booking

Amazon.com has the Fujitsu LifeBook U810 Mini-Notebook PC for $966.95, after $511.75 savings.

Save $511.75 on the Fujitsu LifeBook U810 Mini-Notebook PC from Amazon.com >> Regular price is $1478.7 >> Sale price is $966.95 >> Savings $511.75 (34.61%) >> Click here for deal

Kindle? Here comes the Talking Book!

Everyone's talking about the new Kindle, but here's a product that may present an even more radical innovation in the e-book sector: The Talking Book, created and distributed by the non-profit Literacy Bridge, is a low cost audio player/recorder with special features for Knowledge Sharing and Literacy Learning. It was developed entirely by volunteers and costs less than $10. The device involves an ecosystem to produce and share locally relevant audio content, allowing users to record their own messages and distribute them within local networks through a device-to-device copying capability. Other features include slow play for reading … Read more

Nvidia aims at top Netbooks, Windows 7

Nvidia is working with top-10 PC makers to bring its graphics chips for the first time to Netbooks, according to an executive at the company. And an important part of this push is getting its silicon working with Windows 7, a more Netbook-friendly operating system than Vista.

This week, Nvidia released Windows 7 beta drivers for the "Ion" Netbook silicon that it's handing over to customers. In conjunction, Nvidia demonstrated in Taiwan this week applications running on Windows 7. Nvidia also announced that its Ion platform has been certified on Windows Vista.

The Ion chipset is based … Read more

Retail e-commerce falls 3 percent in fourth quarter

Retail e-commerce posted its first quarterly decline in at least eight years, during the normally robust fourth-quarter holiday shopping season, according to a report released Thursday by ComScore.

During the fourth quarter, retail e-commerce sales fell by 3 percent to $38 billion, compared with a year ago.

"I thought things would be flat, so this was a little worse than I thought," said Gian Fulgoni, ComScore chairman.

He attributed part of the decline to fewer post-Thanksgiving shopping days in November last year, compared with the same time in the previous year when there was nearly one full additional … Read more

Authors to Google Book Search: Pay up!

Authors and publishers of tens of thousands of out-of-print books have submitted claims for compensation from Google Book Search as called for in a settlement agreement to a copyright lawsuit, a lawyer in the case said on Wednesday.

Under a $125 million settlement Google reached in October with book authors and publishers who sued over the company's book-scanning project, the search giant is required to provide notice to authors, publishers, and their heirs and successors that they may be eligible for payment.

The notice is being published in 218 countries and 72 languages, according to a statement from Boni &… Read more

'Kindle killer' Shortcovers covers a lot

Hey, Kindle 2! Apparently you have some legitimate competition calling itself the "kindle killer."

OK, enough with the cuteness. So far I've yet to be personally interested in the Kindle 2. That most likely has to do with the price of the unit. I just don't have the time to read enough books to make $360 for an e-reader worth it.

Indigo's Shortcovers caught my eye, though. PCWorld is reporting that the service is set to launch later in February as an app for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android OS.

Shortcovers lets you read the … Read more

Book publishers object to Kindle's text-to-voice feature

Update at 5:30 p.m. PST: Quotes added from copyright advocate Ben Sheffner.

Was your mother a lawbreaker when she read you The Little Prince or Green Eggs and Ham?

That's the question raised Tuesday by the Authors Guild, an advocacy group for writers. Paul Aitken, the group's executive director objects to the text-to-speech feature on Amazon's Kindle 2 digital-book reader. Aitken told The Wall Street Journal: "They don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

Wow. If a computer … Read more

Even More Ways to Read on iPhone

The reading public today was inundated with news about Amazon.com's new Kindle 2 ebook reader, but the iPhone may already have a headstart thanks to Google Book Search and Safari Books Online. Both services are accessible via MobileSafari and require live online access, unlike the Kindle 2.

Google Book Search

Last week Google, announced a mobile version of Google Book Search that gives you access to 1.5 million public domain books in the United states (and about .5 million in other countries) from your iPhone and other web-enabled mobile devices.

The books are now optimized for mobile … Read more

Amazon Kindle 2: It's NOT too expensive

Let me start by saying that I agree with you on one thing: $359 is a lot of money. I just don't agree that it's too much to pay for an Amazon Kindle 2.

In the wake of the announcement of the Kindle 2, the general response is that it's nice and all, but the price is just too high. A price breakdown of the original device found that you'd need to buy about 60 books to make up the price difference (all while paying to get delivery of newspapers and periodicals you could read online for free). And analysts complain that Kindle is a niche product with a small, upwardly mobile target audience. And here's my question: what is the problem with that?

Isn't the Kindle, fundamentally, an early adopter's device? And aren't we usually pretty tolerant of that in the tech space? You all know this story. In the evolution of technology, devices start expensive, they target a niche audience that can afford the price and care passionately about the product, and then they either adopt more mainstream features or become mainstream through a combination of obvious value proposition and gradually lower prices.

Even though the Kindle is on its second iteration, it's still very much in early-adopter territory. Does anyone really expect that an e-book reader is going to take the entire world by storm and become the iPod-like gadget commodity of its day? Of course not; so why should it be priced like bread and milk?

Then there are the features.… Read more