I don’t hang out at Tokyopop.com anymore, but I still get all their newsletters, just to keep abreast with what’s going on. In the newest newsletter, there is a poll about e-books. Which would you prefer? Apple iphone, Sony e-Reader, Amazon Kindle, or none, reading paper books. Accompanying this in the newsletter is a video of a comparison review of the e-Reader and the Kindle. Viewing the video shows Tokyopop’s bias for the e-Reader (as that is where they have OEL manga available). The influence of this video seems to be reflected in poll, as the e-Reader has the second most votes, and most for a digital device. I have to hand it to Tokyopop for continuing to show some support for ebooks and the e-Reader. With it’s recent problems, publishing books electronically can be a good call to keep the fanbase happy while Tokyopop struggles through these tough times. It could also help to grow ebooks, in the same way that they did with OEL. If they would keep their books updated and make them easy to get, they might just make ebooks successful.
I got this through the comments on a previous post of mine about reading manga on the Kindle. Of course, this isn’t for legally downloaded manga, becasue…..there isn’t any! But if you read and enjoy scanalations, which manga publishers obviously don’t consider a threat or care do anything about, here’s a new solution for reading them on the Kindle. Mangle is open source software that makes organizing and reading manga on the Kindle easier. It was created by Alex Yatskov, a manga reader with one of those imaginary Kindles Michael Gambos keeps asking to see. He did what I couldn’t do; play around with the Kindle and it’s “undocumented features” and got scanalations working on his. Of course because these are not official features, there were problems. See the link for details. But, being an enterprising gentleman, he set to work to create software to fix them. The site includes download links, instructions and screenshots. It’s really sad that we have to rely open source and borderline pirates to get manga in a digital format. But as long as publishers refuse to do anything about it, I’m glad there are people like Alex and the other sites that make online…
Earlier this week, I ranted about manga publishers and their head-in-the-sand attitudes toward digital distribution of books. One of their seemingly cited reasons for not supporting digital books is the lack of e-readers in circulation. Sony and Amazon seem to be trying to rectify that.
While going through some old ANN news feeds, I picked up a few news items I want to comment on: DS Vision to go live in June: This just sort of passed right by in one of thier Daily Brief posts, but I want to give it more attention. This was first announced last November, and now it seems to be coming to fruition.
As I’ve described before, the Kindle has a lot of potential, but it seemed to be wasted in the 1.0 version. Well, apparently that wasn’t quite true. There is more potential in the Kindle, they just didn’t want you to see it. Fortunately, there are people out there who are never satisfied with what we’re given. I learned about this while listening to Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy podcast. Igor Skochinsky has a blog called Reversing Everything. He got a hold of a Kindle and decided to see what made it tick. Taking it apart both physically and hacking the software, he found some interesting programs residing in the Kindle, just out of reach of the user; a picture viewer, minesweeper game, and some GPS capabilities through the browsers. The program of interest to mangaphiles is of course the picture viewer. It allows for a “picture” folder to be created, and the pictures can then be loaded into a sub folder to create a “book” that will appear on the home screen. It’s a little slow at turning pages, but will view jpg, png, and gif. So if you read a lot of scanalations, this might be worth a try. A…
In a previous post, I spoke about the Kindle as being a possibility for reading electronic books and manga. But, a little searching around the web has brought to light another possibility that is much more inexpensive, and more readably available. As a matter of fact, you may have on in your home right now! It’s the Nintendo DS. Nintendo’s newest handheld game platform can be a tool for more than just games.While Nintendo has been announcing products that bring manga to the Japanese DS users, we here in the US can only hope and pray that these products are brought over. But, thanks to good, old, hacker ingenuity, (and some hardware from Asia), programmers and others can and often do make their own programs, or “home brews” to run on the DS. For more information on Home Brews for the DS, see this wiki. For purveyors of portable digital manga (and who are willing to risk their DS) would be two home brew programs: PictoDS and Comic Book DS. A review of the software running on a DS, with pictures can be found here. It uses the dual screens and touch screen to really give a customizable reading experience….
The Kindle has been getting a lot of press lately. It was feature on the cover of Newsweek, it’s back ordered because of the demand, but is it really all that the hype is making it out to be? And what’s this going to mean to manga and other j-media? The Kindle is Amazon’s entry into ebooks. Since Amazon sells books, this seems to make sense. The Kindle uses a new technology know as “electronic paper”. It uses black ink, in a way similar to an etch-a-sketch, to electronically charge the ink so that it clings to the screen. This gives the appearance and readability of paper without the flicker or glare of a computer screen. It has wireless connectivity that makes getting books and other files fast and easy. No need to search for a WiFi hotspot. Anywhere Sprint service is available, so is your Kindle. You can buy and download books from the Amazon Kindle Store with the keypad at the bottom of the reader. It comes with an account and email address for your purchases and correspondence. You can also download magazines and daily newspapers, so no more paper cluttering your house or needing recycling. It can…