From time to time we bring back some of the more popular articles and blogs posted on E-Reads. This one is from November 2009.

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A while back we wrote up a book lover who said she was reluctant to buy a Kindle “unless Amazon comes out with a special ‘book scented’ Kindle.” (See If They Can Make the Kindle Smell Like a Book, Maybe She’ll Buy One). It was all kind of a joke, but an enterprising manufacturer took it seriously enough to produce a line of aromatics simulating book scents. The aromas include New Book Smell and Classic Musty. The product is trademarked as Smell of Books™ and here’s how their website describes it:

Does your Kindle leave you feeling like there’s something missing from your reading experience?
Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don’t smell right?
If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the e-book bandwagon, you’re not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted digital books because they still don’t compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book.
But all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.
Now you can finally enjoy reading e-books without giving up the smell you love so much. With Smell of Books™ you can have the best of both worlds, the convenience of an e-book and the smell of your favorite paper book.
Smell of Books™ is compatible with a wide range of e-reading devices and e-book formats and is 100% DRM-compatible. Whether you read your e-books on a Kindle or an iPhone using Stanza, Smell of Books™ will bring back that real book smell you miss so much.

Among the five smells offered is “Crunchy Bacon”. This is a welcome novelty for noses jaded by such natural book fragrances as grass, leather, printer’s ink, and decaying paper. Hopefully, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France will invest heavily in shpritzing their collections with Crunchy Bacon. Some other but lesser known aromas associated with books are baked lamb shank, General Cho’s Chicken, and asparagus vinaigrette.

On a more scientific note, Henry Fountain of the New York Times reports on research to quantify old-book odors to help librarians preserve books more effectively. Fountain describes how conservators “analyzed the volatiles produced by 72 samples of old paper of different types and in varying condition from the 19th and 20th centuries, using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. They found that some compounds were reliable markers for paper with certain characteristics — high concentrations of lignin or rosin, for example, which make paper degrade relatively quickly.”

There was apparently no manifestation of crunchy bacon in the spectrum analyzed by the scientists, but it is well known that subatomic bacon particles are even more elusive to detect spectrometrically than the Higgs boson, and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN may be required to capture one.

Read Digging Into the Science of That Old-Book Smell.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

No Contest.

That’s the judgment rendered by technology maven David Pogue in his New York Times column evaluating the latest version of Kindle and comparing it to rivals iPad, Nook and Sony. Here’s his pronunciamento: “Certain facts are unassailable: that the new Kindle offers the best E Ink screen, the fastest page turns, the smallest, lightest, thinnest body and the lowest price tag of any e-reader. It’s also the most refined and comfortable.”

Following is a thumbnail sketch of Pogue’s take on Kindle 3 (in his own words):

• The smallness comes in the form of a 21 percent reduction in the dimensions from the previous Kindle…Yet the screen has the same six-inch diagonal measurements as always because they shaved away a lot of that empty beige (or now dark gray) plastic margin…The background gray is a few shades lighter than on any other reader, producing much better contrast behind the black text.
• The Kindle is almost ridiculously lightweight; at 8.5 ounces, it’s a third the weight of the iPad. That’s a big deal for a machine that you want to hold in your hands for hours.
• Then there is the $140 price. That’s for the model with Wi-Fi — a feature new to the Kindle that plays catch-up to the Barnes & Noble Nook…Quite a tumble from the Kindle’s original $400 price, and a tiny sliver of what you would pay for an iPad ($500 and way, way up).
• The Kindle’s catalog of 630,000 current books is 10 times the size of Apple’s.
• E Ink is great for battery life. (Amazon says that on the new Kindle, if you turn off the wireless features, you can read for a month on a single charge.)
• The new Kindle reduces the page-turn wait to well under a second. It’s the fastest page-turner among e-readers.
• The new Kindle’s nonremovable storage now holds twice as many books: 3,500 of them.
• The tiny joystick has been replaced by cellphone-like four-way control buttons, and the page-turn Forward and Back buttons, which flank both edges, are silent now, for the benefit of sleeping spouses. And the new Kindle handles PDF documents much better now; you can even add notes to them and magnify them.

Are there flaws in Kindle 3? Yes. Problems? Some. Invidious comparisons to competitive devices? Sure.  Learn what they are in New Kindle Leaves Rivals Farther Back

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Posing as the chief digital officer of a Big Six publisher, E-Reads’ own Richard Curtis got a sneak peek at Floppatronic’s new Pfleeber reading device and has reviewed it for Publishers Weekly.

His verdict? “‘Kindle Killer’ is an overused term,” writes Curtis. “but if anything deserves it more, we’ll eat our laptop.”

Curtis awards the device 4 1/2 stars, withholding a full five because of the gadget’s dumb name.  Here are some features he finds so compelling:

• Its 8.5″×5.5″ dimensions are almost Grecian in their perfection.
• It weighs a mere 15 ounces, yet it’s more flexible than the Plastic Logic Que.
• Its operating system is 50-pound paper stock bound on the left-hand seam.
• The bright ivory-white surface enables us to make out 10-point text clearly in ambient light even at an astounding 20-degree reading angle.
• The pages make a satisfying pffftt with each activation, simulating the sound made by the iPad.

In fact, the Pfleeber sounds suspiciously like another and quite familiar reading device but we can’t quite put our finger on it. The fact that Curtis’s review appears on PW’s “Soapbox” page where his satires are often published leads us to wonder if our leg isn’t being pulled…

Check it out here and see if our suspicions are correct.

Bob Tedeschi, informally surveying available book-reading applications in the Personal Tech section of the New York Times, awarded laurels to Kobo.

The reason? Unlike other e-book reading apps you can use Kobo to read on any device (except Kindle).

“The books you buy from most of these apps are, for now, readable only within the company’s apps. It is as if you have to travel back to the bookstore every time you want to open the book. That is not a major headache, as long as the apps that support your e-books survive forever, with the support of the major hardware manufacturers. But if Amazon folds its apps, or if you decide you want to read your books on another e-reading app, the books will be far less useful.”

Which is why Tedeschi has settled on the Kobo.  In a rapidly shifting e-book terrain it’s impossible to  predict which format will retain standing a few years (or even a few months!) from now.  Not even Kindle format has a lifetime guarantee – your lifetime, that is. Armed with your Kobo reader, you don’t have to worry about waking up to learn the digital gods have removed your format while you slept.

“I’m starting my own digital library through the Kobo iPad app, and I plan to hedge by not buying a lot of books in the near future,” declares Teseschi.

Details in E-Reader Applications for Today, and Beyond

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Nilay Patel has posted on Engadget a preview of the excruciatingly long awaited Microsoft Courier tablet. It could well give Apple’s iPad a run for the money.

” We’re told Courier will function as a ‘digital journal,’” writes Patel, “and it’s designed to be seriously portable: it’s under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn’t much bigger than a 5×7 photo when closed. That’s a lot smaller than we expected…The interface appears to be pen-based and centered around drawing and writing, with built-in handwriting recognition and a corresponding web site that allows access to everything entered into the device in a blog-like format complete with comments…Most interestingly, it looks like the Courier will also serve as Microsoft’s e-book device, with a dedicated ecosystem centered around reading.”

No news on price or release date except a vague “Q3/Q4″. Below is a video demo. For the full Engadget article click here.

RC

Are you as weary as we are of doomsayers sounding the death knell of print books? The latest comes via a blog on Huffington Post by Dan Agin, editor in chief of the online journal ScienceWeek. You would think that with a Ph.D. in biological psychology and three decades of lab research experience in neurobiology, Agin would be smarter than to make categorical statements like “Requiescant in pace, big print publishing.The run is finished.” Aside from his solecism (it’s Requiescat), he has buried print books and declared Game Over.

Agin has made the mistake that so many other Print-is-Deaders have done, condemning the medium when what we really hate is the system that supports it. We’ve said it many times but it bears reiteration: there is nothing wrong with printed books – just that the way they are distributed, which is appallingly stupid and wasteful. But does that mean print is finished? Not even close. However, Agin is entitled to his opinion and goodness knows there are a lot of people who share it.

What surprises us, though, is how willing this credentialed neurobiologist is to exalt Kindle and other e-readers when there is an impressive body of scientific evidence suggesting that reading on a screen may not be all that it’s cracked up to be. Some researchers have suggested that readers – especially young ones – are easily distracted by e-books, fail to immerse themselves the way they do in print, and do not retain information as well as they do with words on paper. In a posting last fall called The Medium is the Screen. The Message is Distraction, we quoted Sandra Aamodt, former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience: “People read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent… Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read.”

And Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, points out that “No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain.” But “my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).”

Read Agin’s article, Kindle Armageddon: How the Publishing Industry Is Slitting Its Own Throat, and form your own opinion.

Richard Curtis

Earlier this week Baker & Taylor introduced its Blio e-book reader software to attendees of the the Digital Book World conference. First presented at the Consumer Electronic Show, the product made an unusual splash because – unlike the scores of e-reader devices presented at the Las Vegas expo, Blio is not hardware. It’s a platform.

After watching the spellbinding demo I owe Baker & Taylor an apology for twitting them about the name of their product. With use it will become as familiar to us as Google or Kindle. And it will be used often and well, I guarantee. It is an absolutely terrific product.

By downloading the free software you can read an e-book on just about any tablet, phone, or netbook. Unlike so many e-readers Blio’s screen is full color, not E Ink, making it the perfect vehicle for such products as color-illustrated textbooks or children’s picture books. “Blio actually lays out the ‘pages’ as they would be seen on paper, with typography and illustrations copied across,” write Priya Ganapati and Charlie Sorrel on Wired.com’s Gadget Lab. “It also uses video.” In fact, with Blio loaded into your reader you can interact with your book by importing illustrations – jpegs and videos – from the publisher’s website, making your book a living thing. This is especially true for children’s books with read-aloud features, interactive text, automatic page-turning, and a lookup archive for every single word – at least of every word in the book demo’s at DBW.

Blio’s bookstore will be rolled out in February with one million free books plus proprietary titles supplied by publishers. Ganapati and Sorrel add: “Other big features include a text-to-speech capability, an online library that stores each customer’s books, making them available on any Internet enabled device, including smartphones. The books can also be downloaded for offline reading.”

Downside? Craig Morgan Teicher, writing for MediaBiestro’s Galleycat, says they include “an apparent lack of Mac support: the system requirements on the Website list only Windows. Also, blogger Mike Cane points out that the Website shows no support for writers to create their own eBooks, meaning this is unlikely to become a self-publishing platform, a factor which many think is essential to the future of publishing.” Having witnessed the interactivity of Blio I’m not sure how Cane came to that conclusion. I can visualize Blio as a great vehicle for the creation of vooks.

Think you might be interested? Come on in – the software’s free. Click here.

Richard Curtis

After a gestation longer than an elephant, speculation characterized by preposterous fantasies, and a delivery witnessed by millions, Apple finally brought forth a bouncing baby iPad. Not since the Essenes have such Messianic hopes and dreams been cherished, and whether they will be fulfilled remains to be seen after technicians take it apart and consumers render their verdict. Nevertheless, it seemed difficult for tech pundits to resist the temptation to kneel before it.

Here for instance is what Gizmodo’s blogger had to say:

• The guts: It’s a half-inch thick—just a hair thicker than the iPhone, for reference—and weighs 1.5 pounds…It’s also loaded with 802.11 n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, a 30-pin iPod connector, a speaker, a microphone, an accelerometer and a compass.
• It’s substantial but surprisingly light. Easy to grip. Beautiful. Rigid. Starkly designed. The glass is a little rubbery but it could be my sweaty hands. And it’s fasssstttt.
• Apple didn’t really sell this point, but it’s the single biggest benefit of the iPad: speed. It feels at least a generation faster than the iPhone 3GS. Lags and waits are gone, and the OS and apps respond just as quickly as you’d hope. Rotating between portrait and landscape modes, especially, is where this new horsepower manifests in the OS.
• iBooks: It’s an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn’t seem to strains the eyes—but time will tell on that.
• Pictures: Pinch, zoom, whatever—like we said, it’s fast—the photo app is faster that iPhoto performs on my aging Core2Duo laptop.
• Apps: Apps can play in their native resolution, or be 2x uprezzed for the screen. How does it look? An ATV game we tried actually looked pretty good—limited more by its base polygon count than the scaling process itself. Bottom line: it’s about as elegant solution as Apple could have offered, even if that graphics won’t be razor sharp.
• Browsing: Over Wi-Fi, Gizmodo loaded quickly. The 9.7-inch screen is an excellent size for reading the site. You can pinch zoom, but you won’t need to. Of course, on such a pretty web browsing experience, not having Flash makes the big, empty video boxes in the middle of a page is pretty disappointing. Put differently, the fatal flaw of Apple’s mobile browser has never been more apparent.

For these features and many more, the $499 price is universally acclaimed to be a huge bargain for this seamless blend of computer, game and movie player, e-book readers, and more. As to the battery, about which many expressed the gravest skepticism, Apple claims it will run for ten hours even with intense use such as movies. If you don’t like what they’re showing on your flight to Australia, load your iPad up with half a dozen films and you’ll be there in no time.

To see Gizmodo’s hands-on test-drive, click here. You can also view an absolute feeding-frenzy of comments, blogs, tweets, and eructations. Be careful not to stick your hand in there: it will be bitten off.

As for e-books and newspapers, Publishers Weekly‘s Calvin Reid writes: “The device was demoed with newspaper content from the New York Times and supports video and audio embedded in the content. Most importantly, the iPad will support the ePub e-book standard and Apple has developed its own e-reader software, iBooks, and will also launch an iBookstore. E-book pricing is reported to be in the $15 range.” If you plan to write a book on iPad instead of reading one, there is both a virtual keyboard (left) and a pull-out.

Now that iPad is born there doesn’t seem to be much left to live for. But we will carry on as best we can, comforting ourselves with the knowledge that the Apple has scaled a pinnacle from which the view of the digital future is truly intoxicating.

Richard Curtis

Scorecard here! Can’t tell yer e-book readers without a scorecard!

That seems to be the consensus of bloggers covering the recent Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas. Inspired by the success of the Kindle, Sony eReader, and Nook, a host of would-be Kindle-killers and Nookslayers has flooded the marketplace with lookalikes, playalikes and costalikes. Consumers who’ve been sitting on the sidelines waiting for a second generation of e-readers are now shaking their heads in confusion. Huffington Post has produced a handy-dandy guide for the perplexed with photos and thumbnail descriptions of each device. Just click here, then go the red navigation bar and click “Next” to view a complete array of current e-book reader choices. It may answer your questions. Or it may leave you as mixed up as ever.

So…with so many gadgets to choose among and factors to compare, is there a simple single decisive criterion to guide us home? In fact there is: Content. All things being more or less equal, you can’t go too wrong selecting a reader with a rich library or store of books, magazines, newspapers and other publications.

A case in point is a device displayed at the Consumer Electronic Show called the Skiff Reader. Dan Nosowitz, Gizmodo’s reviewer, gave it high marks for beauty, slimness, weight, screen size and functionality: “I just got a chance to play with the big-screened, touchscreened Skiff Reader, which is targeted at periodicals. It’s incredibly thin, incredibly light, and they’ve even got a color screen prototype—Kindle and Nook should be scared.”

They should be scared but they won’t be for one simple reason: Skiff does not have a store or library of content behind it. “Kindle and Nook waltzed into this world with massive and well-known stores behind them,” says Gizmodo, “and the Skiff is creating one from scratch. They’ve got a lot of publishers behind them, but the store right now is pretty bare. Of course, since it’s not out yet, this may all be a moot point—but I wonder if their scrappy little store can compete with Amazon and Barnes & Noble.”

Wilson Rothman, blogging for Gawker, states the case for content even more bluntly in a posting titled There Are Officially Too Many E-Book Readers. A lot of consumers, he writes, “will buy some $100 reader, then wonder why they can’t borrow books from their friend who has a Nook, or can’t get the same stuff that’s sold on the Kindle.”

Rothman also raises a very important point: if the new breed of cheap e-book readers doesn’t carry legitimate content, customers might turn to file-sharing pirates for it. “Cheap e-ink readers will essentially be targeted at people with libraries of pirated books,” he says.

What’s a consumer to do? Rothman seems to be urging us to wait a little longer until full color, multitouch tablets reach the marketplace. “E-ink is an interim technology, a stopgap measure to keep our attention till we have full-color video tablets (slates?) whose batteries last for ‘days’.”

Rothman’s bottom line? “Go Kindle, wait for a cheap-as-hell reader, pray for a slate, or buy a book. A real paper-and-ink book.”

Richard Curtis

SciTeDaily.com tells us that a team of University of Tokyo researchers claims to have simulated the process that Google recently patented to produce error-free images during high-speed scans of books.

The process corrects distortions created by the bending of pages near the binding, and does it while those pages are being rapidly turned. “The computer knows what the pattern looks like when it is flat,” SciTeDaily explains, “so when the computer sees the amount of distortion the pattern undergoes upon falling on the page, it can deduce the curvature.”

You can read about it here, and for the technical-minded there are cool illustrations and a video. You might also like to see a truly high-speed scanner: check out this one, also developed by Tokyo scientists, that flips pages faster than a card deck shuffled by a Vegas croupier.

For a thrilling climax to your tour of scanners you can see the world’s sexiest one in the video below but be warned that it is X-rated and you may need to take a cold shower after watching it in action.

Generally speaking there are two fundamental scanning processes. One simply photographs pages to produce a read-only PDF file. The other produces a computer-readable file – an RTF – that is the basis for conversion of printed books into digital files for Kindles, Nooks, Sony eReaders, and other devices.

The latter is a far more complex, demanding and expensive process. Ideally the scanner should produce a perfect text file but that is seldom the case. Not only are there distortions like those described above but frequently, if the pages are yellow or wrinkled or dusty the camera does not pick the words up cleanly. For example, “nn” can come out looking like “m”, or “l” might show up as “1″. Though scanning technology has come a long way, you need to understand that even 99.9% perfection in the “OCR” (Optical Character Recognition) still means one typo in every three or four pages. Therefore proofreaders are almost always required. Once the RTF is completely error-free, it is ready to be formatted for your e-book.

Richard Curtis