Saturday, April 4, 2015

Where can you Buy HarperCollins eBooks other Than Amazon?

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Amazon and Harpercollins are trying to renegotiate their contract for print and digital books.  They have been in talks since late 2014 and apparently HarperCollins is not happy with the new terms.  We have it on good authority that in the very near future HC is going not going to have their content listed on Amazon and digital readers will have to look elsewhere.

Where can users purchase bestselling e-books such as American Sniper, Girl In A Band or Yes Please? If you live in the United States or the United Kingdom the Barnes and Noble Nook store will have them available. Kobo also has all of the new e-books as well, but they also have a larger international footprint.

If you are the type of person that would subscribe to an e-book subscription websites such as Entittle, Scribd and Oyster you are in luck. They all have HarperCollins e-books available, but they are primarily older titles.

I am sure we all remember the very public contract dispute between Hachette and Amazon. For over six months every major newspaper in the world reported on it and even TV personalities such as Stephen Colbert got in on the action. The one big problem Hachette faced, was that Amazon accounted for a large portion of their sales and did not have much of a viable alternative.

In October 2013 HarperCollins started selling books, e-books and audiobooks directly on their website. This is the first time a major publisher has developed proper infrastructure to bypass traditional booksellers.

The vast majority of their digital titles are only available to read via the HarperCollins Reader App for Android and iOS. Select titles are actually available in DRM-Free MOBI, which is a format that is compatible with Kindle e-readers.

You might be wondering to yourself, how is a major publisher offering e-books that do not have Adobe Digital Rights Management? In late 2014 HC signed a relationship with Digimarc in order to have watermark technology embedded into the e-books it sells. Digital watermarking technology caught on a few years ago when the entire Harry Potter eBook collection adopted it, instead of going the traditional DRM route. The primarily benefit is that there is no barriers preventing users from loading their books on as many devices as they want.

So if the rumors are true and HarperCollins will be ceasing selling content on Amazon, until more favorable terms are offered, they will continue to make money. Readers will still have many options to read the publishers e-books and the world will go on.

Where can you Buy HarperCollins eBooks other Than Amazon? is a post from: Good e-Reader

Video Review – Onyx Boox i86

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The Onyx Boox i86 is only available in China and it should be hitting Europe and North America later this year. This eight inch e-reader features Google Android and users can install apps via Google Play.

The Onyx i86 HD features an eight inch IR touchscreen with a resolution of 1600 x 1200 with 250 PPI.  It does not have a front light like most contemporary e-readers which helps keep the cost down. Underneath the hood is a 1 GHZ single core processor, 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of internal storage. There is compatibility for an Micro SD, so you can easily enhance it further up to 32 GB.

I think the two thing users will appreciate is the fact this reader can listen to audiobooks and music via the 3.5mm headphone jack and could even hook up wireless speakers via Bluetooth.  The eight inch screen is also appealing because there is a large segment of users that demand more screen real estate.


Video Review – Onyx Boox i86 is a post from: Good e-Reader

How to Use Onyx Boox M96 Without Stylus (Video)

I came across a new YouTube video yesterday that explains how to use the Onyx Boox M96 entirely without a stylus. The M96 is a 9.7-inch E Ink ereader that has an electromagnetic touchscreen that requires the use of a specialized stylus. The device has physical buttons and a nav wheel controller that can be […]