Rumors are rising indicating that Amazon is soon to release an ebook reader for iphone. I fully expect this to happen, and I think it will be good for the ebook cause as a whole. It is hard to predict what the ratio of kindle to iPhone usage will be. Speaking of the kindle, I thought that the text to speech feature was the coolest thing. It is kind of a holy grail of mine to be able to switch between reading a book and listening to is without losing my spot. But of course the publishers pretty much killed that straight away. So that also means my hope of having this same feature in the iPhone version is dead as well.
A new Tolkien book, The Children of Hurin, is coming out in April.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be out on July 21.
What other nerdly things are there to do until Battlestar Galactica resumes 9 fracking months from now?
I'm one of those guys that just needs to know how stuff works. I need, at a minimum at least, a high level theory for everything. It doesn't have to be a completely accurate theory, just something that allows me to stop thinking about how something works and move on. One topic that continues to puzzle me has been thinking itself, or more specifically how the brain works. Jeff Hawkin's new book "On Intelligence" has scratched that itch nicely. His name should sound familiar, founder of Palm Computing, inventor of the Palm Pilot, founder of Handspring... In his book he presents a new theory for how the brain works and what intelligence really means. He hopes that by understanding the human brain we will someday be able to build intelligent machines - A promise that so far traditional AI has failed to fulfill.
Data input sources in recommended order:
Audible
EReader
Amazon
Oops, I guess it is more than rumor, I just installed it.
Update: Well the reader software itself is technically unimpressive. It is clearly the least feature rich eReader of the page full I have installed on my iTouch. The kindle store however is another thing altogether. Ignoring price for a moment, there are a ton books there that might actually interest me. Far more nerd related books than my current eBook favorite eReader.com.
Oh and the whisper sync feature looks like it would be very cool if you also happened to have a Kindle.
My guess is the lack of a text-to-speech feature in the Kindle for iPhone app is unrelated to the fit the Author's Guild threw.
Text-to-speech is only disabled on the Kindle when publishers request it. And I think market forces will discourage publishers from disabling the feature for most books.
The only real thing standing between me and the using the Kindle store for most of my future book purchases is the lack of a desktop or web client. I have the ability to read an ebook on the PC for all the other vendors I use.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/12/1846224&from=rss
This is actually pretty funny. Amazon is using the DMCA to go after a site linking to a script that allows you to put DRM'd books from another store on the Kindle.
Now I was just reading about this script a couple of days ago and there is a crazy twist to the story. First of all the Kindle supports the unprotected mobiPocket format. The Kindle's native format is actually based on protected mobiPocket. The script lets you extract the device ID from your Kindle so that if you purchase a protected mobi-book (from Mobipocket.com for example) it will be encrypted properly so your Kindle can read it. So for starters this is not breaking or cracking the DRM in anyway, so the DMCA doesn't really apply. But the funniest part is that Amazon OWNS Mobipocket!
So they are invoking the DMCA to prevent you from legitimately buying a book from one of their stores and putting it on one of their devices.