ereaders

Tom and Rafe talk about eReaders and help you decide which one you should get.

We've known for a while now that Eee PC maker Asus planned to get in on the e-reader action, and on Tuesday the company made it official by unveiling the DR-900 at the CeBit tech fair in Hannover, Germany.

The DR-900 features a 9-inch, monochrome touch-screen display with a 1,024x768 resolution and boasts a slim form factor (9mm thick--no thicker than a pencil, Asus says). The device has Wi-Fi connectivity and optional 3G, and battery life should let users read 10,000 pages, or 20 400-page novels, on a single charge. The reader supports ePUB, PDF, and TXT … Read more

You've seen the film, probably with Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson; now read the original book, on your Kindle, for nowt. The works of Dickens and Austen are among 65,000 classics of English literature digitized by the British Library and coming soon, for free, to Amazon's e-book reader.

The titles were scanned on Microsoft's dime as part of its now-defunct Live Search book search project. They're all from the 19th century and are out of copyright. Amazon will offer the e-books to Kindle owners through its Kindle store in late spring or early summer, … Read more

Thanks to the success of Amazon's Kindle and the frenetic anticipation surrounding Apple's forthcoming iPad tablet, electronic book readers are front and center in the gadget world. Fans laud the convenience and portability factors--and as a result, one of the demographics that they say has benefited the most from devices like the Kindle is the urban commuter.

But a new project from non-profit biannual magazine Slice, based in Brooklyn, tries to show us that something is lost on a Kindle commute. Meet CoverSpy, a Twitter feed run by Slice, which peeks at the books that people are reading … Read more

Tree huggers rejoice.

E-readers are a hit, or rather 93 percent of owners surveyed by research company, The NPD Group, say they are "very satisfied" with their device. Only 2 percent of buyers reported being dissatisfied, according to the research firm.

What this means is that technology appears to be improving upon an information-distribution system nearly 4,000 years old. It also means that book publishers better get on the ball.

Most of those surveyed owned either an Amazon Kindle or a Sony Reader, the leaders in the e-reader space, Ross Rubin, NPD's executive director of analysis, … Read more

It's hard to argue the fact that this week's Apple iPad launch disappointed the tech crowd, and not just because of that inexplicable name. Despite its lovely design, beefier core apps, and new e-book features and store, the iPad is hampered by a well-documented string of missing features: a camera, 16:9 support, Flash support (seriously?), multitasking, SD card slot, HDMI or high-res video output support, USB ports, GPS, and so on. Plus, it's exclusive to the AT&T network (again: seriously?) in this iteration, the pricing scheme is overly complex, and while I'm not … Read more

This episode of The 404 Podcast is dedicated to all of our heartbroken comrades out there who were expecting an Apple tablet computer, but got an Apple e-reader instead. Join us as we recap what might be the most underwhelming Apple product announcement since Apple TV.

Full disclosure here: This entire 30-minute episode is dedicated to the Apple iPad. We know a lot of you must be exhausted with all the moaning and groaning so far, but we'll take any opportunity to make fun of Wilson. Bear with us as we try to get him to say one bad thing about the iPad.

In addition to a healthy dose of polite yelling, we also play a collection of voice mails that drive the stake in even further. We guarantee tomorrow's show to be (relatively) free of Apple talk, and we're also very excited to welcome Jerry Ma and Cliff Chiang of the Asian-American comic anthology "Secret Identities," who will join us in the studio tomorrow to talk about state of the industry, ethnic minorities in the comic genre, and...well let's face it, we want their artistic opinion of the iPad.

Apple is in secret last-minute negotiations with book publishers over a new e-books pricing scheme for its highly anticipated tablet computer, putting it in direct competition with Amazon.com, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Apple wants publishers to create two new price points for e-books of best-sellers: $12.99 and $14.99, with some titles offered at $9.99, according to the report. As it does with iPhone apps, Apple is negotiating for a 30 percent take on the sales price, with publishers getting the other 70 percent, the Journal reported.

The move would put Apple … Read more

Regardless of whether we see a gorgeous tablet from Apple on Wednesday, there is a clear trend toward using electronic devices to read what has traditionally been printed media. From an environmental point of view, that shift is a mixed bag, depending as much on user behavior as on technology.

According to reports, Apple will show off a tablet PC that can be used with a docking station or an electronic reader.

Displacing printing media with an electronic device like the Amazon Kindle can reduce the amount of energy associated with cutting down trees and making physical periodicals and books, … Read more