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POPS10 Most Brilliant Gadgets Of 2008 Popular Mechanics announced its picks for the 2008 Breakthrough Awards awards in what the publication called The 10 Most Brilliant Gadets of the Year. Here's the list of international winners; you may be surprised at the gadgets on the list.
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POPSThe Future of Reading The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity, via a system called Whispernet
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POPSElectronic Papyrus: The Digital Book, Unfurled The black-and-white display holds about 22 lines of a book page, depending on the font, all shown in the crisp black type provided by technology from E Ink, also used in Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers. The screen changes from one page to the next in about half a second, at the touch of a thumb.
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POPSAmazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues. Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”
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POPSSome E-Books Are More Equal Than Others As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table. You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony? The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”
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POPSAmazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said. Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned. Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish. An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.” People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. “Of all the books to recall,” said Charles Slat
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POPSTalking about Kindle 2.0 Already? A day after Amazon's new reader is released, and Brad Stone at the New York Times is already making "helpful" suggestions about what the next version should include. Sounds like an attitude of tech entitlement. But the fact that folks are already talking about the next version also points out just how many flaws are in the current Kindle, and also how important this area is for personal tech.
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POPSAre e-books the new newspapers? Trend Monitor was writing about newspapers being circulated using what was then called "data broadcasting". We brought out our own 'ebook' at the time designed to work with floppy disk. With wireless distribution, this could finally become the next big technology given the enormous financial and environmental cost of paper newspapers, journals, magazines and books. The way a subscription model would work is that publishers would (jojntly or singly) lease ebooks to customers as part of the subscription, so they would not have to pay upfront costs.
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POPSApple building a Kindle clone? I hope if this is true Amazon and Apple find some way to co-exist -- it would be terrible to have some publishers work with Apple and some with Amazon. Both stores should have the same books, in the same format -- let the companies compete on the hardware front.
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POPSKindle - eBook for the Future To be honest, I own the Kindle so my comments are biased. I also am a gadget nut and have owned previous incarnations of ebooks in the past (Rocket Reader). The Kindle, in my opinion, is a definite winner. The always accessible store. Fast downloads without a computer. Readable screen. Easy operation. Bookmarks, annotations, and highlighting. It has everything I was looking for in an electronic book reader. IMO, the Sony doesn't compare. Content alone makes it a winner. Sony has access to 20,000 titles. Kindle to over 80,000.
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POPSNew Sony Reader has touch display, note-taking stylus I have both the SONY PRS-500 and the Kindle and prefer the Kindle simply because it is easier to put content on the device and has a wider range of content. Until Sony gets their pricing down to match Amazon and until there is wireless, the PRS-500 is the last SONY I will purchase.
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POPSPrint Book Sales Down, Ebook Sales Up A sign of things to come, preferences aside. I sell both print and ebooks and just like the majority of my customers, I prefer the print format. However, when e-readers are more affordable and functional, I am pretty certain things will change. Additionally, every generation is increasingly computer literate, which will lead to greater sales of ebooks. I am currently educating myself in the creation and marketing of of dynamic ebooks so that I can be up to speed in the publishing field. If you have an interest in writing an ebook, let me know! Also, I'll have a new website soon that will sell both ebooks and ereaders (some new ones are on the horizon that will be more reader-friendly). What's your opinion? Can you adapt? Would you just read books on your computer or prefer a light-weight reader such as the Kindle or similar?
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POPSAll Hail Our Glorious Leader! Note: The official Obama campaign website is doing this. They're screaming about McCain running the sleaziest campaign ever, while they're actively trying to stifle dissent against Obama. Not refuting it; not ridiculing it; not even engaging with it. Trying to keep it from being said at all. If this is like last time, they won't even send a campaign rep to the show, which is just down the street from their HQ. No, just send in the phone zombies. And they're getting away with this. I guess because if you have a problem with it, you're a racist? I've got my Amazon Kindle right here and I just downloaded Freddoso's book. While I still can.
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POPSRemember when .... star Trek seemed like science fiction? Well remember those notebook/computer/books? Guess what !
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POPSKindle 2.0 Out Feb 9 This is a hotly anticipated gadget -- but launching an expensive book reader right in the middle of a major recession isn't the best timing.
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