Electronic Publications

Wade Roush Wonders if the new U.S. version of the Librie may well succeed where the previous generation of e-book devices failed. Indeed, if an authentic book-reading experience is what consumers are looking for, the new Sony e-reader -- which BW's sources said is based on an earlier device marketed in Japan called the Librie -- won't have a much better shot at success than the previous generation of e-book devices. While the Librie is based on an innovative "electronic paper" technology from E Ink, it is cut from the same mold as the Rocket E-Book, with a flat, inflexible, monochrome screen, operated by push-buttons.
Sony has plans to launch the new e-book reader at next month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Jay writes "Peter Suber in Open Access News recently pointed out Heather Morrison's blog entry on Open Access Textbooks from the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, December 27, 2005. Online textbooks resources include: Textbooks in Mathematics.
(A list of links to useful mathematical textbooks available for free on the Internet.
They are all legal and maintained by their authors or by the legitimate publisher.) This site also includes electronic handbooks and guides on 'How to prepare documents? TEX,LATEX etc.'
Online Mathematics Textbooks
, and American Mathematical Society Online Books are two other examples of online textbooks collections. Peter Suber also pointed out Jason Turgeon's Textbook Revolution, a page that provides excellent information on textbooks in other subjects such as Biology, Business and Management, Economomics, Engineering, Mathematics and Physics."

A Short Post from Trusted Reviews says Next Christmas we could all be sending our Christmas cards on ePaper, since iRex is going to have a reader available by April.

The ER 0100, also nicknamed The Illiad (How Homer of them), has an 8.1in, 1024 x 768 native resolution, 16 shade grey-scale display which claims to be equally readable outside or indoors. The whole thing measures 216 x 155mm and is just 16mm wide and weighs 390g, so little more than your average book, if a little less pocket friendly.

Jay writes "Penn's online books page (new listings) lists the titles of on-line books that have recently been added to the index, or whose entries have been recently revised. For a full list of available books, try the main on-line books page. An RSS feed URL for the new listings can be found at: New listings RSS/XML."

The Australian IT Section Reports thin flexible displays known as electronic paper, or e-paper, are starting to come of age and appear in autotellers, kiosks and portable devices.

Research labs have touted their advances but there have been few mass market products to date.

Fujitsu recently showed off e-paper with vivid colour images that are unaffected when the screen is bent.

Its e-paper requires little power, making it suitable for displays such as advertisments.

Interesting Title on a short post over on Mobile Magazine. The PSP has a new "Content Viewer" to store e-books and comics on a memory stick and view them on your PSP. The content viewer has just been unveiled at a trade show in Seoul, so there is no word yet on when we might see it. One more popular eBook reader.

Bearkat writes ""Dot mobile, a British mobile phone service aimed at students, says it plans to condense classic works of literature into SMS text messages...Academic purists will be horrified. Hamlet's famous query, "To be or not to be, that is the question," becomes "2b? Nt2b? ???"" Read more at CNN"

Jay writes "Proquest just announced that new items added in its dissertation database are now available as RSS feeds. Excerpt from the web site: "The ProQuest Dissertations & Theses database includes over 2 million masters theses and dissertations, with over 60,000 titles added every year. It is a great resource for researchers in a wide variety of fields. Now, you can keep up with 'what's new' in the database using updates in RSS format. Once you point an RSS reader at this URL, anytime a dissertation or thesis is added to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses database that matches the predefined subject terms, your website is updated automatically. Note that you can use dissertations & theses RSS Feeds regardless of whether you use the classic PQDD interface or access PQDT via the ProQuest platform. Non-subscribers will be able to see basic information about each relevant title."

For more information:

Proquest Dissertations & Theses: RSS Feeds."

Jay writes "PubMed has announced that the search results can now be directly downloaded on your desktop through RSS feeds.

To set up an RSS feed:
(1) Run your search in PubMed.
(2) Select RSS Feed from the Send to menu.
(3) Click Create Feed and copy the XML icon into your RSS Reader.

An RSS reader is required to use this service on your computer and retrieve new items from PubMed. RSS feeds can also be retrieved in your bloglines account by subscribing to the feed.
For More information, see:

RSS Feeds Available from PubMed.

For additional information on feeds from other electronic journals and databases, please see:

Blogging as a tool : innovative approaches to information access."

The Book Standard Author Max Chafkin says For all the maneuvering among publishers and tech companies last week as various groups scrambled to gain a stake in the digital future of books an unlikely early winner emerged: the perennially underpaid author.

The Financle Express (India) says The future of the printed word seems smudgy . They say while programmes to meet the digital challenge may vary between publishers, booksellers and software agencies, there seems to be a near unanimous resolution that a digital future is the way forward, and this may revolutionise the way books are bought and sold.

Brian G. writes "The Cleveland Plain Dealer has been running a series of articles about a new audiobook format, called Playaway. This new format is a self-contained audiobook about the size of a cassette tape. It is battery-driven and offers the ability to control the speed of the narration and place a bookmark. Currently, the prices range from the $30-55, with the next version (already being designed) expected to fall between $20-30. Alternatively, this format may be offered to companies that want to give customers a preprogrammed selection of music, stories, or product information (such as car dealers). So far, the sales have been slow in bookstores but higher sales have been experienced in airports. Vending machine sales are being considered as well."

Leading authors have called for the government to act to help end the "book famine" faced by the blind.
Crime author Ruth Rendell and Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes are backing a Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) call for government funds.
More @ The Beeb
 
 
 

One From The Financial Times on a deal announced on Thursday by Microsoft on a "strategic partnership" with the British Library that will allow the software group to digitise 25m pages of content - the equivalent of 100,000 books.

The deal with one of the world's great libraries will be seen as an attempt to make up lost ground in its battle with Google, which only on Thursday unveiled its first digital book collection.

search-engines-web.com notes a couple articles on Amazon's plan to offer online access to books for a fee to customers who buy hard copies of the same book. The service starts next year.

The USA Today and CNET both have coverage. Meanwhile, Random House, the world's largest publisher of trade books, said it had come up with a business model for allowing people to pay to view its books on the Internet.

Blake writes "New York Times Tech columnist David Pogue is covering a new way to listen to your books. Its actual name is Audible Air, and it's a way to download spoken recordings from Audible.com to the Palm Treo cellphone and other wireless gadgets - over the air, wherever you happen to be. But to appreciate its significance, you must first understand how Audible works."

Engadget Says Siemens, claims their new color screens are quite actually paper thin, and that they actually cost relatively little to manufacture—£30 ($52 US) per square meter. That's still a bit much for newspaper use, of course, so it looks like they want us to hold out until 2007 on this one, when they suppose it'll be a little more affordable in mass market pricing.

Jay writes "Jimmy Leach in the E-Learning section of the Guardian Unlimited reports, "The UK is losing around £1.5bn annually because of its failure to embrace open access publishing, according to an open access advocate. Stevan Harnad, of the American Scientist Open Access Forum and professor of cognitive science at the University of Southampton, has calculated the potential return on the investment in scientific research findings that are being lost to the UK each year through what he views as the limitations of the current academic publishing environment."

Read the full article at:

Open access failings 'cost UK £1.5bn'."

Jay writes "Information Today's Weekly News Digest announced that Proquest is expanding to provide access tomore than 2,000 medical and health e-books.

Excerpt: "Beginning immediately, titles including a range of Oxford Textbooks and Oxford Handbooks as well as key titles from Medical Publishers Wiley, Elsevier, Springer, Blackwell, and others will be offered on the MyiLibrary e-book platform."

Read the full article at
ProQuest Expands Medical Content."

Jay writes "It appears that more electronic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences are on the way.

Information Today's Weekly News Digest of September 6th, 2005, reports, " Swets Information Services Swets Information Services announced it is partnering with Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis to launch new Social Science and Humanities eCollections of e-books. The companies said the Social Science and Humanities eCollections provide a way for libraries to arrange access to a large number of e-books at low cost; the collections also increase accessibility to more users through the Web. The new eCollections have been sourced from imprints such as Routledge, RoutledgeFalmer, and Taylor & Francis."

Read the full news story at:

"Swets Partners with Taylor & Francis to Launch New eCollections"