| Amazon will be announcing a number of new e-readers in the next few months and are heavily discounting a number of units in order to clear inventory. The Seattle company is now offering the Kindle Paperwhite 3 for $119.00 and the Kindle Basic Touch for $64.00. If you have your eyes on the Kindle Voyage, Amazon is selling the 3G/WIFI refurbished for $219.00, which is quite the savings since it normally costs $269.00 |
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Amazon is Heavily Discounting Kindle e-readers
Final Fantasy 7 Launches on iOS
| Final Fantasy 7 is very beloved and when word come out that the game was getting a remake, millions of people turned into little kids again. If you have an iPhone or iPad, the PC version of Final Fantasy 7 has just launched today. One of the interesting things about this title is that it has been optimized for touchscreen displays and has the ability to disable the random battle system. There are built in cheat codes that can automatically level your party up, which might appeal to people who have played the game in the past and simply want to take a walk down memory lane. Right now this game is only available in New Zealand, which is often a launching pad for Square iOS titles. It should debut in North America sometime in the next few weeks.
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Amazon Announces Closure of Trade-In Program
| Amazon has announced the closure of their popular Trade-in service in the United Kingdom. Currently, books, video games and other items can be traded in on Amazon's website in return for Amazon gift cards. Starting August 31st 2015 the Amazon Trade-in program will be suspended. The company has acknowledged that all trade-in orders submitted online before 31 August 2015 will be processed as normal if dispatched them within 7 days after submission. Amazon is now encouraging people to sell their used content directly through them, instead of offering gift cards. If you employ the Sell on Amazon feature, you can sell in over 30 product categories across 5 European Marketplaces. If this is something you are interested in, you can find out more here. |
550,000 People Attended Comiket 88 in Tokyo
| Comic book conventions in North America the last few years are less about comics and more about Hollywood hyping television and movies. Comic-Con is a fine example of this, all of the major news agencies talked about Disney, Star Wars and the Avengers. Meanwhile, in Japan things are quite different, the 88th annual Comiket just wrapped up and over 550,000 people attended the three day event. Comiket has been running since 1975 and occurs twice a year, once in the summer and again in the winter. The emphasis is on comics, novels, and game software. All of the big manga houses are in attendance, but normally day 3 is the largest due to the self-publishers. Over 210,000 people attended the event on the last day to check out fan-zines, fan-fiction and parodies of famous manga – starring popular characters. Around 11,500 doujin circles (groups of self-published artists) participated in the event on Sunday. What I find interesting is how truly enamored people are with self-publishers in Japan. Comiket 88 attracted 180,000 attendees on its first day on Friday and 160,000 on its second day on Saturday and then 210,000 people on Sunday. It really shows that way more people prefer indie titles than stuff produced by the big publishing houses. Its almost the opposite here in North America where indie authors hardly ever have a presence at Comic-Con or even trade events like Book Expo America. |
Twitter for dogs
| Henry Conklin’s dog, Oliver, is one of those very vocal dogs who likes to try to let you know what he’s thinking. By barking. A lot. Henry says:
Henry has built a system around a Raspberry Pi that listens out for sounds over a certain volume, and triggers a recording when that constraint is met. But there are things in Oliver the dog’s vicinity which are also pretty noisy, so a second, filtering step is needed. Henry says:
The output is forwarded to the Twitter API, where they’re published by an account called @OliverBarkBark. Right now, a random string of barks, woofs, howls, and ruffs are published, but Henry is looking at adding some more sophistication by designing a dog-to-text translator which will say “bark” when Oliver barks, “ruff” when Oliver ruffs, and “woof”…you get the idea. All the code you’ll need to replicate the scheme in your own house (you’ll need a dog first) is available on Henry’s GitHub at https://github.com/HenryWConklin/barkdetect. Thanks Henry, and please give Oliver a biscuit for us. The post Twitter for dogs appeared first on Raspberry Pi. |
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Short List for the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
| The First Novel Prize is awarded every year to the best debut novel published between January 1 and December 31 of the award year. The author of the winning book is awarded $10,000 and each shortlisted author receives $1,000. This year the award ceremony is held on December 8 at The Metropolitan Club in New York. After the Parade by Lori Ostlund (Scribner) Sensitive, big-hearted, and achingly self-conscious, forty-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confines of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. After twenty years under the Pygmalion-like direction of his older partner Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to stop letting life happen to him and to take control of his own fate. But soon after establishing himself in San Francisco—where he alternates between a shoddy garage apartment and the absurdly ramshackle ESL school where he teaches—Aaron sees that real freedom will not come until he has made peace with his memories of Morton, Minnesota: a cramped town whose four hundred souls form a constellation of Aaron's childhood heartbreaks and hopes. Against the Country by Ben Metcalf (Random House) In a voice both perfectly American and utterly new, Ben Metcalf introduces the reader to Goochland County, Virginia—a land of stubborn soil, voracious insects, lackluster farms, and horrifying trees—and details one family's pitiful struggle to survive there. Eventually it becomes clear that Goochland is not merely the author's setting; it is a growing, throbbing menace that warps and scars every one of his characters' lives. Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam (Penguin Books) For as long as she can remember, Ella has longed to feel at home. Orphaned as a child after her parents' murder, and afflicted with hallucinations at dusk, she's always felt more at ease in nature than with people. She traveled from Bangladesh to Brooklyn to live with the Saleems: her uncle Anwar, aunt Hashi, and their beautiful daughter, Charu, her complete opposite. One summer, when Ella returns home from college, she discovers Charu's friend Maya—an Islamic cleric's runaway daughter—asleep in her bedroom. As the girls have a summer of clandestine adventure and sexual awakenings, Anwar—owner of a popular botanical apothecary—has his own secrets, threatening his thirty-year marriage. But when tragedy strikes, the Saleems find themselves blamed. To keep his family from unraveling, Anwar takes them on a fated trip to Bangladesh, to reckon with the past, their extended family, and each other. The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (Little, Brown) Told from the point of view of nine year old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is the Cain and Abel-esque story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990’s Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their strict father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the ominous, forbidden nearby river, they meet a dangerous local madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings. What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact-both tragic and redemptive-will transcend the lives and imaginations of its characters and its readers. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press) It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. The Turner House by Angela Flournoy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone—and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit's East Side, and the loss of a father. The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs. But now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home and move in with her eldest son, the family discovers that the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage. The Turner children are called home to decide its fate and to reckon with how each of their pasts haunts—and shapes—their family's future. The Unfortunates by Sophie McManus (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Cecilia Somner’s fate hangs in the balance. A larger-than-life heiress to a robber baron’s fortune, once known as much for her cruel wit as for her tremendous generosity, CeCe is now in opulent decline. Afflicted with a rare disease and touched by mortality for the first time, she finds her gilded, by-gone values colliding with an unforgiving present. Along with her troubled son, George, and his out-sider wife, Iris, CeCe must face the Somners’ dark legacy and the corrupting nature of wealth. As the Somner family struggles to find a solution to its troubles, the secrets and lies between CeCe, George, and Iris grow entangled. CeCe’s world topples, culminating in a startling turn of events that is as unforgettable as it is life-changing. |
How to Apply for the Kobo Insiders Program
| Sometimes we all come up with great ideas on how an e-reader can be improved or how the e-book shopping experience can be more intuitive and robust. Kobo has been running a program the last year that lets hardcore e-reader owners have a voice and help chart the direction of the company. It is called Kobo Insiders. Kobo Insiders is an online community where you can chat with other Kobo e-reader owners. You can also get involved in various beta programs for new features that Kobo is thinking of implementing, and provide feedback. Every month or so there are polls the company releases, asking about new design features for future products. Kobo Insiders is a program that is normally invite only, but if you feel compelled to report a bug or suggest new features you can manually register by clicking HERE. |
Lenovo Tab 2 A10 On Sale for $179 – Best 10″ Budget Tablet
| I’ve been using the Lenovo Tab 2 A10 as my primary tablet for the past month and I really like it. It’s the best Android tablet that I’ve owned, and I like it enough that I got rid of all my other tablets, including a first gen iPad Air. The Lenovo Tab 2 A10 is […] |
Save $50 on Kindle Voyage Refurbs with Free 3G + Wi-Fi
| The Kindle Voyage was first released back in October of 2014. Since it’s release, the Kindle Voyage hasn’t gone on sale even once. Amazon’s sales always involve other Kindles and never the Voyage. But now there’s finally a way to get one at a discount. Amazon recently started selling Certified Refurbished Kindle Voyages. Currently they […] |
The TRS-80 model 100 goes online
| Sometimes added functionality isn’t exactly functional. Sometimes, it’s more a sort of demonstration that something can be done, whether or not it’s actually a very good idea. UK readers may not recognise the machine below, but those of you in the USA (as long as you’re of a certain vintage) will be familiar with it. It’s a TRS-80 model 100: an incredibly early (1983-ish) laptop-type computer, whose market was mostly in the US and Canada, made in partnership by Kyocera and Microsoft. The 8k version would set you back $1099, and the 24k version $1399 – an absolute ton of money in 1983, when we many of us at Pi Towers were either not born yet, or still at the corduroy dungarees and deelyboppers phase. The TRS-80, rather amazingly, was a connected machine, with a built-in modem. It was a popular tool for journalists; you could save about eleven pages of text if you were out in the field, and send it over that modem to your editor using a program called TELCOM – an incredibly liberating technology at the time. It was pretty power-efficient as well; it took four AA batteries, which lasted for about 20 hours. So what better for retro-hardware lovers than an internet-connected TRS-80 model 100? That’s exactly what Sean Gallagher from Ars Technica made.
Sean says that the TRS-80 is the last machine Bill Gates ever wrote a significant amount of code for, and that Gates has said it’s his favourite ever machine. This is a really tricky problem to work your way around when you consider that modern websites don’t really work within a 40 columns by eight lines display; that the TRS-80 keyboard doesn’t have a | or pipe symbol; that you can’t load a TCP/IP stack onto the device; that Sean had to build his own null-modem cable – it’s a labour of love and an absolutely fascinating read. Head over to Ars Technica to read more about dragging 1980s hardware some of the way into the 21st century.
The post The TRS-80 model 100 goes online appeared first on Raspberry Pi. |
Monday, August 17, 2015
Kobo Developing a Loyalty Program called KoboLove
| Kobo is in the process of finalizing a new loyalty program that will give you points whenever you purchase an e-book. These points can be redeemed to get free content from Kobo. The exact logistics of the program is currently unknown but it looks like Kobo will be introducing a free tier where you earn 4 points for every $5.00 you spend and a paid VIP Tier where you earn double points on everything you purchase and save an additional 10% off during Kobo promotions. During certain times of the year Kobo will also be running KoboLove Bonus Days, where both the free and paid tier will get double the normal points. The semantics of KoboLove should be publicly released in the coming weeks, right now we only have traces of the loyalty program that were spotted in a recent firmware update for some of their e-readers. |
OverDrive Media Stations Will Soon be in Public Spaces
| Overdrive Media Stations are computer terminals in which patrons can borrow and checkout digital content inside libraries. These have been available since 2013 and have been adopted at hundreds of locations in the US. These terminals were developed to exclusively be inside a library, but Overdrive is cooking up something special. They have created new kiosks that are designed to be in public spaces. Libraries will soon be able to have the option of opting into the new public version of the Overdrive Media Station. They will feature 60-inch screens and professional-grade kiosks for high-traffic areas like hotels, airports, subways, etc. These installations encourage people to walk up and use the kiosk. OMS supports discovery through special collections like new releases, available now, and children's books, as well as browse by subject or search by keyword. The OMS also allows users to sample all content during their experience and send themselves emails or text messages about the content they want to borrow. When they walk away, they can continue their interaction on their smartphone or tablet, or desktop at home. The Overdrive Media Station for public spaces has three main purposes for libraries. 1) It promotes the local library as a modern and innovative community organization. 2) Facilitates the acquisition or re-acquisition of members (that is, it encourages people to use the library). 3) Specifically promotes the library's digital services and collections for discovery, sampling and checkout or hold. The new kiosk system will cost around $13,000 each for libraries looking to branch out into promoting their system in public spaces. They should be available towards the end of 2015, but no definitive date has been set yet. |
Fire HD 6 on Sale for $69 – Today Only
| Amazon is running another sale on their 6-inch Fire HD tablet as part of the main Gold Box deal of the day. The sale includes both the 8GB and 16GB Fire HD 6 models, as well as the Kids Edition tablet that comes with a case and 2-year warranty. All are $30 off the regular […] |
We want you to choose the next Big Library Read!
| The next Big Library Read is coming this October and we want your help in selecting the title the whole world will be reading! The genre this time around will be Juvenile/Young Adult and our publishing partners have provided a number of great titles to choose from. Now that we have the submissions from the publishers we want you to tell us which title we’ll all be reading!
To vote simply go to the survey and pick which title you’re most interested in reading. Voting will be live until August 24th at which point we will reveal the winning selection! Let your voice be heard and help decide the next Big Library Read title!  |
Get over 30,000 titles 25-50% off with the Back to School sale
| In a world where schools are back in session, librarians and educators need a sale to properly prepare their digital collections for the onslaught of student needs. Good thing OverDrive and its publishing partners have prepared such a sale from August 17-September 30.
The Back to School sale includes full catalogs from big publishers like StarWalk Kids and Saddleback Educational who feature common core titles, Nickelodeon, Hachette Audio, Open Road, BBC Active, Cognella who has great classroom texts, and Orca. Check out these lists for great content at amazing prices:
Krisitin Milks is a Collection Development Analyst with OverDrive  |
Australia & Singapore Pioneering Education Tour
| As an education pioneer for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, I'm on a mission to ensure that all children everywhere have some exposure to computing, whether this comes in the form of digital making, the arts, robotics or computer programming. Recently I've been on a brief tour to Australia and Singapore to spread the Raspberry Pi education ethos to as many people as possible. Straight after Euro Python in Spain, where Ben Nuttall, James Robinson and I helped to kick start an Education Summit, I boarded a flight to Australia via Dubai. The months between June and September are often the busiest for the Foundation team with the northern hemisphere schools on summer break and southern hemisphere schools in the middle of the academic year. There are often lots of outreach opportunities alongside large conferences in the space of a single month. Brisbane After around 30 hours (with two stops) I arrived in Brisbane, the capital of Queensland and home to Pycon Australia 2015, where I was to give a talk as part of their first ever education mini conference and give a keynote at the main conference. Fellow Python Software Foundation (PSF) board member Nick Coghlan contacted me to attend the education mini conference way back in January, stating:
There are a number of countries around the world which are starting to address the digital skills gap through formal education. In England we have a new Computing curriculum being taught in both primary and secondary schools. In Australia a new Digital Curriculum has been developed, and in some states has already been adopted by forward thinking teachers. Here was an opportunity to work with industry professionals to highlight the changes, and with educators to collaborate and share best practice. Nick had curated a brilliant day of talks as part of the education mini conference. This was one of the first Python conferences which was not only well attended by teachers, but where most of the talks were given by teachers! In fact you can watch all the talks which have helpfully be added to a playlist by the conference organisers. My favourite talk of the day was given by a nervous developer, Caleb Hattingh, to a room full of teachers about his experiences trying to teach Python to children at a coding club. It was brutally honest and I think sums up many of the problems educators also face in moving from visual programming languages like Scratch to text based languages like Python. My other notable talk of the day was given by Katie Bell from Grok Learning in which she talks about her work with the Girls Programming Network in Sydney, the National Computer Science School (NCSS) Challenge, and the NCSS summer school where young people spend a few days rapidly prototyping heir own website or embedded electronic device. I've had the pleasure of meeting Katie before at PyconUK last September and at ISTE this June in Philadelphia with Grok Learning co-founder Nicky Ringland. Their passion for computing education is phenomenal and can be witnessed in this talk: I ended day 1 with my keynote on Raspberry Pi and physical computing, which included a live demo, and started day 2 with a keynote to the entire conference about lessons we've learned about teaching children how to program.
I'm grateful to Nick Coghlan and the other organisers of PyconAu for their hard work bring the event together. Sydney A short flight from Brisbane brought me to Sydney where I accepted a challenge from new education team member Marc Scott to take a selfie in front of an iconic landmark before setting out on a series of talks and workshops. I gave a brief demo to ICT educators of New South Wales on the first evening at an event where teachers give up their free time to share ideas and practices around teaching ICT and computer science in a state where it is not a formal part of their curriculum. These were inspirational teachers, willing to push what is possible in their classrooms. At the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences at the Powerhouse in Sydney I got the chance to speak to education specialists and teachers about our work at Raspberry Pi before leading a fruity physical computing workshop. I was able to share fun ideas and meet some fabulous STEM education enthusiasts.
The museum was truly a fabulous space with well equipped resources for schools. I was lucky enough to receive a brief tour of all the facilities like the Mars Lab, a recreation of the Martian surface, and robotics lab which is used to encourage students to use technology to search for life on Mars. Schools are able to connect to the lab and their rovers via the internet, allowing students to program the bots directly. Using the cameras, they can experience what it is like for space engineers. They test rovers there, and I got to meet one.
Whilst in Sydney I visited good friend Dan Bowen, a CAS #include committee member, and some Windows IoT Raspberry Pi developers at Microsoft, where they all showed me their latest work with the operating system and Physical computing on the Pi. I was invited to meet the Code Club Australia team who are working with schools across all the territories and training teachers in a bid to give children an opportunity to learn to code. I also found time to speak to girls at two different coding clubs and meet some fans!
There are clearly lots of initiatives in Sydney that parents and educators can tap into from online learning platforms like Grok Learning and the NCSS challenge, to free professional development and workshops from ICTENSW and the MAAS Museum. Singapore I was lucky enough to be able to stop in Singapore on my way back to the UK during the nation's 50th anniversary thanks to the Raspberry Pi team at Broadcom Singapore. I was asked to drop by the office to eat pizza and give a presentation to their engineers about the Raspberry Pi Foundation by Jeffery Chin who leads the Broadcom Singapore Raspberry Pi team, who provide Raspberry Pi outreach to teachers and students in their spare time. I was then taken to Singapore's Science Centre to meet their STEM education specialists and Ministry of Education representatives to discuss Raspberry Pi professional development for teachers and their computing outreach programmes. Before heading out for some of the best dumplings I’ve ever eaten! Singapore Science Centre STEM educators, Ministry of Education representatives and Broadcom’s Jeffery Chin & TK Tan It is one of the many joys of working for the Raspberry Pi Foundation that I get to meet so many inspiring individuals across the globe and to forge partnerships with them as we all embark this movement to enrich children's education. The post Australia & Singapore Pioneering Education Tour appeared first on Raspberry Pi. |
Vancouver Public Library Unveils New Recording Studios
| The Vancouver Public Library has always been very forward thinking when it comes to implementing features that people want. They have one of the largest e-book and audiobook collections in Canada and have just opened up a new recording studio for the general public to use. For anyone living in Vancouver, the public library has implemented six “Inspiration Labs” which are basically professionally setup studios that can be used to record videos, or allow indie authors to narrate their own audiobooks. .They have green screens, professional microphones and other recording equipment. These are FREE to use for up to three hours a day! You can find out more and book time if you’d like here and check out some of the professional setups they have here. |
Europeans have had enough with high e-book prices
| Electronic books have found massive success in Canada, US and the United Kingdom. The sales of e-books represent between a quarter and a third of the consumer book market and, by 2018, will edge out printed and audio books as the most lucrative segment. Things over in mainland Europe are quite a different story. Last year, digital books made up 8% of the consumer book market in France, less than 4% in Germany and Italy, and 1% in Sweden and Norway. Why is Europe lagging behind in e-book adoption? There are two trains of thought on the subject, one is the cultural stigma that e-books will erode print book sales and the other is the high rate of VAT where e-books are often taxed more than 20% compared to print. Since the e-book revolution first begun in 2009, there as been a cultural resistance to protect the print industry. Germany and France prohibit the kind of deep discounts on digital books relative to print that have lifted e-book sales in English-language markets. But another, less publicized factor is taxation, which in the case of e-books is all over the map. Selling e-books in Europe is challenging, since the rules keep changing. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google and Apple used to be based out of Luxembourg to sell their digital books, since they could get away with charging 3% VAT on e-books in every country in Europe. On January 1st 2015 the European Commission mandated that VAT will be payed based on where the buyer is located and not the seller. The United Kingdom, for example has a 20% VAT on e-books and the Irish Republic VAT is 23%. Germany charges 19% VAT, Luxembourg 3% VAT, Spain 21% VAT and Italy 4% VAT. Some countries like Poland are trying to fight the existing VAT system to get an even playing field between print and digital. The government has been behind this idea for a number of years and last week a series of judges have petitioned the European Court of Justice to look into the matter. Poland likely will not be able to change the European Court of Justice, but some countries are considering something even more radical, a single European market for e-books. The European Commission revealed that it would hold an an antitrust competition inquiry into the e-commerce sector in the European Union, as part of 16 initiatives on a digital single market to be delivered by the end of next year. As part of its inquiry, the EC will look at cross-border trade in digital content and the Book Sellers Association hopes it will study issues around accessibility and interoperability in e-books. When it comes down to it e-book taxes are tremendously fragmented in the EU and I think they would be better served with a common VAT on e-books in order to foster growth and allow more players to enter the market. |
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Star Wars Force Awakens Movie Poster Revealed
| Star Wars has a storied history of having their movie posters hand painted. Not only will these be sure fire collectors items, but there is something very compelling about something entirely original. The poster also gives us a bit of new information about the plot. John Boyega's character, Finn, will apparently be a Jedi — this is the first time we've seen his character wielding a lightsaber, the weapon of the Jedi. Kylo Ren, Daisy Ridley's Rey, and, of course, Han Solo also grace the poster. |
Star Wars Force Awakens Movie Poster Revealed
| Star Wars has a storied history of having their movie posters hand painted. Not only will these be sure fire collectors items, but there is something very compelling about something entirely original. The poster also gives us a bit of new information about the plot. John Boyega’s character, Finn, will apparently be a Jedi — this is the first time we’ve seen his character wielding a lightsaber, the weapon of the Jedi. Kylo Ren, Daisy Ridley’s Rey, and, of course, Han Solo also grace the poster. |
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