As usual, we have lots of news about Ebook and Ebook Readers to start the week.

First of all a fairly slick looking new Ebook is now available for order in the US from Dulin, called the PocketBook 360. Running Linux on a Samsung 400Mhz processor, the 360 has a five inch Vizplex screen, both SDHC and MicroSDHC slots and can read EPUB, PDF and most other major formats, including DOC and CHM. At 240 dollars, I don’t expect the 360 to set the Ebook world on fire, but another option in the US is always nice, and the side mounted controls along with an accelerometer position sensor for switching orientation make the 360 look very usable, especially one handed. The device can be ordered directly from Dulin.

More updates about new Readers and some great news about Ebook content after the jump.

Also on offer as a preorder in the US from Dulin (with no release date or price in sight, however) is the Boox, which they are touting as their “3rd Generation” Ebook Reader. Most notable about the Boox is the fact that the six inch touch screen is actually a Wacom digitizer, designed for handwriting and drawing via a stylus. I also find the first generation iPod-esque touchwheel on the device to be sort of charming in a retro kind of way. No idea if this device will ever actually be released but it looks interesting considering the fact that onscreen annotating and writing look to be a much sought after feature for upcoming Ebook Readers, especially in academia. If Dulin is able to get this device out and readily available at 200 dollars or less, it could be a sleeper hit.

Speaking of Academia, it is proving to be a headache for Amazon yet again. Not only is the Kindle DX being field tested by several universities to less than enthusiastic reviews (actually, they mostly hate the thing), but now some universities are rejecting the device due to the fact that one important usability feature is implemented epically badly. Both the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University have told Amazon they won’t even consider big rollouts of the Kindle unless they make it more accessible to visually impaired students.

You see, the Kindle’s “Text-to-speech” feature is viewed as an ideal way for visually impaired and blind students to be able to access information. It used to be that they had to depend on either expensive recordings or other less than ideal solutions. With text to speech, they could have much more control over the material, being able to search it by page or content. One problem though, due to the way the menus are arranged you need to be able to SEE the screen to find and activate the feature.

Whoops.

It could rapidly escalate into a major issues for Amazon including discrimination lawsuits. The Seattle Times reports…

The Federation for the Blind sued one of the schools that participated in this pilot program – Arizona State University – in June, along with the American Council of the Blind and a blind ASU student, arguing it was discriminating against blind students. That case is ongoing.

The group also filed complaints with the Department of Justice against five other schools that are participating in the Kindle trial with Amazon. Wisconsin and Syracuse are not among those schools.

Ken Frazier, director of Wisconsin-Madison’s library system, said the library bought 20 Kindle DX devices for use in a history class this fall. Though he’s not sure how many blind students are at his school, he said many students have difficulties reading texts for various reasons, such as learning disabilities.

No word on if these groups have ever sued print books for discrimination against the blind, or radio stations for discriminating against the deaf. While a court case seems to me a big excessive, I understand how frustrating it must be to have a feature like that rendered useless by bad planning. It really does need to be fixed, since the ability to open up texts to more people through technology is one of the most important aspects of Ebooks, in my opinions.

Amazon has promised to rethink the feature which it seems they mainly included in the device as a way for sighted people to listen to books while driving or otherwise distracted, so expect a way for the Kindle 3 to actually read menus aloud in addition to reading text. Dare I say it, but Amazon really should have seen this problem coming.

Another Ebook vendor that is having problems, but in this case the sort of problems they were dreaming of, is Barnes and Noble. No word on the lawsuit that Spring Design has filed against the upcoming Nook, but the presales of the device are going even better than B&N had hoped for. People preordering the device now wont be able to actually get the device until Dec 11th at the earliest due to high demand (as was reported HERE first), B&N has confirmed. It is also being speculated that online demand is so high you won’t be able to walk into a Barnes and Noble shop and buy a Nook off the shelf until January. Barnes and Noble aren’t commenting on that rumour (which feels accurate to me), but they are now saying they will TRY to get demo units into as many stores as they can by the end of November. Amazon, if you will recall, had similar supply problems when they released the first Kindle.

Lots of interesting developments in content news as well.

First and foremost Harlequin, one of the publishers that has really understood and embraced the promise of Ebooks, has put their money where their mouth is once again. They have created a digital-only imprint called Carina Press which will function independantly of their main print business. Carina will not focus only on Harlequin’s normal Romance market, but also offer other genre’s such as Science Fiction, mystery/thrillers and erotica.

Headed by Executive Editor Angela James, a well respected figure in the young Digital Publishing industry, Carina books will be available directly from Carina’s website as well as third party E-vendors and will begin to go on sale next summer. Currently the plan is for Carina to publish new Ebooks weekly. How do they intend to put out that amount of content? By reaching out to unpublished and new writers of course, which is one of the most exciting aspects of this project in my opinion.

According to the press release..

Carina Press is currently accepting submissions in all genres of commercial fiction. Carina Press will consider shorter stories, genre novels of 50,000 to 100,000 words and longer, and complex narratives of over 100,000 words. Carina Press will also acquire books that have been previously released in print form, but for which the author has either retained digital rights or had digital rights revert to them. All submissions should be sent to submissions@carinapress.com.

I think digital only publishing houses are definitely the way of the future and will become more and more important as Ebook Readers become more common. People have commented again and again that you tend to read more when using Ebooks, so there is an ever growing need for digital content. Carina Press and other digital publishers are perfectly positioned to feed that demand.

Congrats to Harlequin and Carina Press, may they go from strength to strength.

One last development to report, but one that tickles me to no end. The Princeton Theological Seminary’s library, one of the oldest and most prestigious such collections in the United States, has been digitized by the Internet Archive.

The Seminary says in it’s press release…

Approximately 21,000 items have been scanned to date. These books include historical sources about Princeton and Princeton Seminary, early editions of John Calvin in Latin and English, illustrated works on early Protestant missions, and classic biblical commentaries, among much else. All of these books are available to alumni/ae without restriction. The URL of the Internet Archive is http://www.archive.org/details/Princeton. We hope that you will download these books, share links to them with friends, and perhaps introduce this collection to your congregations.

Most downloaded book so far from the Princeton collection on the Archive? Demon possession and allied themes : being an inductive study of phenomena of our own times published by John Livingston Nevius in 1894. I kid you not! I downloaded it as both a PDF (to admire the original typography) as well as in EPUB, all for free. HOW FRICKIN’ COOL IS THAT???!!!

The ability of Ebooks and the internet, with the help of groups like the Internet Archive, to make this kind of information and knowledge available to the public, when otherwise it would molder away, lost even to scholars fills me with a renewed sense of hope and purpose for both mankind and technology.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go brush up on my exorcism techniques.

Zealot (468 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).