If you still need convincing about the emerging importance of e-books, just take a look at these new developments.
FREE E-BOOKS ON BLOGGING
Cook Tips and Tricks has rounded up an incredible list of 26 free e-books about blogging. This is an invaluable list for anyone who blogs, or who is about to do so. I particuarly draw your attention to The New Rules of Viral Marketing, which has been downloaded over 400,000 times within a year. Not only is the advice eye-opening, the design is pacesetting: this PDF e-book is laid out in “landscape” format, eliminating the annoying scrolling necessary in most PDF books. By all means, take a look.
CALIBRE: E-BOOK MANAGEMENT
Ok, so you’ve now downloaded lots of e-books. How do you manage them? With free, open-source Calibre.
CNET’s Download.com provides a quick, but helpful review and endorsement. It also points out its biggest flaw: while the program is genuinely cross-platform, supporting most of the different e-book platofmrs and readers, Calibre currently chokes on Sony’s E-Reader. That’s a drawback that will probably be fixed.
On the strength of CNET’s endorsement, I downloaded it. I’m very impressed. It does a number of things:
- Library management
- Format conversion
- Syncing to E-Reader Devices [with Sony's E-Reader the one problem device]
- Fetching news: Calibre’s website explains that it :can automatically fetch news from a number of websites/RSS feeds, format the news into a ebook and upload to a connected device. At the moment there is support for generating LRF/EPUB ebooks.” Currently supported are the New York Times, BBC, The Economist, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, ESPN and others. The program fetches full articles and displays them in “periodical” style.
- E-Book Viewer: If you don’t own one of the expensive e-book hardware devices, you can still view the e-books on your computer. The program has versions compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.
Are you ready to have your socks knocked off? Take a look at some SCREENSHOTS.
FUJITSU RELEASES FIRST COLOR E-BOOK READER
Publisher’s Weekly has just announced in its daily email newsletter that Fujitsu has released the first color e-book reader that is commercially available. it carries the odd name of FLEPia. Currently, it’s for sale only in Japan, but Fujitsu expects to begin shipping to the US in the fall. The design is sleek, and, like the Kindle, it can connect to the internet. Information in English is still sketchy. I’m not sure, for example, whether this reader requires its own e-book format. I have tracked down a video that shows the reader in action. The video is oddly without sound. You can see it in our VIDEO FOR WRITERS sidebar for the next few days, or at the VIDEO FOR WRITERS website.
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- Indigo launches new e-book platform (network.nationalpost.com)
- Who Needs The Amazon Kindle When You Have A Netbook? (makeuseof.com)
- 14 Reasons Why I Should Buy A Kindle (bargaineering.com)
- eBook Market gets serious (phonemag.com)
- Calibre: A Good, Free Open Source eBook App (ostatic.com)
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Sorry, comments are closed.
Comment by
Rahul Jadhav
29 Mar 2009
Hi Tom, thanks for mentioning my post
Rahul Jadhav’s last blog post..50 Beautiful Templates Converted From Wordpress To Blogger
Comment by
Dan
31 Mar 2009
When it comes down to it, there’s still a huge market out there for simple ebooks created in pdf file format. A big portion of my own ebook sales are to international markets, and these customers generally find ebook readers with proprietary formats offputting, expensive, and/or completely unavailable.
Yet I move the pdf file format ebooks I publish every day to a lot of people. There’s still a huge appetite amongst readers for information delivered in a simple, sweet, user-friendly format. If they want to hold it in their hands, they print it out on their printer.
Of course, this works best with the “How to” style non-fiction ebooks I sell – not so great for selling novels in e-format.
Dan
Comment by
Tom Colvin
31 Mar 2009
Rahul, you must spend LOTS of time scouring the internet to build your lists. They are very helpful.
Comment by
Tom Colvin
31 Mar 2009
Your comment, Dan is well taken. When I downloaded Calibre and searched my system for e-books to place in its catalog, I came up with none in true-ebook format. On the other hand, I’ve got dozens of PDF books, which still remain the best format for the how-to books I tend to prefer.
PC Magazine just issued its April online issue, with a cover-story review of the Kindle 2. While mostly glowing in praise, it’s major criticism was lack of support for PDF. That’s why I’m holding out for the anticipated Liquid Crystal e-book, which I think will support PDF.