Kindle magazine under the PopMatters brand.

PopMatters Kindle Edition features a daily dose of features, columns, reviews, interviews, and blogs, covering all things pop culture, present and past, including music and its makers, film and its creators, books and their authors, video games, comics, and more. PopMatters Kindle Edition is currently available on a 14-day free trial and subscription basis on Amazon. TMS, the content syndication and licensing subsidiary of Chicago-based Tribune Company, distributes the magazine but has no editorial role.

"PopMatters is dedicated to bringing the best popular culture commentary to the world on the Web, in print through our new book series, and now on the innovative Amazon Kindle eBook platform," said PopMatters founder, Sarah Zupko. "Kindle is a perfect platform for our hip, urban, intellectual readership, which will enjoy Kindle's easy, portable access to our content."
Since 1999, PopMatters has been providing smart readers with sharp, entertaining writing on a wide range of topics in pop culture, offering a refuge from the usual hype and gossip. PopMatters has become one of the Web's foremost cultural sources and tastemakers, especially within the highly desirable 18-34 demographic. Content on the PopMatters.com Web site and PopMatters Kindle Edition is updated daily, Monday through Friday. A subscription to PopMatters Kindle Edition is available on Amazon for $1.49 a month.

About PopMatters

Founded in 1999 by Sarah Zupko, PopMatters, the #1 independent pop culture site on the web, is an international online magazine of art and culture that is dedicated to documenting our times and promoting cultural understanding. PopMatters is listed as one of Entertainment Weekly's favorite pop culture sites -- "Impressively comprehensive overview of music, books, movies, and more ..." Music critic Jim DeRogatis has said that "writing as thought-provoking, engaging, insightful, witty, and just plain ol' fun as much of the fare on PopMatters is a rare and wonderful thing, and it should be treasured." Notable members of the mainstream broadcast media such as the BBC, NPR, MSNBC, Radio Australia, and VH1, call upon many PopMatters writers for its opinions. Web publications such as USA Today.com, Alternet.org, and Movies.com regularly pick up links to PopMatters articles and post quotes from PopMatters writers.

About Tribune Media Services

Tribune Media Services (TMS) is a leading domestic and international provider of information and entertainment products for print, electronic and on-air media. It distributes television and movie listings and related editorial content under the TMS and Zap2it brands; syndicates and licenses comics, features and opinion columns; creates and syndicates a variety of online information products; licenses editorial content from national periodicals; and manages national advertising networks. Through its partnership with the McClatchy Company, TMS also markets news, photos, graphics and multimedia content to media clients worldwide through the McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT). Headquartered in Chicago, with offices in Los Angeles, Glens Falls, N.Y., Dallas, Milwaukee, Amsterdam, London, Amman (Jordan) and Hong Kong, TMS is a subsidiary of Tribune Company. For more information about TMS and its products and services, visit tms.tribune.com.

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Cybook vs Kindle

The popular Cybook eBook reader arrived today and we are shipping again" said Bob LiVolsi, President of BooksOnBoard (http://www.booksonboard.com/), the online eBook and audio book retailer.

BooksOnBoard remains the exclusive retailer of Cybooks for the US and Canada, although a buying club also exists for the US. "The good news and bad news is that we cannot keep them in stock" said LiVolsi, "Our Cybooks have consistently sold out within a week of their arrival here. Bookeen, the Cybook manufacturer, is working hard to catch up with demand" LiVolsi attributes the success of the Cybook to two primary factors:

(1) It is considerably lighter than the competing Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader;

(2) It reads Mobipocket format eBooks which are available from many eBook retailers and in which many customers have substantial libraries;

(3) The ease of loading eBooks made possible by Bookeen’s partnership with Mobipocket, a subsidiary of Amazon; (4) BooksOnBoard’s loyal customer base which has come to value the company’s responsive eBook support team.

The Cybook reads Mobipocket eBooks, both DRM and non-DRM. BooksOnBoard (http://www.booksonboard.com/), with possibly the largest eBook selection in the industry, carries the Mobipocket format ebooks from Mobipocket/Amazon, all of which can be read by the Cybook. BooksOnBoard offers almost 200,000 eBook and audio book titles in all major genres including romance, paranormal romance, thrillers, mysteries, romantic mysteries, biography and more.

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Electronic ink display

A concept active matrix electronic ink display called blueChute has been revealed by an employee of E Ink. The expected features include a microSD card slot, LPC2148 ARM 7 host processor, 8Track display controller board, bluetooth, hybrid frame scanner and short animation sequences.

Quoted from the source, "It is built from two thin layers of aluminum sandwiching an acrylic core. At just over 5mm thick, it is thinner than an ipod nano. About as thick as a stack of three US quarters, as shown below. Power is from four 2.6mm thick lithium polymer cells which have a combined capacity of 1360mAh. If the software does good power management this should be able to give a pretty long life."

More pictures and information can be found here.

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