iPad textbook publisher Inkling is partnering with college bookstore provider Follett. Starting this fall, Follett will sell “hundreds of Inkling titles” in its over 900 college bookstores — including Stanford and UC Berkeley — and on its website.
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World’s first flexible e-paper display heads into mass production | BGR
LG on Thursday unveiled the world’s first plastic e-paper display, which the company claims will “revolutionize the E-Book market.” The 6-inch E Ink display features 1,024 x 768-pixel resolution and can bend at an angle of up to 40 degrees. “With the world’s first plastic EPD, LG Display has once again proven its reputation for leadership and innovation with a product we believe will help greatly popularize the E-Book market,” said Mr. Sang Duck Yeo, Head of Operations for LG Display’s Mobile/OLED division. “Based on our success in mass-producing plastic EPD, we are excited as we look toward applying concepts from this experience to future developments like plastic OLED and flexible displays.” The display will be supplied to manufacturing companies in China first, and end-user products could launch in Europe as soon as the beginning of next month. Read on for LG’s press release.
“With the Fire, as with its its whizzy-gizmo predecessors, the iPad and the Nook Color, we are seeing the e-book begin to assume its true aesthetic, which would seem to be far closer to the aesthetic of the web than to that of the printed page: text embedded in a welter of functions and features, a symphony of intrusive beeps. Even the more restrained Kindle Touch, also introduced today, comes with a feature called X-Ray that seems designed to ensure that a book’s words never gain too tight a grip over a reader’s consciousness: “With a single tap, readers can see all the passages across a book that mention ideas, fictional characters, historical figures, places or topics that interest them, as well as more detailed descriptions from Wikipedia and Shelfari, Amazon’s community-powered encyclopedia for book lovers.” The original Kindle, now discounted to $79, is beginning to look like a dusty relic - something for the rocking-chair set.”
Amazon Kindle can now check out e-books from 11,000 libraries - CSMonitor.com
Kindle users can now check out e-books from 11,000 community libraries across the country, Amazon announced today. The process is a simple one: Navigate to the website of your local library, enter your library card number, select a title, click “Send to Kindle,” and plug in your Amazon.com information. Your book can then be transmitted wirelessly or via USB – any gadget with Amazon software will do, including an iPhone or Android handset.
The availability of the e-books will vary from library to library, but most titles should be available on your Kindle for about two weeks. After that, they’ll disappear. In a press release, Amazon exec Jay Marine called libraries a “critical part of our communities,” and framed the initiative as the natural next step for library lending.
“We’re even doing a little extra here – normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no,” Marine said. “But we’re fixing this by extending our Whispersync technology to library books, so your notes, highlights and bookmarks are always backed up and available the next time you check out the book or if you decide to buy the book.”
InTech, Open Access publisher in the fields of science, technology and medicine has just published three books written by and for specialists in the field of Wireless Sensor Networks.
Wireless Sensor Networks: Application-Centric Design
Recognizing that most work in the WSN domain is highly application-specific, this book is a collection of state-of-the-art research papers offering a broad array of often differing interpretations regarding the configuration and limitations of WSNs.
You can download the book here.
Smart Wireless Sensor Networks
An overview of aspects of designing smart wireless sensor networks, including: design methodologies, network protocols and algorithms, quality of service management, coverage optimization, time synchronization and security techniques for sensor networks.
You can download the book here.
Sustainable Wireless Sensor Networks
This book deals with research efforts aimed at maximizing the lifetime of WSNs. It provides a snapshot of research into wireless sensor networks, giving both a high level overview as well as detailed discussion on specific areas.
You can download the book here.
The World’s First Solar Powered E-Book Reader eReaders are popping up these days like dandelions on an un-mowed lawn, and truthfully it’s hard to sing the praises of their individuality. But Toshiba has decided to give their next gadget a green twist by announcing that their new eReader, the Biblio Leaf, will be solar powered.
KDDI, a Japanese telecommunications company, will start offering the Biblio Leaf with a $20 per month 3G contract in the near future. For the time being, the Biblio Leaf looks only to be available in Japan.
According to their forecasts, about two percent of total mobile network traffic was used for wireless machine-to-machine communications in 2010, thanks to a 46 percent increase in the number of M2M subscribers. I bet the recent bump in sales of Amazon’s Kindle device has to have helped. In the next five years, the total number of wireless M2M connections is forecasted to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.0 percent, to reach 294.1 million connections in 2015. By then, M2M as a share of the total number of cellular connections is projected to reach 4.0 percent. “In Q1-2011, we expect that AT&T will become the first mobile operator to reach 10 million M2M subscribers after more than doubling the installed base in the past 12 months, largely thanks to a successful strategy for connected consumer electronics devices,” said Tobias Ryberg, senior analyst at Berg Insight. (read the rest on GigaOM)
Not a week goes by when we don’t hear about some new device with built-in mobile connectivity. It seems we are all heading towards an Internet of things at a rapid speed. Clues to this connected device future comes from the data collected by Swedish research group, Berg Insight. Ericsson CEO recently predicted there will be 50 billion connected devices by 2020.
As students cut costs by buying books from cheaper online retailers or by downloading e-textbooks, campus bookstores sell fewer and fewer textbooks. That’s triggering an identity crisis for one of the oldest institutions on campus and leading some college officials to ask: If textbooks go digital, does the campus even need a bookstore?
“Book sales are declining—they’re down tremendously this year,” says DeAnn Hazey, executive director of the National Association of College Stores Foundation. “The college stores have to find other ways and other categories” to make money, she says, “otherwise they won’t survive.”
So bookstores at many colleges are preparing for a bookless future with new services they hope will keep students coming: performance spaces for in-store concerts, multimedia stations for printing digital photos, and even dry cleaning. Most store managers I talked with hoped to drop the word “book” from the sign out front.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s book. Watch global design and innovation consultancy IDEO’s vision for the future of the book. What new experiences might be created by linking diverse discussions, what additional value could be created by connected readers to one another, and what innovative ways we might use to tell our favorite stories and build community around books?
I rarely make predictions about the tech business, but here goes: Before the holidays, Amazon will cut the price of the Wi-Fi Kindle to $99, and the 3G version will go for $150 or less. Amazon will do so, I think, not only to sell a lot of Kindles but also to cement its online store as the iTunes for books—the dominant force in the publishing business for the foreseeable future. A $99 price tag will make the Kindle the hottest gift of the season—much cheaper than the $499 iPad, more useful than an Xbox Kinect, and a lot more fun than a cable-knit sweater.
