This, folks, was one of the reasons why the Nook failed. B&N underestimated consumers who were savvy enough to figure out that they could read Nook ebooks on other hardware, but they couldn’t do jack with B&N’s tablets because of the sparse app store.
Source: B&N is Shutting Down One of Its Top Three Digital Blunders on 15 March | The Digital Reader
At seven inches with a 1024 x 600 resolution screen and 1.2GHz dual-core processor, the so-called Iconia B1 tablet will have somewhat similar specs to Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.66%’s Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Inc. BKS -0.66%’s Nook Color. But Acer plans to undercut those best-selling tablets’ $139 price tag by offering the Iconia B1 for around $99, the person said. The final shelf price will be determined country-by-country.
Shipments of ebook readers by year-end will fall to 14.9 million units, down a steep 36 percent from the 23.2 million units in 2011 that now appears to have been the peak of the ebook reader market. Another drastic 27 percent contraction will occur next year when ebook reader shipments decline to 10.9 million units. By 2016, the ebook reader space will amount to just 7.1 million units—equivalent to a loss of more than two-thirds of its peak volume in 2011.
If you buy e-books from Amazon, and want to engage in a bit of digital civil disobedience—by stripping the files’ DRM and making sure that Amazon can’t deny you access—we’re about to show you how. Yes, many parts of the Internet have known about this technique for some time now, but we feel that it bears mentioning again here..
via DRM be damned: how to protect your Amazon e-books from being deleted | Ars Technica.
Now, as West himself noted, these files are for your personal use only—they’re not meant to be distributed anywhere. Enjoy!
The Nook HD features a 7-inch display (1440 x 900 resolution), a dual-core 1.3GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, expandable microSD storage, an 11.1-ounce weight, and advertised battery life of 10.5 hours of reading and 9 hours of video. In its publicity materials, Barnes & Noble didn’t exactly pull its punches against archrival Amazon, claiming the Nook HD is 20 percent lighter, a half-inch narrower, and armed with a sharper-resolution screen than the Kindle Fire HD.
via Barnes & Noble’s Nook HD Tablets Face iPad, Kindle Fire HD.
The Kindle was identified as the only product that met the department’s requirements, according to the Justification and Approval (J&A) for other than full and open competition. Apple’s iPad was rejected because it fell under the tablet or computer category rather than as a single-function e-reader, and had additional features that “are not only unnecessary, but also present unacceptable security and usability risks for the government’s needs in this particular project.”
via U.S. Department of State cancels large Kindle contract | ITworld.
There’s no word yet on when the new screen might hit the market, but I do know that it can display 4 thousand colors (4,096 to be exact) with a resolution of 75ppi. While that might seem awfully low, there’s a reason for it. Plastic Logic added color to their existing screen in much the same way that E-ink did.
The color is provided by a filter lying on top of the grayscale screen. The screen underneath the filter has a resolution of 150 ppi, and that gets cut in half because you need 3 pixels to do red, green, and blue. There’s also a 4th pixel which is left alone (it shows the white/black of the underlying screen. The RGBW are arranged in a 2 by 2 grid in the layer on top of the Plastic Logic screen.
via Plastic Logic Unveils a Flexible Color ePaper Screen (video) – The Digital Reader.
MS just buried the only lawsuit that could have blown a hole the size of Manhattan in their anti-Android patent portfolio.
via Microsoft Invests $300 Million In Nook e-Readers – Slashdot.
Kindle Fire’s best feature is its ability as an e-book reader, according to reviewers. It is much more, however. For a list price of $199, customers get a seven-inch display, 8GB of RAM, free storage on Amazon’s cloud, WiFi and USB connections, the ability to run any Android-compatible app or game and automagical connections to media (for which you can pay Amazon) including e-books, music, movies and anything else you can find on the Internet.
Fire’s list price is $430 lower than the list price of the latest edition of the iPad and $249 less than Amazon’s discount price for a new ten-inch Samsung Galaxy tablet and $50 less than the seven-inch Samsung Galaxy.
via The tablet that changed the whole market for tablets, and isn’t a tablet | ITworld.
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