Monday, March 11, 2013

Netflix Now Available for the Blackberry Z10

If you are a Blackberry Playbook or Z10 owner, the most sought after video streaming apps everyone wants is Netflix. It has not been possible until this point to even stream videos from the website because Netflix put a physical block on accessing the content. Today, Good e-Reader is proud to bring the only working copy of Netlfix, exclusively for the Blackberry Z10.

This working version of Netflix will only work on BB10 devices. One of the only drawback is because this is an Android port, it tends to take a longtime to load up and tends to lag. If you can get past all of this, you can install the BAR file on your Z10 today by clicking HERE. If you have no experience loading in your own apps on the Playbook or the Z10, you need to download the proper software HERE.

Netflix Now Available for the Blackberry Z10 is a post from: E-Reader News

Marvel’s Project Gamma Brings Adaptive Music to Digital Comics

Project Gamma adds sound to the comics experience—but it’s not a single soundtrack, nor is it simple sound effects. It is “a unique, immersive experience that brings fully adaptive music and sound together with digital comics to create an entirely new audio-visual event,” according to the Marvel website.

Unlike your standard audio comic, where a single soundtrack plays when the comic is opened or the reader taps a button, Project Gamma will tailor the sound not only to the action in the comic but also to the reader’s behavior. Here’s Peter Phillips, senior vice president and general manager of Marvel’s Digital Media Group said "The music will not speed up as you flip the page," he explains. "Its modulated in such a way that whether you're a fast reader or a slow reader, it will stick with you, it'll be by your side. This is embedded music to enhance the experience of what you're already enjoying. And it paces itself to how you're reading. So that's really the key.

"If there's a piano expected to be on there for 30 seconds and plays music for 30 seconds, after that time is over it's going to randomize in a way that's completely intuitive. As you're flipping back and forth throughout pages, it's not going to be buffering; the audio will enhance that experience and take you back to where you were. You're not going to hear any break in the music."

In addition, there will be similarities in the music across different comics that feature the same character.

Marvel will roll out Project Gamma later this year and will pair up the new system with comics that have “Big events, big characters—honestly, ones that really lend themselves to music,” according to editor-in-chief Axel Alonso, who also managed to articulate why, exactly, anyone would want this: "It's not unlike being in a video game, to be honest."

Marvel’s Project Gamma Brings Adaptive Music to Digital Comics is a post from: E-Reader News

Comixology Experiencing Massive Problems with Free Marvel Comics

Comixology announced that it would be giving away almost 700 free issues at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. In the last 48 hours since the comics have been available, the company’s systems have been crashing and many customers are unable to even log into the system. This normally wouldn’t be a big problem, but the free #1 issues are only available until March 12th 2013, which means the vast majority of comic lovers won’t be able to download anything at all.

The main idea behind the free first issues will be to encourage people to buy second issues. Most of the comics available are older, but you can find some great things if you can get to them. We have found through our own experiences that the app suffers the most on iOS and Android. The best solution is to directly access the webpage, get the goods from there, and it will then be automatically synced to your account. Unfortunately, due to the demand the company has paused the ability to download all the free issues, with no word on when they will reinstate it again.

David Steinberge, the CEO and co-founder of ComiXology, released the following statement just now: “It’s been a whirlwind weekend and comiXology is fresh from SXSW, where we talked about some exciting things. We had believed ourselves prepared—but unfortunately we became overwhelmed by the immense response. We’re still struggling to keep our systems up. The result is that you aren’t getting your comics when and where you want. We don’t like letting you down. Our teams are working around the clock to resolve these issues so that you can have the experience you’ve come to expect. We’ll be communicating with you as often as we can and deeply appreciate the outpouring of support we’ve seen from our customers while we right the ship.”

Comixology Experiencing Massive Problems with Free Marvel Comics is a post from: E-Reader News

Toronto Public Library Strikes Affiliate Deal with Indigo

The Toronto Public Library has implemented the ability for customers to buy eBooks via their website with a new affiliate program with Indigo Books. Users will be able to purchase the eBook that have borrowed from the library or if the book has a long wait list, they can just straight up purchase it. The Toronto Library will earn a paltry 5% commission on every digital variant they sell.

This new program marks the broader push to open TPL up to new revenue sources. In the near future the library will begin printing advertisements on the backs of its due-date slips, for a six-month trial period. The library is also investigating the possibility of running ads through its public wi-fi service.

Libraries are building more synergy with selling eBooks, rather then just lending them out for free. In essence, libraries don’t make any money from loaning out eBooks and the investment for a solid catalog often run upwards to $20,000. This is also the first time Indigo has partnered with a library and makes sense they selected the one they did, because Indigo has their headquarters in Toronto.

Toronto Public Library Strikes Affiliate Deal with Indigo is a post from: E-Reader News

Floating mouse helps prevent injury

A team of European designers has a plan to help save your wrists from injury when using the computer. It's a floating mouse that reduces the chance of repetitive stress injury

See more at:

http://www.komando.com/coolsites/index.aspx?id=14172&utm_medium=nl&utm_source=notd&utm_content=2013-03-11-article_6-img

10 Ways to Make a School Librarian’s Job Easier

It's not easy being the school librarian. Tasked with fostering learning, encouraging library use, and instilling a love of reading among students, school librarians are often in high demand and short on time. We asked some of OverDrive's school library partners to share tips for making the most of your digital collection while balancing an ever-expanding to-do list.

Train students using hands-on demonstrations
Respondents agreed: there's no better way to teach students how to use a digital collection than by having them do it themselves. Try hosting one class at a time and supervising students as they access your school's digital collection, borrow a book, and—if they're using devices—install OverDrive's mobile app and authorize it with an Adobe ID. Once students try it out for themselves, our librarians reported, they'll continue to use the digital collection on their own.
Kids and teens love technology—harness that interest!
Show students how eBooks and audiobooks from your school library work with the devices they already know and love.
Train parents of young students
If you're catering to students in the lower elementary grades, focus training efforts on the parents, who are often in charge of devices at home.
Take advantage of time-saving tools in Content Reserve
Content Reserve offers features to help you save time and ensure that you never miss titles that fit your needs. Try saving your popular searches (basic or advanced) in the Content Reserve marketplace, or check out the automated collection development tools located under the Select Express tab.
Designate in-house experts to help with collection development
Consider designating one or two "collection experts" per grade from your school's library or teaching staff. These experts can help pinpoint the wants and needs of their designated age group and bounce ideas off one another to arrive at the best possible collection for your school.
Partner with teachers
Demonstrate how to use your digital collection to teachers—or better yet, supervise as they do it themselves—so they can promote the service to their students and make use of it in their classrooms.
Implement fun incentives to encourage use of your digital collection
Prizes are popular, but incentives can be cheap or free, too. As one of our contributing librarians shared, "I had a contest this year—if students increased the use of the e-library by a certain percent, they got to 'pie' me in face during the pep rally! Also, I had our counselors dress up as superheroes if this percentage was raised."
Use holidays to promote your titles
Create promotions centered around holidays, celebrations and commemorations. In March alone, Women's History Month, March Madness, and the first day of spring (to name a few) provide opportunities to showcase related titles from your digital collection.
Get ahead of the technology game
As digital learning tools become more and more popular, say the librarians we surveyed, it pays to be proactive and anticipate the needs of your school. Cultivating a digital collection now lays a good foundation for future endeavors.
Enjoy the perks of your OverDrive collection
With your OverDrive collection, there's no need to deal with overdue fines or lost or damaged books. We hope you can take a second to sit back, relax and enjoy!

Thanks to Paige Jaeger (Washingon-Saratoga Board of Cooperative Educational Services, N.Y.), Tana Penn (Taylor County School District, Ky.), Ann Terry (Frisco Independent School District, Texas) and other OverDrive school library partners for sharing ideas. For additional outreach ideas, take a look at these printable bookmark templates, sticker and shelf-talker templates, and more on our digital library blog.

If your school is interested in OverDrive, but hasn't signed up yet, check out our free school trial.

Carrie Smith is a Technical Writer at OverDrive.

Marvel Giving Away 700 #1 Issue Digital Comics for Free

Yesterday Marvel Comics announced that they are running a temporary promotion where they are giving away 700 first-issue digital comics for free to anyone who can get through the download process using the Marvel Comics apps or Marvel Comics Digital Comics Shop. Unfortunately they are having trouble sustaining the massive download attempts, and neither are [...]

How to print from Android

http://www.techhive.com/article/2027751/answer-line-how-to-print-from-android.html

REPORT: Apple's Thinner, Lighter iPad 5 Could Be Here In April

RUMOR CONTROL TO EARTHLINGS:Here We Go Again...iPad 5 "Possibly" ApriliPhone 5S "Maybe" August

Publishers and eBook Stores File Complaints Against Amazon’s New Domains

Amazon has petitioned ICANN for some new top-level domain names such as .book, .author, and .read. These are the new breed of internet extensions that will go live this April and will replace the standard .com and .net we all know and love. Amazon’s plans to dominate the book portion of the new domain names have incurred the wrath of the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.

In a letter to Icann, Scott Turow, the novelist and president of the Authors Guild, wrote: “We strongly object to ICANN’s plans to sell the exclusive top-level domain rights for generic book-industry terms, such as .book, .author, and .read. Placing such generic domains in private hands is plainly anti-competitive, allowing already dominant, well-capitalized companies to expand and entrench their market power. The potential for abuse seems limitless.”

Barnes & Noble also filed its own protest in the last few days that said “Amazon would use control of these TLDs to stifle competition in the bookselling and publishing industries.”

The Digital publishing industry is seeing unparalleled revenue growth in the last few years and major publishers, such as Penguin, see 22% of their global book sales stem from digital. Amazon is thought to control at least 60% of the global ebook market and controlling popular brand extensions would be a savvy move. It is thought that the company has spent well over 10 million dollars in filing applications for different top-level domain names in the last year.

Publishers and eBook Stores File Complaints Against Amazon’s New Domains is a post from: E-Reader News

3D parametric plotter

This video from Benedek93 is a little slow to get going, but it’s well worth watching all the way through for a really tight demonstration of what you can achieve with OpenGL ES on the Pi.

Benedek says:

Recently I’ve started going through a tutorial for modern OpenGL programming again (I can recommend it:http://arcsynthesis.org/gltut/ ), and on the way I decided to re-do that function plotter program I have showed off in one of my videos (“OpenGL Shaders and Shadow Maps”).

First I wrote it using the old, fixed-pipeline OpenGL specification so that I could run it on my laptop which didn’t support the newer versions. You can download it here and play with it on a PC: https://bitbucket.org/benedek/simple-…

At the same time I was also messing around with OpenGL on the Raspberry Pi and I was impressed seeing how smoothly you could make it draw simple but pretty 3D graphics. So I started porting that program to the RPi, adding the boilerplate code necessary to set up a GL context on it and changing the graphics code to use modern OpenGL ES.

In the end, the results were just as pretty as in my old shadow-mapping plotter program (except for the shadows), and the RPi was able to draw models smoothly at the same triangle counts as my laptop.

Here’s the download link: https://bitbucket.org/benedek/rpi-sim…

Finally, a Tablet Built Exclusively for Women

Eurostar Group, a Dubai based tech firm has designed what it is proudly calling the world's first tablet device that has been built entirely for women. Named the ePad Femme, the tablet looks exactly like any other currently available device, except for its branding and the choice of apps the device comes pre-loaded with. Some sources pointed out the ePad Femme is also available in a pink color scheme, though none seem to be available online. Anyway, the tablet does sport a light pink wallpaper.

Coming to specs, the ePad Femme sports an 8 inch display and is built around a 1.5 GHz chip. The tablet runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and offers 16 GB of internal memory. There is also an SD card slot should one need more storage. What makes it even more attractive is its price tag of $190, making the ePad Femme even more affordable than the Nexus 7.

The manufacturer is attempting to increase the tablet’s appeal to women through a chauvinistic selection of pre-loaded apps. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the ePad Femme comes pre-installed with the predictable and stereotypical apps for cooking, yoga, weight loss, shopping, clothing size conversions, and such.

However, while Eurostar probably meant well by building a tablet marketed to women, it remains to be seen if this device will have any appeal among its targeted demographic. It’s not like women were holding off on buying a tablet, impatiently waiting for something like the ePad Femme. Maybe it will have some success in the middle east and other such markets where women are forced to have a separate, secondary identity.

Finally, a Tablet Built Exclusively for Women is a post from: E-Reader News

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