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With support from several prominent American partners, Philips spinoff IREX Technologies entered the U.S. e-book market yesterday when it unveiled a device intended to compete directly with the Kindle and the Sony Reader. The IREX DR800SG, which features 3G wireless connectivity through Verizon and access to the recently launched Barnes & Noble eBookstore, will land in Best Buy stores late next month.
Online writing community Protagonize—a platform for collaborative, interactive fiction—announced last week that it will begin implementing an optional subscription system. While core services will remain free, paid accounts are set to include, among other features, ad-free browsing, personal blogs, and reader statistics.
In a bid to position itself alongside social networking phenomena like Facebook and Twitter, online publishing service Scribd unveiled a host of new social features yesterday. Users can now create personal reading lists, connect with those who share similar interests, and subscribe to instant updates from favorite authors, publishers, and even other readers.
Hoping to ramp up competition in the e-book arena, Sony announced the launch of a new—and less expensive—line of digital readers on Tuesday evening. The Reader Pocket Edition and Reader Touch Edition, priced at $199 and $299 respectively, will hit stores later this month. The company also said that its online store will knock two dollars off the cost of new and bestselling e-books, matching the $9.99 price Amazon set for Kindle titles in 2007.
Yet another contender entered the rapidly crowding e-book market yesterday when electronics giant Samsung announced the South Korean debut of its first e-book reader, the SNE-50K. The six-and-a-half-ounce device, which will retail for the equivalent of about $270, is not expected to reach the American market until 2010.
For those unaccustomed to absorbing more than 140 characters at a sitting, Penguin is set to release a volume that pares classic books down to a series of tweet-sized chunks. Twitterature, the brainchild of two University of Chicago freshmen, promises to deliver works by Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce, and J. K. Rowling in no more than twenty tweets apiece.
Between January and April, Oxford University Press added 1.5 million public “tweets” to its Oxford English Corpus, a vast electronic database that collects examples of words in context. Among the findings: Language use on Twitter tends to focus on the self and the present, while the social networking service’s insistence on brevity gives rise to some creative solutions.
Many in the publishing industry now consider Twitter—as they do Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube—an essential marketing venue for books and authors. But authors hoping to tweet their way to the social-networking top need more than a Twitter account—they need a game plan.
Lexcycle, the company that created Stanza, the free e-book application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, yesterday announced that it had been acquired by Amazon. Neither company disclosed financial details. "We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition, representatives from Lexcycle wrote on the company's blog. "Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read e-books from our many content partners."
Today, it seems that we have access to an unlimited amount of information all the time, and for those of us who want to be alone with our thoughts, that information is getting harder and harder to avoid. More and more of us suffer from a condition sometimes called "digital information overload," or "infomania."
