Read More »

To be taken with a grain of salt: Apple’s long-rumored tablet will arrive at market early next year and will feature a 10.6-inch panel designed with e-books in mind. This according to the occasionally accurate DigiTimes.

Read More »

Six years after shuttering its first e-book effort, Barnes & Noble has embarked on a new one. Monday afternoon, the bookseller announced what it describes as “the world’s largest eBookstore,” an online storefront that boasts 700,000 titles.

Read More »

Read More »

Apple has fleshed out its chip design group with another key hire. The company has recruited Bob Drebin, former CTO of AMD’s Graphics Products Group, as a senior director. Apple won’t say what it is exactly Drebin’s going to work on, though it’s a safe bet it’s related to the multicore graphics processors in which Drebin has his expertise.

Read More »

Sun and IBM reportedly prepare for a Monday announcement. Plus, Stephen Colbert on Twitter, iPhone camera rumors, and YouTube’s 2009 losses. (April 3)

Read More »

Market source reports from Taiwanese trade mags are best taken with a grain of salt, if not an entire salt flat–particularly if they concern Apple. That said, claims today that Cupertino has ordered a bunch of 3.2-megapixel CMOS image sensors for its next-generation iPhone seem entirely reasonable, if only because the device’s current camera is so poor.

Read More »

With its speech synthesizers, brain current-operated controls and solar power source, the device described in Monec Holding’s patent–“electronic device, preferably an electronic book”–would seem to have little in common with Apple’s iPhone. Still, it is a “light-weight” electronic device with a “touch-screen” and “a power source.” And these days, that’s enough file suit over…

Read More »

Reports that Apple is developing a new touchscreen device are picking up traction and credibility. In the past few days, claims made in a Chinese-language financial newspaper have been reinforced first by Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal and now by Reuters as well. Consensus seems to be that Apple has ordered 10-inch touchscreens from Wintek and that those screens are destined for an entirely new device. Netbook is the word most often bandied about for it. But might it be an e-book reader?

Read More »

Much ado about the Amazon Kindle 2.0 this week:

After its official unveiling on Feb. 9, the e-book reader started shipping on Monday, and actually managed to grab much–but not all–of the hype that’s surrounded Twitter of late. The device has been met with much acclaim, though it’s by no means unanimous.

Read More »

Rather than argue with the Authors Guild over the text-to-speech feature of its new Kindle 2 e-book reader, Amazon is modifying the device’s software to make it optional. Authors and publishers will now be able to decide if they want the function enabled or not on titles for which they own the rights.

Read More »

The idea of derivative rights and royalties for text-to-speech “audiobooks” like those provided by Amazon’s Kindle 2 might seem ludicrous now, but will that be the case in a few years when the device’s grating text-to-speech voice has been inevitably humanized? A reasonable question, and one that Roy Blount Jr., president of the Authors Guild, poses in an Op Ed in the New York Times today.

Read More »

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader may not be the iPod of the book world yet. But it will be some day if Citigroup research analyst Mark Mahaney has anything to say about it. In a report to clients Monday, Mahaney, who in May predicted the device would generate $750 million for Amazon by 2010, said the company could be on track to sell as many as 380,000 Kindles this year.

Read More »

OK. So maybe Amazon’s Kindle isn’t ‘the Zune of reading.‘ Certainly, that’s the impression given by CitiGroup analyst Mark Mahaney’s prediction that the e-book reader will generate three-quarters of a billion dollars for Amazon by 2010.

Read More »

Read More »