• Digital Longhand: 4 Handwriting Tips for Tablets (LitReactor)
• Dolphin Browser 10 for Android gets a makeover, emphasis on web apps (Liliputing)
• Enough with the news-reader apps – it’s time to support media that really matters (PandoDaily)
• Fun Tip of the Day: Google Authorship (The Kill Zone)
• Open access inaction (guardian.co.uk)
• Putting Freemium Marketing into Context (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• Rockmelt Launches Official Android App, Allows You To Browse Stuff On The Internet And Things (AP)
• Stop Submitting Manuscripts to Traditional Publishers (The New World of Publishing)

The post The Morning Coffee – 20 June 2013 appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

The Accidental Victim by James Reston Jr is a new and critical look at the events surrounding the assassination of JFK on that fateful day in 1963. It’s due out in September.

Also scheduled for September is Zola Books’ 2nd grand opening. While this ebookstore has been operating since summer 2012 and also had formally launched in October 2012, they decided that this event was important enough that they had to have it a second time.

They will also celebrate the 2nd grand opening with the second publication of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. This novel was published in digital form for the first time last October by Zola Books, who then removed it from the market so it could be republished in September of this year.

Zola Books got a lot of attention last year when they announced the ambitious goal of becoming a bigger ebookstore than the Kindle. Zola is planning to account for 1% of the US ebook market by the end of 2013, and in the next 5 to 10 years replace Amazon as the largest ebookstore. Currently they stock 50 thousand titles and have about 5 thousand registered users.

The post Leading eBookstore Zola Books is Now a Publisher appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

Penguin has just announced a new program called First to Read. According to the press release this is an “exciting new program that will grant readers free sneak peeks of some of Penguin’s most anticipated books – months before they are available in stores and online retailers”, but what we’re really looking at is Penguin’s latest marketing foray.

They are hoping to harness word-of-mouth advertising to build buzz for  their upcoming titles, only instead of using a service like NetGalley to get review copies into the hands of book bloggers First to Read is targeted at the average booklover.

“First to Read is a program created for all readers, providing exclusive, early access to our upcoming books. We know people love to talk about and recommend the books they’ve read and are reading, and to encourage that, we’ve integrated social sharing throughout the site,” said Suzie Sisoler, Sr. Director of Consumer Engagement.

The program is live now and it includes titles like Hotshot by Julie Garwood, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, Sister Mother Husband Dog by Delia Ephron, A Disloyal Prof by Pilar Lofos, The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee, and many more.

The ebooks are available in unproofed copies and are regrettably encumbered by Adobe DE DRM. Yes, Penguin has launched a program that implicitly assumes that the readers Penguin is trying to sweet talk are all thieving pirates.

And given how easy it is to remove DRM, there’s also the implied assumption that the readers participating in First to Read are too stupid to figure out how to remove the DRM that is stopping them from sharing the ebook.

Smart move, that.

P.S. This would normally be the spot where I would suggest using a less user-hostile form of DRM, say digital watermarks. But I already made that suggestion a few weeks ago in a post about HarperCollins’ new digital galley program and I don’t see a need to repeat myself.

The post Penguin Launches New Program to Get Early Copies of eBooks to Adoring Fans (AKA Thieving Pirates) appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

TBH, I  do not know whether that will happen.

This tablet is running Android 4.1 on a dual-core 1.5GHz CPU with 1GB of RAM, Wifi, HDMI out, and a pair of cameras – a front-facing VGA camera and a rear-facing 2MP camera. This  tablet ships with 8GB of Flash storage and a microSD card slot.

The screen measures 8″, and has a decent but not extraordinary screen resolution of 1024×768. That is a fairly common screen resolution for 8″ Android tablets these days, and you’ll even find the occasional Windows 8 tablet sporting a screen with those specs.

The Nextbook Premium 8HD will ship with Google play as well as a full suite of Google apps. It’s also going to ship with the Nook for Android app.

Rather than develop their own ebookstore, E-Fun has always partnered with one ebookstore or another. Their first partner was Borders, and then after that company imploded in 2011 E-Fun worked with Kobo and now B&N Nook Media. E-Fun has been shipping the Nook for Android app on their tablets for past least the past 7 months or so, and I would expect them to continue (unless Kobo outbids B&N for the privilege).

At first glance this looks like a decent tablet, with a screen, cameras, and CPU that would go on a tablet that cost $50 more. But as I drilled down into the specs I noticed that the battery life was rather limited. This tablet is specced as having a battery life of 5 hours, and that is rather limited. Given that the actual battery life is probably shorter I’m not sure this tablet is worth buying.

But if you do want to get it you can find it at Walmart for $99.

The post E-Fun Launches New “Premium” 8 Inch $99 Tablet appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

Feedly is pleased to remind us today they they are the heir apparent to Google Reader. Ostensibly today’s news is an announcement that Feedly’s servers are now completely independent of Google, but in all honesty that was revealed last week with the update of the Feedly app for iPad and iPhone.

The news Feedly would most like you to read about today is that they had 12 million registered users as of the end of May. Their userbase is now literally 3 times as large as it was the day before Google announced the Readerpocalypse. Feedly is now serving up over 25 million feeds and crunching through billions of articles and blog posts published everyday.

Those 25 million feeds are being read in a wide variety of apps, including a new browser-based reading app. Yes, Feedly has done away with the existing web browser plugins that users have come to dislike. This new Feedly Cloud is served up as a web page any time a registered user visits the Feedly website.

While this might appear to be a minor change in reality the new cloud app is going to result in a significant improvement in service. Now users won’t have to download and install plugins to get the latest updates; they’ll simply have to refresh the browser window. And that goes for any web browser, not just the ones which support the plugins.

Today’s announcement also includes news of Feedly’s first app developer partners, including several names that you might not expect. In addition to news reading apps, there’s also IFTTT, Sprout Social, and Pure News Widget:

• Nextgen Reader (for Windows 8 and Windows Phone)

• gNewsReader for BlackBerry 10 and for Symbian/MeeGo

• Press

• gReader

• Newsify

• Meneré

• IFTTT

• Sprout Social

• Pure News Widget

Adding IFTTT in the first group of partners was a particularly smart move; as you probably know that is a content redistribution service which lets users set up automated conversion functions which can output content to a wide variety of places. That in effect makes it a  multiplier of possible output options, not just a single app developer partner.

It was just over 2 months ago that Google broke my heart with the EOL of Google Reader, and Feedly has made great strides in adapting to support news junkies that have fled Google Reader, adding more servers to support the heavier load, and expanding their focus to include competing with Flipboard and other magazine style reading apps. In terms of sheer numbers, Feedly is by far the largest of the 9 competing Google Reader alternatives.

The post Feedly Tripled Their Userbase in 3 Months, Ready to Dance on Google Reader’s Grave appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

I’ve just come across another news reader app called Yoelo Reader. Do you like minimalist layouts heavily accented in red? Then this is the news reading app for you.

Yoleo offers a basic function, browser-only news reader service. There’s no sharing options (yet), nor can you save content to be read later, but one thing Yoleo has going for it is that it is reasonably rugged.

I have signed up and imported my Google Reader account. Yoleo has yet to choke on my nearly 2,000 RSS feed collection, and that puts them a step ahead of the competition.

According to the blog, Yoleo launched with just the basic features that the developers felt were needed at launch.  They’re still working at finalizing the design and are planning to add a number of features, including:

Article list

• Sortable by oldest first
• Faster navigation

Subscription list features

• Filterable by read, starred, all
• Drag and drop reorganization
• Folder management
• Manual refresh

Like CommaFeed and Digg Reader, Yoleo looks to be a relatively new app that came about as a result of Google announcing the end of Google Reader. And like a lot of the news reader services launched in the past few months, Yoleo is independent of Google Reader.  While it can import your GR feeds, Yoleo is not tied to Google Reader.

Yoelo

The post Yoleo Reader Joins a Crowded News Reader Niche appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

• BiitBook: Vietnamese Startup Hunts for E-book Publishing Market (Tech In Asia)
• Creatavist: A new way to bring stories to life (Knight Foundation)
• How I became a freelancer (Give Me Back My Five Bucks)
• Monetizing Serialized Fiction (Lindsay Buroker)
• Motley Fool Uses Apple Anti-Trust Suit to Scare People into Paying It (TeleRead)
• Photographer sues BuzzFeed for $3.6M over viral sharing model (paidContent)
• That “Old Book Smell” is a Mix of Grass and Vanilla (Smithsonian.com)

The post The Morning Coffee – 19 June 2013 appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

B&N had removed the links about a month ago. Last week they confirmed that the PC and Mac apps were no longer supported, and that they were now recommending that readers use the Nook for Web app.

It looks like B&N may have rethought abandoning support for the Nook for PC and Nook for Mac apps, though I’m not going to read too much into this. While the links may have been restored, the apps are still  woefully out of date.

The apps were last updated well over a year ago. According to the website, the Mac app still lacks support for OSX Mountain Lion, which is running on 28 million Macs (around a third of all Macs in use). There’s also no indication that the Mac app will be updated to support the recently announced OSX Mavericks, either.

I strongly doubt that either app will receive another update, so while the apps may be available to download they have effectively been discontinued.

Thanks, Tim!

The post B&N Restores Nook PC, Mac Apps to Their Website appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

Now, Mr King had decided not to release Joyland as an ebook (he wants you to buy the paper book in a bookstore, or Amazon), so I was all set to write a post showing the pointlessness of his decision. I was going to explain how he has no effective control over the digital release of his novel; he can only control whether readers pay for the copy.

But I have already written that post, so today I wanted to take a different angle on the story. I was comparing all the different pirated copies of Joyland when I noticed something. Of the 4 distinct copies I found on The Pirate Bay, one was a PDF made with an Adobe Acrobat plugin, while the others were made with Calibre, the best free ebook library management and conversion tool.

Yes, 3 out of 4 ebook pirates prefer Calibre. I trust you see what this means.

Calibre enables ebook piracy, and users of calibre are enabling it. I hope you feel ashamed of yourselves.

I can only hope that Kovid Goyal, the developer of Calibre, soon feels the full wrath of the US government. His role in encouraging ebook piracy is incalculable, and so is the damage caused. No punishment is too severe for this malefactor, and one can only hope that justice is swift, thorough, and absolute.

I think we should take a lesson from the demise of Osama bin Laden and the dragged out extradition and prosecution of Kim Dotcom, and act accordingly. Working within the justice system, even though many laws were twisted into a pencil,  is probably going to prevent one of these evil, evil men from being brought to justice. Clearly we must act outside all laws and legal framework, otherwise this evildoer will go unpunished.

Who’s with me?

image by fuzzcat

P.S. If you cannot tell that this post is satire, I don’t know what to say.

The post Three Out of Four eBook Pirates Prefer Calibre appeared first on The Digital Reader, a site you can support by shopping at Amazon.

This is a several month old Google Reader alternative that combines your existing RSS feeds (they can be imported) with the news stories that your friends share on Twitter and Facebook, all of which can be read offline. It has the potential of combining a news junkie’s personally curated news sources with the more random readings suggested organically by your social network.

Or at least that is what it could do. I’ve been trying to use FlowReader today, and I keep getting locked out. That’s a pity, because this service offers some rather useful options.

Update: It turns out that the reading app and the browser based FlowReader are not related.

There’s a FlowReader Android app in Google Play, and according to LifeHacker the app lets you filter content. You can chose to follow certain writers on a blog, or you can choose to filter out certain topics. If you don’t want to read stories about Twitter you’ll never see them.

The ability to filter out content is a feature that I have often wanted but few news reader apps offer, so far as I know.  And that is why I was particularly interested in trying out FlowReader.

I’m also really looking forward to the social news sources integration. I may not be active on Twitter much any more but I do still try to check out the news stories that are linked to. Sometimes they’re useful leads, and I often reshare the stories worth reading as well as add them to the morning coffee post.

Unfortunately it looks like this service is having some growing pains. I have been trying to use FlowReader for the past several hours and access is at best intermittent. But I plan to keep trying; the possible benefits outweigh the problems.

The clever Twitter integration alone could make FlowReader worth the bother; it has the potential of saving me the hour or more a day that I currently spend sifting through my Twitter timeline, scanning for links. And the fact that it should lessen the chance that I will miss a story is just the cherry on top.

FlowReader

Google Play

source

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