Sony, in an attempt to be competitive with the Amazon and it’s Kindle, announced this week it would be releasing two new versions of it e-reader and a price drop on it’s books. The Reader Pocket edition is slightly smaller than the original e-Reader, with a 5 in diagonal screen, and a price point of $199, $100 lower than the Kindle 2. The Touch Edition will have the standard 6in diagonal screen and has a touch screen with virtual keyboard. The touch screen will give the reader a more book like experience with page turns and the ability to highlight and add notes with a finger or stylus. And Sony will now match Amazon’s price on new, bestsellers of $9.99. While the drop in prices are nice, and may attract more people to Sony, it still doesn’t have a wireless connection. Users of the Sony E-Reader have to download their books to their computers and then upload them to the E-Reader. After Amazon’s “1984” fiasco, is that really a bad thing? Sure, it might be convenient to be able to download a book anytime (in the US only), but Amazon has shown it can and will take back books from…
As Amazon ships its Kindle 2.0, bloggers and tech sites, just to be contradictory, have been talking a lot about the alternatives to the Kindle. And it’s usually the iPhone that gets the spotlight. Sorry, the iPhone is not Job’s gift to man. There are plenty of other small screen devices that can do the job without the stranglehold.
What would it take to get you to buy a Kindle? Amazon’s ebook reader seems to be selling okay (not that we’ve seen any numbers), but there are a lot of people who haven’t taken to it, or any other e-book reader device. And why should they? Books work just fine, and buying them is cheaper than the electronic gadget. Amazon boasts to have thousands of ebooks, but very, very few that would interest readers of this blog, namely manga. What if Amazon tried to sweeten the deal? Would you go for it?
There’s been a lot of talk in the media lately about Twitter, especially with Ashton Kutcher reaching 1 million followers and Oprah joining and getting 220,000 in one day. And, while it might be nice to follow celebrities like them, it might get real boring real fast. I know when a technology has reached a saturation point when my Mother asks me about something. She’s not very techie (she’s just started using a cellphone), and prefers running her old Mac with OS7 than a PC. She asked me, “What is Twitter?” The more complicated answer is to say, it’s a microblogging platform that can be used for marketing and networking. With the addition of celebrities, it’s become a sort of voyeuristic way to watch what the rich and famous are doing, if, in fact, it’s the rich and famous doing the actual tweeting, and not some assistant. But if this is all you do with your twitter, you will probably become one of the “Twitter Quitters”, who give up after a month.
When I last looked at the Amazon Blogs, just after the Kindle 2.0 came out, there were no blogs available. Whispernet is rather pointless if there aren’t any books or blogs to get through it. But that is starting to change finally. A tweet from Erica Friedman about her Yuri blog Okazu being published on the Kindle made me take a look to see if there were any others. I was pleasantly surprised to see there were a few others. Comics Worth Reading is a group blog run by Johanna Draper Carlson. It’s a terrific place to get reviews of not just manga, but comics, graphic novels and everything related to them. Okazu is run by Erica Friedman and is the oldest blog about Yuri manga. You won’t find better or comprehensive information on Yuri than here. There it is, Plain as Daylight is a review blog by Melinda Beasi. You’ll find lots of reviews of manga and commentary here. The Anime Almanac is a blog by Scott VonSchilling. It covers manga, anime and commentary on the medium. The Anime Blog is a group blog. It covers anime and manga, as well as Japanese culture such as cooking, culture and…
Amazon.com isn’t resting on it’s laurels with the Kindle. The Kindle 2.0 was only just releases in February, but less than 3 months later, they already have a new model out, the Kindle DX. It features a larger screen, 9.75 in, integrated PDF support and auto rotating from portrait to landscape.
While looking around for links to add to my e-reading section, I stumbled upon these posts about putting manga on the Sony E-Reader. They feature the PR-500, but the current, less expensive version, the PR-505, is essentially the same. These include an extensive comparison of color comics, scanalated manga, and Tokyopop manga available through Sony’s store. There are also links to a conversion guide to convert scans to a format optimal for reading, and Manga2Ebook, and RasterFarian, programs used in the conversion guide. Here are some videos as well, showing manga on the E-Reader: You won’t have to turn your head sideways for this one:
Being a wanna-be tech hound, I watch the tech news for interesting posts about the tech subjects I like. I found one over at Channel Web that I’d thought I’d share with all my readers who are interested in E-books. They have a slide show showing all the current and future/possible E-book Readers, with specs. Check it out. At the end they mention a few software programs as well. But there is one that I think anyone considering purchasing an E-book Reader should look at. I found out about it when I was exploring the MobileRead website and forums. It’s an open source free program called Calibre. Calibre is an ebook management program that works on all the major platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X). It works as a library, a format converter, and, best of all, convert news feeds to ebook format! With this program, which hands all the major formats, including Kindle and Sony, it doesn’t matter which reader you get. You can read any ebook on your reader. What I like best about it, is that it can take RSS feeds and make them available to read on the e-reader. The Kindle charges you for the…
Today, Amazon.com had a big press event to unveil the newest generation of its e-book reader, the Kindle. Speculation has been running about for while now that Amazon would release a new reader with leaked photos, increased orders of screens, and a long reorder wait at the Kindle store. So, what’s new about it? Well, not much. There were some cosmetic changes, which many people called for when it first came out in late 2007. It’s lighter and thinner, has an estimated 25% increase in battery power, and more memory that will allow it to hold nearly 6 times more books. What’s in it for manga readers? Again, not much. It does boast a new screen that is capable of showing 16 shades of gray, as opposed to the first generation that could only show 4. This would definitely improve the quality of black and white pictures, which makes up most manga releases. What hasn’t changed? The two most important things that would make the Kindle relevant to manga readers; price and content. The price hasn’t changed, so it’s still $359. But in this economy, that prices the reader out of LOT of people’s range. Prices under $200 seems to…
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.