Kindle

The controversy regarding the text-to-speech function offered by Amazon.com's Kindle 2 digital book reader appears to be heating up again.

Groups advocating for the blind and reading disabled on Tuesday held a protest at the Manhattan offices of the Authors Guild. The guild was very vocal in opposing the text-to-speech technology in the Kindle. The group, which represents 4,000 authors, argued that the Kindle infringes on copyright and could hurt audio book sales.

The whole debate seemed to be over in February when Amazon appeared to give in. The Web's largest retailer said it had decided … Read more

Sony has a deal with Google that lets users of the Sony Reader get all kinds of public domain e-books for free. But what about the Kindle users? Not to worry. Thanks goes out to Buzz Out Loud listener Dave for sending along a tip for downloading free e-books right to the Kindle, no computer necessary. That's something that the Sony Reader can't do. Here's how to do it.

Press menu and select experimental.

Then select basic Web.

Press menu again and select enter … Read more

With the launch of the Amazon Kindle 2 and its text-to-speech feature, a broader range of reading materials would now be available to the 15 million Americans represented by The Reading Rights Coalition, a group which defends the rights of those who cannot read printed words because of blindness, dyslexia, spinal cord injury, or other disabilities. However, The Authors Guild is looking add a hoop or two for people with print disabilities to jump through .

As previously written by my colleague Greg Sandoval, "the retailer, which makes the popular Kindle electronic-book reader, announced late Friday that the company is modifying systems to allow authors and publishers to decide whether to enable Kindle's text-to-speech function on a per-title basis."

According to The Reading Rights Coalition: "The Guild has told them that in order to read their books with text-to-speech they must either submit to a burdensome special registration system and prove their disabilities--or pay extra. The Guild's position is contrary to the principle of equal opportunity for all and discriminates against millions of people with print disabilities. The Guild's position is outrageous and discriminates against the millions of people with print disabilities who are eager to be their readers and customers."… Read more

Wired's Gadget Lab blog has a story about how a group of about 250 Kindle owners are staging an online protest over Kindle e-books that cost more than $9.99. The weapon they're using is Amazon's own tagging system, as price offenders are getting hit with a special "9 99 boycott" tag.

The roving--and most likely growing--band of annoyed Kindle owners includes such folks as Connecticut librarian Crystal O'Brien, who spends "a few minutes every day in the Kindle book store tagging the more expensive digital books with the '9 99 boycott' tag … Read more

Samsung's upcoming e-book reader, the Papyrus, had its debut at CES in January, but the stylish looking device is now making the rounds in Europe with some new details in tow. What's interesting about it is that it seems to have quite a bit of PDA in it as Samsung's gone with a touch screen (an aluminum stylus is included), and is bundling some utility applications such as a calculator, scheduler, and contacts. The Papyrus is an A5-size e-ink device (it's 5.8 inches by 8.3 inches while the entire Kindle 2 measures 5.3 … Read more

Earlier this month Apple got hit with a lawsuit over an "exploding" iPod Touch. Now it appears to be getting hit with a suit over the exploding e-book market.

A couple of blogs, including Apple Insider, are reporting that a Swiss communications firm, Monec Holding, has filed suit in a Virginia district court. Monec accuses the iPhone maker of "patent infringement, unfair trade practices, monopolization, and tortious interference for allegedly treading on its January 2002 patent No. 6,335,678 titled 'Electronic device, preferably an electronic book.'"

We've never heard of Monec, but the mission … Read more

I got an e-mail from the folks over at O'Reilly Media mentioning that keynotes and other presentations from the company's ETech 2009 conference, held earlier this month, were now online at the ETech 2009 site. I missed that show, but I was interested in one of the keynotes, so I surfed on over to take a look.

The keynote I was looking for was indeed online: Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO of Pixel Qi and formerly CTO of the One Laptop Per Child organization, talking about "Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing." You can watch a video of the presentation … Read more

Playboy opens up its back catalog of magazines to the Internet for free, and we're all at a loss of words. Tread lightly, buzz brigade. Also, IE8 users are downgrading to IE7 after only one weekend of use. Something smells Vista-ee in here.

Someone pays: Sony charges publishers for PS3 bandwidth http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/03/someone-pays-sony-charges-publishers-for-ps3-bandwidth.ars

IE 8 users downgrading to IE 7 http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/browsers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=216200082&subSection=News

Kindle firmware update http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10200969-1.html

Skype … Read more

Calibre is a cross-platform, open-source library for your e-books that can also sync them to your e-book reader. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it offers a massive range of individual book customizations, as well as format conversion and newspaper-style RSS feed grabbing, but lacks a slick interface that would go a long way toward convincing skeptics that it's a powerful tool.

The number of things that Calibre can do for your digital book collection is stunning. You can view books in a basic spreadsheet layout or with an adaptation of Apple's Cover Flow. Cover Flow here lacks a default image, and the sudden white rectangle where the book cover should be is jarring. It can be toggled with the big, white arrow icon in the bottom-right corner of the main window--an equally awkward placement. … Read more