A month has passed and I don’t have any more solid evidence than before, so I can’t yet prove this rumor true. But I have had the new Kobo Aura HD on my desk for this past week and it has convinced me that I was correct.

This ereader was not the planned device that Kobo would claim. Instead the design and build quality suggests that timing was more important than quality.

I can point out many flaws about Kobo, but one thing they have always gotten correct is that Kobo has hired Ideo to design the Kobo hardware. This firm has been working with Kobo since the very beginning, and Ideo is the reason that all Kobo hardware (except for the Aura HD) has a quilted backside, a rubberized shell, and a generally aesthetically pleasing appearance.

The Aura HD, on the other hand, feels and looks like the shell was made from cheap plastic. Instead of the quilted backside, this ereader has a funky weird double ridged backside that I am still trying to understand. It is clearly inferior in design and materials, and I think that is a telling clue in support of the rumor.

I think the Aura HD’s hardware design was originally intended to be a reference design from Netronix. This was going to be one of the designs displayed on the Netronix website which could be ordered by companies that wanted to put their own brand on it.

That is pretty much what Kobo ended up doing, but I don’t think it was what Kobo had planned to do.

I think the only reason Kobo used this hardware design for the Aura HD is that they were surprised by B&N passing on the early production run of the 6.8″ screen. I think Kobo was planning to release a new ereader this Fall, but the sudden opportunity to get ahead of the marker was too good to pass up.

Kobo needed something they could get on the market ASAP so they could take advantage of the early production run of the 6.8″ screen, and this design was the best they could do given the time constraints.

That ties in well with the rumor, doesn’t it? I honestly think the rumor is now more plausible than the claim that Kobo had always intended to release an ereader this Spring.

But the rumor could still be wrong, and I am keeping an eye on a couple events that could prove it wrong. If Nook Media releases a new ereader in the next month then that event will disprove the rumor. I am not expecting that to happen but it could.

But one event that I am expecting is for Kobo to launch new hardware this Fall. One of the new devices is probably going to have a 6.8″ screen. That device is going to the designed by Ideo, and it will largely have the same specs as the Aura HD.

After all, the Aura HD is supposed to be a limited edition, right? That means it could be replaced later this year by a new model.

It’s going to be an interesting year, no?

The post A Week With the Kobo Aura HD Has Convinced Me That The Nook Glow HD Rumors Were True appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

Engadget reported this morning that the Kindle Keyboard 3G model was out of stock at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. Normally I wouldn’t have paid attention to the story (Target hasn’t carried the Kindle since last year), but I double checked the reports and it looks like Engadget was half right.

It’s not just the 3G model that is out of stock; I think Amazon has quietly discontinued all Kindle Keyboard models. Both the 3G and the Wifi models of the Kindle Keyboard are out of stock at Amazon.com, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and Staples. But that’s not all; I can’t find any  Kindle Keyboard models in stock on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, or Amazon.fr.

I’m still waiting for official confirmation from Amazon but the current stock situation presents a pretty clear picture. This ereader has been discontinued, or at the very least it looks like Amazon has stopped making them.

Update: I have an early response from one reader who was told by Kindle CS that the Kindle Keyboard has been discontinued:

I understand your concern that you love the Kindle Keyboard device and I’m sorry to inform you that our company does not manufacture the old Kindle devices due to the in demand of the newer version of Kindle devices. I’m so sorry for the disappointment caused.

Amazon initially launched the Kindle Keyboard in August 2010 as a replacement for the K2, which was launched in early 2009. The KK followed the the same design as its predecessors, and it had a 6″ E-ink screen, 4GB of storage, speakers, and a keyboard.

Amazon launched more Kindle models in 2011 and again in 2012, but for some reason known only to Amazon they kept the KK around. Amazon even pushed out updates for this ereader which gave it support for the latest features of KF8. Many owners appreciated that Amazon kept it around, because after Amazon replaced the Kindle Touch with the Kindle Paperwhite, the KK was the only Kindle model that was equipped with text to speech.

I thought Amazon had kept the KK around because it filled a different product niche than the basic Kindle and the KT/KPW, and now that the KK is gone I have to wonder what will replace it.

While it is possible that Amazon killed off the KK simply because it wasn’t selling well anymore, there is also a chance that Amazon is going to replace this ereader with an updated model. We could soon see a KK with a 6″ HD E-ink screen, or possibly even the 6.8″ screen that is currently used by the Kobo Aura HD.

On the other hand, I checked the FCC and there were no new filings that might possibly belong to Amazon.  So perhaps the KK was simply discontinued.

I am waiting to hear from Amazon, and I plan to update this post if I do.

The post Did Amazon Kill Off the Kindle Keyboard? appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

The Wingo promises to rescue Kindle owners from the torture holding an ereader. This case is equipped with a kickstand and a pair of wings that are designed to keep your hands in the right position to hold the Kindle. And like most other cases, the Wingo also makes the Kindle thicker and thus easier to hold.

Here are some shots of the prototype:

When I first read about this case I snickered. The Wingo strikes me as a clunky and expensive way to solve an ergonomics problem that affects only a few users and which can usually be solved for half the $50 price tag of the Wingo.

But then I read some more and I watched the video, and I realized that the Wingo case marks a turning point in the history of the ereader. Not only have ereaders gone mainstream, they are now fodder for late-night infomercials. Check out the Kickstarter demo video, and I think you will agree:

Seriously, doesn’t the first few minutes remind you of the “As Seen on TV” brand of products? I think so.

Seriously, though. While some users do have a real problem with the ergonomics of handheld devices, I think the Wingo represents a costly and over-engineered solution to the problem. Pretty much any case will add the thickness needed to make an ereader easier to hold.

And before anyone leaves a comment saying I am too young to understand the issue, let me add that I have an incipient case of carpal tunnel in my right wrist. It hasn’t bothered me much in the past few years because I’m careful, but I am well aware of the issues involved in gripping handheld devices and how the strain can affect your hand.

I just don’t think this Wingo case is the best solution.

KickStarter

source

The post The Wingo Ergonomic Kindle Case is an Escapee From a Late-Night Infomercial appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

I still haven’t had a chance to get my hands on the new digital writing slate that Sony announced a few days ago, but I did get an email this morning from a contact in Japan. He spent a few minutes with the writing slate yesterday, and he was impressed.

He thought the tablet itself was very light, and he liked the fact that Sony gave the tablet 2 touchscreen technologies (IR and pen-based electromagnetic induction). He reported being able to write notes on one part of the screen while flipping pages on another section of the screen. My source also noted that the touchscreen was “smart enough to ignore your palm when you place it on the screen when you do handwriting”.

My source didn’t have time to shoot a video, so here is a report from DigInfo.tv. There’s not much in the way of user reports on how well the slate works but the video does confirm a number of features.

This writing slate is scheduled to enter a pilot program at 3 Japanese universities this Fall.  There’s no solid info yet on when this slate will ever see a commercial release or what it will cost, but I’m sure Sony is working on that as we speak.

The post Early User Reports Say that Sony’s New Writing Slate is Lightweight & Well-Designed (video) appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

Yes, links.

Apparently Apple has moved beyond censoring content they don’t approve of. Now they are blocking the sale of ebooks that merely link to content that Apple doesn’t approve of. Admittedly, the links lead to a couple porn sites , but that doesn’t change the fact that Apple is once again banning an ebook because of links.

Edit: I was reminded on Twitter that Apple had previously blocked an ebook because it linked to and mentioned Amazon. Apple had backed down from that position, and it had slipped my mind.

The author initially reported the news on Facebook, and she also tweeted a screenshot of the email she received:

De hartsvriendin wordt door App Store geweigerd. Een tekst op pagina 282 moet worden verwijderd, anders komt De hartsvriendin de App Store niet in. Vergeet het maar, Apple, ik laat me niet censureren. Sterker nog, ik heb mijn advocaat al gebeld en overweeg juridische stappen.

And the screenshot:

Do you want to know what makes this truly ridiculous? It’s not just that Apple is banning links; that is merely absurd. This incident achieves a new standard of ridiculousness because Apple is also selling ebooks like 50 Shades of Grey, a book which is arguably the next best thing to text-based porn.

I think this could be taken as a sign that Apple is trying to penalize not the porn so much as the images of porn. This would also explain why Izneo was threatened last month and forced to remove 40% of their catalog.

Perhaps Apple is merely trying to pursue a higher class of readers?

This would explain why Apple accepts porno podcasts and audiobooks; they only want to sell ebook erotica to people who can use their imagination. There’s also a chance that Apple is hoping to segregate porn viewers in the Video section of iTunes where you can find content like Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Shameless, or many other explicit shows.

What do you think?

The post Apple is Now Banning eBooks Over Links appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

Here are a few stories to read this morning.

• Children turn away from books in favour of reading electronically – Education News (The Independent)
• Don’t Look Now But AOL Sold Off Its Industry News Sites (Forbes)
• The elephant in the (court)room: Amazon and the Apple e-books case (Thomson Reuters)
• Maureen Johnson asks fans to give classic literature a modern ‘girly’ makeover (Mail Online)
• The Other Side of Amazon’s, Apple’s and Google’s Tax Evasion (by @baekdal)
• Publisher Threatens to Sue Blogger for $1-Billion (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Qantas to Flyers: Ditch Your Kindles, Read Our Custom Books (Advertising Age)
• Shifting Sands (The Business Rusch)
• Video in Kindle books, thanks to EPUB3 (Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis)

The post The Morning Coffee – 17 May 2013 appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

I read about this in The Bookseller:

The EIBF unveiled the study, commissioned from academics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, at its annual conference in Brussels today (16th May). The EIBF report has the support of European Commission vice-president Neelie Kroes, in charge of the Digital Agenda, with the EIBF using the conference to lobby politicians and call for “interoperable e-book formats and interoperable DRM schemes”.

The Federation produced the report following widespread concern that customers buying an e-book from one of the international e-book retailers such as Apple and Amazon, which operate closed ecosystems, “implicitly subscribe to this retailer as their sole future e-book supplier”. This threatens European book culture by stopping customers buying future e-books from privately owned, bricks and mortar, community retailers, the organisation said.

I can see 2 problems with this. First, the organization arguably has a bias in favor of open formats. That is not a complaint but it should be kept in mind. But more importantly, I can point to two practical examples of why proprietary ebook formats are sometimes a better alternative: KF8 and iBooks.

Amazon announced the KF8 format in October 2011 and released it in January 2012. Apple announced iBooks, which I would describe as Apple’s own proprietary version of Epub3, and launched it the same day.

Tell me, how is Epub3 adoption coming along in the major ebookstores?

That open source format was finalized in October 2011, but the only major ebookstore that currently supports it is Apple. I know that Sony supports some Epub3 features (but not all) in their ebookstore, and that Kobo is working on adopting Epub3 support. Nook didn’t  support the format in January, and I don’t think they have added support in the meantime.

So what we have here are 2 proprietary ebook formats which were launched pretty damn quickly and an open format that still hasn’t been fully adopted 20 months after it was finalized. Basically the fact that Epub3 hasn’t been widely adopted can be taken as an argument that it is technically difficult to implement. That would lead me to think that at least one conclusion from the report is simply not true:

Professors Christoph Blasi and Franz Rothlauf, who conducted the study, found there were no technical barriers to establishing EPUB 3 as an open e-book format standard, and therefore no functional reason for the continued use of proprietary e-book formats. Although the lack of reader applications able to display all EPUB 3 features remains a short-term obstacle, that will soon be resolved by the Readium initiative being developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), Blasi and Rothlauf found.

Could someone explain why there is “no functional reason for the continued use of proprietary e-book formats”? I think I just gave you a couple.

P.S. If someone can offer a good reason why I am wrong, I will buy that person dinner when I am in NYC for BEA 2012. In lieu of dinner I will pay $100 for a convincing argument.

The post New Report Reaches the Obvious (And Wrong) Conclusion: There’s No Technical Justification for Incompatible eBook Formats appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

CommaFeed is a free news reader service that is strictly browser based at the moment. As you can see from the following screenshot, it offers a clean and minimalist alternative to the more colorful Feedly.

Or at least it is supposed to offer a cleaner alternative to Feedly; I can’t get it to work with any consistency.

One of the nicer features of CommaFeed is that it will let you integrate your Google Reader account, which I did. Unfortunately, the service wasn’t really intended to work with an account that follows over 2k RSS feeds, and I keep managing to break it. But this is probably a problem that is unique to me, so the service is probably worth a look.

Here’s what the developer had to say:

When Google announced Reader shutdown, I started to work on a clone. It is now available. It’s simple, bloat-free, and it’s open-source. Say hello to CommaFeed.

CommaFeed currently has around 1,000 users (so said the developer in a tweet this morning), so this service probably isn’t a serious threat to Feedly with its millions upon millions of users. But this could be still be a good alternative for someone.

You can try it on the website, and if it fits your needs there are Firefox and Chrome plugins. CommaFeed is also open-source, so running your own version is also a possibility.

Please let me know what you think.

source

The post CommaFeed Offers a Clean, Simple, Open Source Alternative to Google Reader appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

Digitimes is sharing a trio of rumors today (here, here, here) that might tell us a lot about Microsoft’s next tablet. Naturally these rumors should be taken with a grain of salt, but I feel they have a good chance of being true.

According to Digitimes’ sources, the new MS Surface tablet is going to use a 7.9″ screen, possibly one made by Samsung. The sources report that LG Display and other firms aren’t yet e included in the panel supplier list for the new device. No screen resolution was mention in the rumor, which I would think was the most important detail.

This theoretical 8″ tablet is also rumored to cost between $250 and $300. The manufacturer is said to be Pegatron Technology, and the new Surface tablet is also rumored to be running on Nvidia’s Tegra CPU. That would fit with the specs of the full-sized 10.6″ Surface RT tablet, which is also using a Tegra CPU.

And last but not least, this tablet is rumored to launch in June. Microsoft is also rumored to be launching a new 10″ Surface tablet in the third quarter.

So are any of these rumors true? I don’t know, but I was expecting an 8″ Surface tablet, and the price and rumored specs are certainly not outside the realm of possibility. These rumors certainly could be true, even if only by accident.

One detail that I have noticed is that the blogosphere has shown relatively little interest in the 8″ Surface tablet. When rumors circulated that other tablets like the iPad or the Kindle Fire might be released in a new size, many tech blogs took a few minutes in Photoshop to make a mockup render showing the rumored tablet. That has not yet happened for the new 8″ Surface RT tablet.

If I were Microsoft, I would be worried. The lack of interest in the blogosphere equates to a lack of buzz, and that will affect sales.

The post Next-Gen Microsoft Surface Tablet Rumored to Cost $249, Have 8″ Screen appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

Earlier this week I learned that at least one of Shelfari’s members isn’t a person; it’s collection of computer programs and it has been quietly adding book details for some years now. But more importantly, that collection of computer programs is now adding details to ebooks because those ebooks are selling well in the Kindle Store.

Tell me, have you spent time on Shelfari? Members of that site probably already know this, but it was only this week that I learned that Shelfari will let you see the activity of active users. You can see the ebooks they have on their virtual bookshelves, comments, and you can even see the data that they have added to book descriptions.

Take this member, for example. The user X-Ray/Shelfari is credited with adding an incredible amount of information to various book descriptions, including:

• 900 thousand character names,
• 700 thousand location/settings,
• 491 thousand first sentences, and
• 4.8 million author and contributor entries.

And that’s just a tithe of what X-Ray has been doing.

Now, some might say that all this data was added by Shelfari employees, and that is true for some details, yes. The book summaries might have been written by a person, and I can certainly detect the presence of a real person signing off on some edits, but a lot of the edits were generated automatically. There’s the 2.7 million edits where duplicate book pages were combined, or the 3.3 million changes to the Dewey Decimal classifications of various books. While these edits might need the approval of a real person, it is a near certainty that they were suggested automatically.

And those aren’t the only book details that are added automatically.

I was tipped to this story by an author I know, Carmen Webster Buxton. She is a member of Shelfari, and a couple days ago she got an email notification that several dozen character details had been added to the listing of one of her books (scroll down). The details added to her book were all character names, without any other info or explanation, and they were all added in a single clump by the user X-Ray.

Now, Shelfari has been automatically adding details like this since at least 2010, so at first glance today’s news isn’t much in the way of news. But have you considered why this ebook was X-Rayed?

Carmen thinks, and I have to say that I agree, that this particular book was X-Rayed by Shelfari (that’s what we’re calling it) because it was seeing a fair amount of activity in the Kindle Store. Karen tells me that The Sixth Discipline has been downloaded 14 thousand times in May alone, and we are pretty sure that is what triggered the X-Ray.

Amazon is now using the sales data from the Kindle Store to select which KDP titles are X-Rayed by Shelfari. The Kindle Store is also lending a copy of the ebook so it can be X-Rayed, and the resulting data is then fed back into the Kindle Store so it can be used in the X-Ray feature which Amazon launched in late 2011 (that is what happened with Carmen’s book). This is now a closed loop whose only outside influences are sales stats from the Kindle Store.

There is a synergy here that is both obvious and elegant once it is explained, but it’s also an idea that only Amazon thought to implement. And that, in case you were wondering, is why they are winning the ebook market.

If you are an author who is selling ebooks through KDP, it might be a good idea to check to see if your more successful titles have been X-Rayed by Shelfari. There’s a good chance this has been going on for a while now, and you might want to check to make sure it didn’t make a mistake.

Has anyone encountered this X-Rayed by Shelfari feature?

The post One of Shelfari’s Most Active Members is a Computer Program, And It Loves KDP eBooks appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.