books

Yeah, yeah, I know. Harry Potter this, Harry Potter that, OMG-does-Harry-die, OMG-OMG-it's-on-BitTorrent... We're so ready to move on to the next cultural obsession from across the pond. Regardless, here's some video from Friday night of some of the people who showed up at the official New York book launch event hosted by Scholastic, the publisher that handles Harry Potter in the States.

The wizardly confab was held in New York City's shopper-friendly SoHo neighborhood, on a stretch of Mercer St. between Prince St. and Spring St. Conveniently, not only is Mercer St. right around the corner … Read more

Want to get the best price for a particular book? Simply enter the ISBN number in this simple iPhone app to get a list of the lowest available prices from several sites around the Web. Though the interface for Booksearch.app is nothing to write home about, the functionality (and saved money) might help you overlook the...look.

iPhone link: http://iphone.campusbooks4less.com/

Web site link: http://campusbooks4less.com/

Tomorrow night, legions of Harry Potter fans will be gathering at bookstores all across the world to pick up the final installment of the series. If you haven't already preordered it on Amazon, or hunted down the digitally photographed pages of the leaked copy--tsk, tsk--your best bet is to exercise patience, or give in and pick it up with the throngs of other fans at one of the midnight release parties.

But where do you find ones worth going to? Short of browsing your local paper's A&E section, there are some handy tools online for … Read more

Old-school book publishers are still trying to figure out how best to reach audiences on the Web and build online communities for their authors. That was the takeaway of a talk this week at Mashup 2007, a conference held in San Francisco that focused on teens and tech.

Diane Naughton, vice president of marketing at HarperCollins Children's Books, said that the challenge has shifted from the publishing industry holding the Internet at arm's length to worries about how to prove value from online marketing efforts.

One way HarperCollins plans to tackle this challenge is to team up with … Read more

Scholastic, the publisher of the popular Harry Potter series of children's books, is taking unspecified legal action against several peer-to-peer sites, a book distributor and an online retailer over the unauthorized release of digital and print versions of the latest book, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh book in the series, is scheduled to go on sale on Saturday, but already there are pirated versions available for download from file-sharing sites, and as many as 1,200 print copies were mailed to eager fans beginning on Tuesday, the newspaper reported.

Scholastic … Read more

When I got this MacBook Pro (MBP), with its 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, back in November, one of the reasons for upgrading was the availability of Parallels Desktop 2.5. The Parallels software runs Microsoft's Windows XP or Vista in a virtual-machine environment. You get the Windows desktop in a window on your Mac desktop, so both environments are available at the same time. The Windows hard disk can be created as a file in your Mac filesystem, so you don't waste much disk space.

There's also Apple's own Boot Camp, which lets … Read more

OK, so I get the iMac, the iBook, the iPod, iTunes, and even (grudgingly) the iPhone. Apple thought up the moniker, so we can't begrudge them for expanding on the very successful franchise. But the iTrip, the iRiver Clix and Cowon's range of iAudio products tested the limits of my patience. And I could have held my tongue if BMW's iDrive had been the end of iOpportunism.

But when I noticed the iLoad--a device for ripping CDs and DVDs to iPod without a computer--on Senior Editor Donald Bell's desk this morning, I felt the need … Read more

Ever since Apple's PowerBook line met its end last year, people have been clamoring for Apple to return to them a 12-inch laptop. Rumors of Steve Jobs granting their wishes and bestowing upon them an ultraportable, professional-grade notebook have been fairly consistent since the man introduced the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros. Today, MacScoop quotes "trusted sources" that point to the arrival of a 12-inch MacBook Pro by the end of the year. These sources say the laptop will be half as thick as the old 12-inch PowerBook at 0.6 or 0.7 inch (15 to … Read more

I upgraded my MacBook Pro (MBP) today with a 250GB 5400RPM hard disk from MCE Tech (product info here). The drive came with an external enclosure with USB and eSATA interfaces for the drive I was removing, which is a nice touch, and even so MCE's price was competitive.

I've bought drives from MCE before. They make some good products, and their customer service is excellent. MCE promised the drive would ship in 7 to 10 business days because they were waiting on the enclosures. It shipped on the 10th day, and MCE volunteered to upgrade the order … Read more