Students can research books on their iPods.... But will they?

Questia Library Plus iPhone app. Credit: Questia

We'll spare you the obvious "there's an app for that" joke. But you can get a library's worth of books on your phone.

Questia, an online research portal for students, announced its application today for reading books, articles and periodicals on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

The app costs 99 cents for 5,000 public-domain books and a week of unlimited access. After that, users can buy a two-week subscription for $9.99.

There are so many things wrong with this we don't know where to start.

For one, students don't like to buy things. Especially digital things. Many strapped-for-cash college kids aren't buying songs at a dollar a pop. Why would they buy books they can find free in their university library or on Google Books?

But you get the convenience of reading and browsing on your iPod, right?

C'mon, have you ever tried reading anything substantial on that tiny screen? The Kindle app is great, but we can't get through a chapter without our eyes bursting into flames.

Two universities recently rejected the Kindle DX device as a replacement for textbooks, in part because it lacks features like advanced notation and text-to-speech. (Considering that the alternative is a paper book, their issues are kind of absurd, but that's for a different discussion.)

If they didn't like the Kindle, imagine what they'll think of a device that's about a quarter of the size.

The Questia app is a decent implementation of a very niche idea. If you're planning to actually do research with dozens of sources, you'll be better off with more fully featured alternatives, which includes Google's academic offerings and Questia's own desktop-friendly site.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Amazon announces Kindle for PC (no Kindle device needed, but bring your own PC)

The Kindle for PC software will let users read Amazon's digital books without having to buy the $259 Kindle device. Credit: Amazon

Most people think of Amazon's Kindle as a slim piece of hardware the size of a very thin paperback book.

In fact, Kindle is also a piece of software that displays digital books on any device Amazon chooses. Today, the Seattle online retailing giant unveiled a Kindle version for computers. The application was part of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system launch event in New York this morning. Expected to be released in November, the program will also run on Microsoft's earlier operating systems, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Dubbed Kindle for PC, the free software will let readers view full-color photos and use touch screens to browse books, turn pages and adjust font sizes for digital books purchased at Amazon's online bookstore. Amazon has released a version of the reader for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

Amazon's announcement came days after rival bookseller Barnes & Noble said it would start selling its own device, the nook. Due to ship in November, the $259 reader features the same gray-scale E Ink screen as the Kindle, but also has a separate color touch screen. Nook owners also can share their books with their friends for up to 14 days at a time.

In contrast, the Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX, two devices sold by Amazon, has only the gray-scale screens and don't allow users to "lend" digital copies of their books to others.

By releasing Kindle for PC, Amazon is expanding the audience for its digital books beyond just readers who can afford to buy its $259 device to about 1 billion of the world's PC users.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

Barnes & Noble's nook digital book reader to let users lend titles to their friends

The $259 nook digital book reader. Credit: Barnes & Noble.

Barnes & Noble Inc., looking ahead to the next chapter in digital publishing, this afternoon took the wraps off an electronic book reader, dubbed "nook." 

Anyone who has read Dr. Seuss' "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" will recall Theodor Geisel's Nook who took a look at the book on a hook. For Barnes & Noble's $259 device, the hook is its ability to let users lend their books to their friends for up to 14 days at a time. Using the LendMe feature, nook owners can send a copy of their digital titles to their friends' iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry or computer.

The second hook: The nook marries a gray-scale E Ink screen, which is standard with other digital readers such as the Sony Reader or the Kindle, with a separate color touch screen below the E Ink display (see photo to the right). As with the Kindle and the upcoming Sony Daily Edition, nook lets shoppers browse and buy books, newspapers and magazines wirelessly, and without a computer, by hopping on AT&T's cellular phone network.

The New York bookseller said it would start distributing the device in November (free shipping if ordered from the company's online store).

Barnes & Noble, which operates more than 777 stores in the U.S., in July re-launched its online bookstore, which carried 700,000 digital titles.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

LG's solar-powered e-book may leave Washington and Alaska readers in the dark

It's always sunny is Seoul. Credit: LG.

Pleasing vacation readers everywhere, South Korea's LG Display Co. on Tuesday announced a new e-book reader that comes complete with a 10" solar cell, so that you never again need run out of batteries while reading on the beach in Hawaii. 

Unless, that is, you're in Hilo. That's the gorgeous coastal town on the Big Island that, counterintuitively, is one of the cloudiest cities in the United States. It joins Juneau, Alaska, and Quillayute, Wash., on NOAA's short list of places where the sun shines as little as 30% of the year. 

When you consider cities like Yuma, Ariz., (90% sunlight), Redding, Calif., (88%) and even Los Angeles (73%), it's only fair to wonder if linking the availability of sunlight to literacy might be unfair to those relegated to less sunny climes.   

A cool four to five hours of direct sunlight would improve the device's run-time by about a day, meaning you could go a whole week without plugging it in if all you did on your tropical vacation was sit outside and read.

Sadly, the solar e-book won't be available until at least 2012.  That's because LG considers the 9.6% solar energy conversion rate inadequate and is holding out for something higher, like 14%.

As seen in the photo above, the cell is actually a completely separate panel from the screen -- a configuration that leaves the reader to stare at a rather unexciting black square at all times. But the point here is the potential:  E-books consume so little energy in the first place that a well-placed, efficient solar cell could make a reading device completely self-powered. 

You're on notice, print books:  Soon the only people that will read you will live in Alaska, Hawaii and outside of Seattle.

-- David Sarno

Judge sets November deadline for revised Google book deal

A New York judge overseeing the long-running case in which a group of authors and publishers sued Google over the company's attempt to obtain digital rights to millions of books ruled that the parties must submit a revised settlement agreement to the court by Nov. 9.

The previous agreement was scuttled last month when federal regulators notified the court that the pact may have been vulnerable to antitrust and copyright concerns. The Department of Justice filed an amicus brief after a wave of critics -- including authors, libraries and watchdog groups -- complained that the agreement was unfair.

A plaintiffs lawyer said the sides had been working "around the clock," and that the amended agreement would address the issues raised by the Justice Department, according to the Associated Press.

-- David Sarno

Move over, Wii -- Electronic book readers poised to become this holiday's hot ticket

Sony's Daily Edition is expected to hit store shelves later this year at $399. Credit: Sony Electronics.

Will digital books catch fire this holiday? According to an online survey, 1 in 5 shoppers said they planned to buy an electronic book reader such as a Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle this year.

When asked what they would like to get as a gift this year, about 1 in 10 cited a digital book reader. Portable music players, once the hot holiday ticket, got just 3.4% of the vote, while game consoles came in at 6%, according to the survey commissioned by Retrevo, a gadget review website.

Likely buyers tend to be men, under 35 years old, living in the Northeast where more people use public transportation, and with an average annual household income of more than $100,000, according to the survey of 771 respondents.

Of those who said they planned to spring for an electronic book reader, 62% said they would buy Amazon's Kindle 2 or Kindle DX, while 32% favored the Sony Reader. Although Amazon and Sony dominate the business today, more devices are scheduled to hit the U.S. market within the next year, including the $399 IREX expected later this fall and Plastic Logic due out in 2010.

To give its online bookstore a competitive advantage, Sony today is announcing it is throwing the doors open to independent authors to publish electronic books on its site. Sony said it has partnered with two companies, Smashwords and Author Solutions, to help independent writers self-publish digital books on Sony's eBook Store, which currently sells more than 130,000 titles. It also distributes millions of free public domain books via a partnership with Google. Amazon, on the other hand, boasts 350,000 titles for its Kindle readers.

Although sales of electronic books constitute less than 5% of the $25-billion book market, it's a fast-growing category within publishing, said Chris Smythe, director of Sony's online bookstore.

"With digital, people tend to buy more books," Smythe said. "It's easier, often cheaper, and you can get it right away."

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

How two dads turned the iPhone into a platform for children's books [Corrected]

Corrected Sept. 30, 2009: This post has been updated to include programmer Marin Balde as one of iStoryTime's four co-founders. Balde, who coded the company's original software platform, has since left the group.

Like most parents who find themselves juggling fussy tots and multiple chores and errands, Woody Sears and Graham Farrar have surrendered their mobile phones to distract their toddlers. It wasn't just the buttons and beeps on those devices that attracted their kids -- it was also the music and video clips that turned the phones into instant toys.

"But we always felt guilty about doing that," said Sears, a 31-year-old father of two who lives in Westchester, Calif.

So Sears and Farrar teamed up with two friends -- Peter Kyriacou and Marin Balde -- to come up with iStoryTime, a platform for creating children's books for the iPhone that can entertain their kids during shopping trips, airplane hops or long car rides to grandmother's house for a holiday weekend.

Drawing from $10,000 in combined savings, the partners took four months, working in their spare time, to start their business from scratch in January to launching their first app in April -- a 99-cent book called "Binky the Pink Elephant." Click on the video below for a narrated sample of the book.

Readers can choose either an adult or child narrator, whose voices were professionally recorded for each book. So far, "Binky" has sold more than 2,000 copies and ranks in the top 30 books sold on Apple's iTunes app store.

The self-funded startup, FrogDogMedia, now has six titles. Four are in the top 100 book apps. And with another 40 books waiting in the wings, the Santa Barbara publisher is on track to add a title a week, Sears said.

The revenue is split among authors, artists and FrogDogMedia, which plows its share back into building new features for its iStoryTime platform, such as highlighting text as the narrator reads it to help kids make the connection. Now that the core software is built, publishing a book costs an incremental $1,000 to $1,500 per title. Much of that expense goes to pay the recording studio for the time used to capture the voice-overs.

"It’s a great platform for developers," Sears said. "Apple takes care of the transactions so we can focus on the books. Content is king again."

But the best part about iStoryTime? "Our kids love the books," Sears said. "It's really exciting when we can show them the books. That's the best reward."

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

Sony sees Google Books settlement as 'profoundly positive'

Sony's new e-book reader. Credit: HO/AFP/Getty Images

Sony, a major player in the digital reading marketplace, this week stated that the settlement between Google and a group of authors and publishers "may have a profoundly positive impact on the market for e-book readers and related devices."

In a request to file an amicus brief in the 4-year-old copyright case, Sony expressed its support for a settlement under which Google and the rights holders would share revenues derived from commercial use of the company's vast online database of digitized books.

Under the settlement, Google would be able to sell access to millions of books online, as well as offer for-pay subscriptions that would allow libraries, universities and other institutions unfettered access to the Google Books collection. Google would pay rights holders 67% of the revenues generated from the database.

Google began a large-scale project to scan books at libraries around the nation in 2004.

On Thursday, Google announced that it would support the EPUB digital book format -- also recently embraced by Sony -- for more than 1 million public domain books that users will be able to download and read on reading devices that support the standard.

Separately, Abilene Christian University also filed a letter with the court expressing its support of the  settlement.

"The new access models created by the settlement will be of extraordinary value to research at our institution," said Provost Jeanine Varner in a statement, adding that it would lessen "inequalities among educational institutions as information becomes available to all students everywhere."

-- David Sarno

Follow my variable-rate stream of tech, media and culture musings on Twitter: @dsarno

Google Books embraces EPUB standard

Google today announced that it would adopt the EPUB digital book format for its distribution of digital books, giving the standard a significant boost in the ongoing tussle for a dominant digital book format.

EPUB, developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum and backed by companies such as Adobe Systems, Random House, Harlequin and OverDrive, is a technology standard that strives to be what MP3 is to digital music files and MPEG is to video.

In recent months, EPUB has emerged as one of the dominant formats for digital books. Sony two weeks ago also said it would begin selling digital books in the format.

Google's endorsement furthers the format's standing in the market but by no means guarantees its place as the de facto standard. Among EPUB's rival formats is the Kindle, Amazon's proprietary format used by its digital reader to display digital books purchased at its online bookstore.

In a blog post announcing Google's decision, the company's product manager, Brandon Badger, emphasized the open nature of EPUB:

We're excited to now offer downloads in EPUB format, a free and open industry standard for electronic books. It's supported by a wide variety of applications, so once you download a book, you'll be able to read it on any device or through any reading application that supports the format.

The standard is being applied to more than 1 million public domain books that Google has digitized. Aside from the Sony Reader, devices that can display EPUB books include the iPhone (using the Stanza application), Hanlin eReader, Cool-ER and the upcoming Plastic Logic device.

-- Alex Pham

Market for electronic 'paper' to hit $9.6 billion by 2018

Sales of electronic "paper" displays such those used in the Kindle and Sony Reader will approach $10 billion by 2018, up from an estimated $431 million this year, according to a report released today from DisplaySearch, a technology research firm.

“E-paper displays are taking off with consumers due to their low power consumption and ease of reading, especially in sunlight,” Jennifer Colegrove, DisplaySearch director of display technologies, said in a statement.

Colegrove said the popularity of "green" products is expected to give digital paper a sales boost. Consumers who cringe at throwing away newspapers and magazines can read articles guilt free on devices with e-paper, which sip less power than back-lighted LCD displays.

As a result, annual sales of digital book readers are projected to zoom from 1 million units in 2008 to 77 million in 2018.

Because of their thin profile, electronic paper has been embedded in items other than readers too, including magazines, credit cards, store-shelf tags and even clothing. Sound odd? Talk to the jacket.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.