| Comic-Con is over for another year, and the comics industry is in its customary post-San Diego swoon. News will probably be slow for a while, but it’s a great time to read comics, so let’s take a look at this weekend’s digital deals. Most of these end Sunday evening; check the links for more information. ComiXology kicks it off with three sales: All Wolverine comics are marked down to 99 cents, so you can catch up before going to see the movie, which opened today. In the mood for something lighter? They have also marked down a handful of Betty and Veronica comics and graphic novels, although a lot of these were priced low to begin with, so not everything is discounted. And if you read French, this your lucky fin de semaine: They have marked down a healthy handful of French-language comics to 99 cents each. Dark Horse has slashed prices on its Mass Effect comics. Single issues, usually priced at $2.99, are just 99 cents and the bundles are an even better deal. Dark Horse has published a number of mini-series and single issues that tie in with the storyline of the video game, so this is a good opportunity for gamers to get more deeply into the Mass Effect story. I’m not sure if Amazon’s Wolverine graphic novels on Kindle are discounted from their usual prices, as Amazon doesn’t make that easy to see, but they do seem to be priced well below the print editions, so give that a look if you want even more Wolverine. They have definitely marked down their Deadpool graphic novels for Kindle, though, to $2.99-$3.99 for a limited time only, so go check those out. And finally, this is the last weekend to save on a one-year subscription to Shonen Jump, Viz’s digital manga magazine; the price has been marked down from $25.99 to $19.99 with a special code (it’s at the link), but the sale ends Sunday evening. Digital Comics Bargains for the Last Weekend in July is a post from: E-Reader News |
Friday, July 26, 2013
Digital Comics Bargains for the Last Weekend in July
Smashwords Beta Tests Pre-Order Status of Titles in Retail Outlets
| One of the original advantages of the self-publishing digital book industry was to level the playing field for self-published authors by offering them the same quality books and considerations that traditionally published authors have always enjoyed. Inexpensive access to print-on-demand uploading has allowed authors to have a bookstore-quality edition of their titles in print, and platforms like KDP and NookPress have made it possible to list self-published ebooks alongside their bestselling, traditional counterparts. Now, Smashwords is beta testing a new feature that gives its authors the same pre-order capabilities that traditional publishers can generate for their titles, all while still making the book available through consumers’ favorite online book retail sites. And while this feature was quietly tested with a handful of authors in Apple’s bookstore, it is now in public beta and available through Apple, Kobo, and Barnes and Noble. According to a press release from Smashwords’ CEO Mark Coker, pre-orders offer authors some very strategic benefits in terms of placement in genre lists and pre-publication buzz. “Advance staging of book releases has always been a common best practice in traditional print publishing. It’s interesting now how some of those same best practices are migrating to the digital world. Now indies can access the same tools…We began testing preorders a few months ago at Apple, starting with the successful launch of Kirsty Moseley’s Free Falling and followed by Abbi Glines’ Forever Too Far. Both titles hit #1 or #2 in Apple’s largest markets. “In the last two weeks, following multiple successes with Apple, we expanded our testing to include Barnes & Noble and Kobo.” R.L. Mathewson, Emma Hart, Claudia Hall Christian, T.M. Nielsen, Maree Anderson, S.H. Kolee, Lilliana Anderson, JD Nixon, Rebecca Forster, Quinn Loftis, J. S. Scott, Eve Langlais, Ambush Books, Elizabeth Reyes, Kristen Ashley, Marquita Valentine, Joseph Lallo, Ruth Ann Nordin, Chanda Hahn and Camilla Chafer are some of the authors who works were tested in the pre-order experiment.
Smashwords Beta Tests Pre-Order Status of Titles in Retail Outlets is a post from: E-Reader News |
Textbook Publishers Embrace a New Digital Distribution Model
| The Digital textbook industry garnered 27% of the $12.4 billion spent on textbooks for secondary schools and colleges in the United States last year. All sorts of new business models have erupted that do everything from charging per page read to fully interactive editions. Google, Amazon and a myriad of other companies have all jumped into the fray to get a piece of an increasingly lucrative market. Major textbook publishers are trying to tap into new revenue models to deal with students directly, and may have found the holy grail. Pearson and McGraw-Hill Education are going to be rolling out a new distribution model very soon: Creating online versions of their texts, often loaded with interactive features, and selling students access codes that expire at semester’s end. One of the big advantages of this new model is being able to edit and update the content very quickly, with new material pushed out to all users around the world. Currently, textbook publishers are facing a crisis as students embrace renting them, instead of buying them outright. Consider the widely used textbook, “Biology”, by Sylvia Mader and Michael Windelspecht, published by McGraw-Hill. The ebook costs $120, a steep discount from the $229 cost for a new print textbook. But savvy shoppers do better. The same book in printed form can be rented for $36. It can also be bought used for $102, and later resold on the secondhand market for up to $95, according to the website CheapestTextbooks.com. It will be interesting to see if textbook publishers can market this new initiative and if students will embrace it. They seem rather gun-ho about launching this new program. Textbook Publishers Embrace a New Digital Distribution Model is a post from: E-Reader News |
Viz Rebrands Its Kids’ Comics App
| Viz Media, the largest manga publisher in the U.S., has renamed its recently launched children’s comics app, as well as its children’s print line. Initially, the print comics had the VizKids imprint and the app was called “sticky DOT comics.” Beth Kawasaki, senior editorial director for children’s publishing at Viz, explained the name change: “Viz has a legacy of bringing over manga for several years, and we will continue to do that; obviously Pokemon is our best known [children's property] and second to that is The Legend of Zelda, but as the market has changed and we have changed and started to [focus] more as a company on licensing and properties based around other characters, we have decided to change the name.” Indeed, while Viz’s teen and adult imprints consist almost entirely of manga licensed from Japan (their most popular property being Naruto), they have been moving in a different direction with their children’s books, producing new graphic novels based on licensed characters such as Voltron, Mr. Men and Little Miss, Winx Club, Ugly Dolls, Ben 10: Omniverse, and most recently, Hello Kitty. If you already have the sticky DOT comics app on your iPad, just update it and it will change automatically to Perfect Square. And if you’re a Pokemon fan, be aware that it is only available digitally in the Perfect Square app—it’s not sold via Viz’s regular digital service. Viz Rebrands Its Kids’ Comics App is a post from: E-Reader News |
What Do You Think of Kobo’s New Redesigned Website?
| Kobo recently started rolling out a completely new design for their ebookstore. It’s not live everywhere yet; it seems to depend on where you live and which web browser you are using. For instance, I can see Kobo’s new website with the iPad, Android tablets, and and on my PC with Internet Explorer, but Chrome [...] |
Carputers – some ideas to get you started
| We are firm believers in the idea that computing starts to get really interesting – interesting enough to suck in people who have never programmed before – when you begin interfacing software with real things made out of atoms. That’s why there are GPIO pins on the Pi (another reason you should never tread on one with bare feet). Here are some resources to get you started with some real-world hacking: namely, hacking your car. The usual disclaimers apply here. Don’t be stupid. Don’t drive along typing, watching videos, playing Transport Tycoon Deluxe or anything else that’s likely to get you killed. You’d make us feel bad, and you’d embarrass the people who know you. Don’t mount any part of your kit on a sharp pointy thing that might impact your body if you crash. Use common sense. With a Pi, you can build a customised, specialised pieces of equipment; and you’ll want your carputer to do things that a laptop sitting on the passenger seat wouldn’t be able to do. Martin O’Hanlon (who maintains a blog with some of the best Minecraft: Pi Edition hacks we’ve seen – go and check it out) has been busy with car diagnostics, which is as good a place as any to start. It turns out that there’s a standard for reading data from all makes of modern car, called OBD-II (on-board diagnostics II). Your car can communicate all kinds of data that you may not even have known it was collecting, like the volume of particulates being absorbed by the filter, the temperature of the air coming into the car, or results from the oxygen sensor; and the things you might expect, like oil pressure or speed and distance travelled. You can then process that data to output figures on useful things like fuel economy. (Martin’s using the screen of that Samsung laptop as a display for his Pi for the time being.) Consumers can buy a USB to OBD2 interface cable – Martin’s was about £10 on eBay. Reading and displaying this data is the first step in what Martin hopes will be a larger project. Those of you making carputers will find the ability to do this useful too – it’s well worth being able to work out for yourself why the mysterious red light on your dashboard has come on, without having to spend money at the garage just to find out that your oil levels were low. Martin has forked some existing software from GitHub so that he could find out what sensors were supported by his Lotus, and poll the car every 0.5 seconds, writing the sensor data to the screen. To run Martin’s code on your own Pi, open a terminal and type:
Once you’ve got the data from the car out of the way, of course, there’s a lot more you can do with a Pi to make being in the car a bit more fun. First off, there’s music: you can turn your Pi into a Spotify server (you’ll need a premium Spotify account) or a Pandora jukebox. And, of course, you’ll want GPS and a camera. Using a Raspberry Pi camera board and a separate GPS module hooked up to the Pi, Chicago Electronic Distributors (who specialise in Pi stuff, if you’re in the market for some kit) built a reversing camera and in-car GPS. They’ve also been using another Pi with a camera board as a dashcam. We’ve been racking our brains about what else you might want in a carputer. Emma suggests you might like to add a thermometer to your Pi too, to log the internal temperature of your car “in case of dogs”. Rob wants disco lights. (You could use a LED matrix for this – I’d be tempted to mount such a matrix in the back window and scroll obscenities at people behind me with their headlights on full beam.) And I would also like a robot valet with a teeny-weeny vacuum cleaner, and something to count the change in the ashtray, but that might be a step too far. JamesH races cars – he’s been talking about infrared sensors for the tyre temperature and accelerometers to measure G-force when taking corners, which might be a bit more practical. Finally, you’ll want to install the thing. Now, you can do what Chicago Electronic Distributors did and just mount a screen on velcro or attach it to the windscreen with a sticky cup, and hide the Pi itself in the glovebox or the boot: but where’s the fun in that? We found a lovely album of pictures from LuckyJezster, one of our forum members, who is refurbishing a 1980s Ford F120. With a Pi. Here’s his post about the process – click on the image of the Pi he’s embedded in the central console and covered with plexiglass to see the photo album. Blue LEDs! Lovely clicky switches! A Pi logo hand-engraved with a knife! Are you working on your own carputer? Does your Pi have wheels? Have we missed anything glaring that any carputer worth its salt should have? Let us know in the comments. |
New HMH Website Brings Ed Content to All Learners
| When consumers think of names like DK, McGraw-Hill, or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, there’s a good chance that they think back to the colorful textbooks of their elementary school days, heavy books with stories to read followed by questions to answer. They might even remember the sneaky joy they felt the day they discovered that the answers to all of the odd-numbered math questions were in the back of the book. But HMH is changing consumer’s perceptions of academic publishers, namely, by reaching out with relevant content to learners of every age and interest, not just traditional school students. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced this week the launch of its new website, HMHCo.com, a learning portal that will provide content to teachers, parents, students, and constant learners who want access to some of the most engaging titles HMH has to offer. "We believe that our customers, whether educators, parents or book lovers, will find engaging and relevant resources onhmhco.com," said John Dragoon, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, HMH, said in a press release about the launch. "From CliffsNotes study guides to assessment tools, and from Curious George apps for young learners to Life of Pi and J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series, we have extended access to our content and created an online hub for lifelong learners." While HMH’s students and teachers are probably fairly familiar with what the new site can offer them, typical consumers may not be as aware. According to the release, “Readers and lifelong learners can explore the latest offerings in contemporary fiction and thought-provoking nonfiction, like Paul Tough's How Children Succeed or popular cookbooks like the Essential Pepin and How to Cook Everything. As the home of The American Heritage Dictionary and Webster's, HMH has reference and vocabulary needs covered, and visitors can also download reading and discussion guides, hop onto book group forums to share ideas or download a new cooking app to try in the kitchen.”
New HMH Website Brings Ed Content to All Learners is a post from: E-Reader News |
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Video: Top 5 Digital Comic Book Apps for Android
| Android has become more refined over the years and is the operating system of choice for many of the worlds leading tablets. Today, we showcase Comixology, Dark Horse, ACV, Comic Rack and Comica! Each one of these apps brings something unique to the table. If you want to load in your own CBR and CBZ comics that you download from the internet, you may want to check out Comica, Comic Rack and ACV. All of these allow you to import your own into the app, but most feel rather clunky when you search your tablet for each issue. There tends to be no unified way to automatically import them all in and manual labor is required. For the most part, you don’t have some of the more essential features found in the mainstream apps. You do not have guided view, and have to pinch and zoom each panel to read some chat bubbles. Comixology and Dark Horse are the most refined apps and have the greatest selection for paid content. Comixology has deals with Archie, Marvel, DC, IDW and Walking Dead. This is the most well developed ecosystem, but their Android app always plays second fiddle to their iOS endeavors. Dark Horse excels with cool properties that have an avid following, such as Buffy, Star Wars and tons of indie titles. Video: Top 5 Digital Comic Book Apps for Android is a post from: E-Reader News |
Ectaco Caught Faking their Own Product Reviews
| Ectaco has been releasing the Jetbook line of e-Readers since 2008 and has been developing language assistant devices for the military for the last 15 years. The company has never gained mass market traction with their devices, as they cannot compete with price alone against the juggernauts of the industry like Amazon and Kobo. Ectaco is facing some backlash as they have been caught creating fake profiles and building up hype about their products in popular e-Reader communities. Popular community MobileRead has looked into the past five years of pro-Ectaco reviews and most of them stem from the companies official IP address. It seems a number of users were posting very favorable reviews and even making Youtube videos, posing as average customers. This is just one specific example, they have also been patrolling our website and others in an effort to sell more units. Today, MobileRead issued the following statement “We’re a bit heavy-hearted to report the news, but recently it was discovered by one of our vigilant members that someone, or several people, employed by, or affiliated with, Ectaco used sock puppets in our forums. Posing as regular consumers, these sock puppets were used to create phony grassroots support for Ectaco products, specifically for the Jetbook device. Not just recently, but for several years. We pride ourselves on being an open and welcoming community. Everyone is invited to join the discussions, whether in an official capacity or otherwise. Full disclosure is not a requirement, as long as you don’t attempt to distort the views in our forums, either by pretending to be a delighted customer of your own brand, or by pretending to be a disgruntled user of a competing product.” You can follow specific examples by checking out Kris777′s Posts and LuBiBs Posts, as an example of how not to promote your own company, by posing as legitimate customers. Ectaco Caught Faking their Own Product Reviews is a post from: E-Reader News |
Good e-Reader Introduces a new eBook Best Seller List
| Today Good e-Reader is proud to announce the launch of our comprehensive eBook Best Seller List! The essence of the list is to data mine all of the popular eBook file sharing websites and produce what people are really reading. This is the first service in the world that gives readers and publishers comprehensive reports on what authors, genres and books are the most popular and what people are downloading the most. The New York Times, IndieBound and USA Today all focus on digital books that produce the most sales. They look at the most popular reselling sites, such as Amazon, B&N and Kobo. We go the opposite direction to see what people are really reading, and not necessary purchasing. The main reason we went this route, is because no one else is paying much attention to this space, yet millions of books are being downloaded every single week, with no metrics or tracking information. We seek to help publishers and readers alike determine what books are the most popular and what eBooks are being downloaded the most. This type of data is often produced in real time, and is fairly accurate. Our new eBook Best Seller List features the top 10 downloaded books and focus on new books exclusively. Obviously the Hunger Games, Harry Potter and 50 Shades of Grey dominate the all time most downloaded, but that’s not what we are interested in. Each book entry has cover art, the author name and a basic description. If any of them interest you, there is a Buy it Now button that directs you to Amazon, Sony, B&N and Kobo. We do not use affiliate links or tracking code, we get no commissions on any of the digital sales. You can check it out today by visiting the Good e-Reader eBook Best Seller List! We also have a new widget on the right hand side bar, that lists the book name and an image of the cover art. Clicking on any of those images will bring you directly to our Best Seller List. Good e-Reader Introduces a new eBook Best Seller List is a post from: E-Reader News |
Android 4.3: New Features Discussion
| As expected, the “Breakfast with Sunder” event has yielded the Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, which marks an incremental enhancement over the Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean version. It could well have been Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie that we could have been discussing here, but instead Google made the decision to bring in a smaller update. Key Pie Lime is still being speculated to bring about some changes to the Android platform. However, it will be wrong to assume the latest Android is just about a few extra features or the usual dose of bug fixes and enhancements that all updates seem to incorporate. Clearly, one of the biggest changes that Android 4.3 offers is performance enhancement with better graphics rendering than ever before. This has been brought about thanks to the OpenGL ES 3.0 support that has been included in Android 4.3 for "highest-performance graphics,” which aims to "optimize texture management and increase gradient rendering fidelity.” Android 4.3 also brings with it better rendering for shapes and text, which ensures fewer draw calls issued to the GPU for 2D images. Another improvement that Android 4.3 has is the inclusion of support for Bluetooth AVRCP 1.3, which means devices running this version of Android can easily pair up with car audio while also offering additional functionality as well. Google has also introduced a way to introduce further restrictions to the multi-user profile so that users can now restrict what specific apps or games other users can have access to. This feature is only available for tablet devices, and will come in handy for parents to restrict their kids usage of tablet devices. Android 4.3 also introduces better location accuracy, enabling apps to get location data. This is achieved by ensuring the apps have access to wifi even when it is switched off and not used for data access purposes. Google has also introduced additional languages to Android 4.3, include Afrikaans, Amharic, Hindi, Swahili, and Zulu. The Android 4.3 update also has a new keyboard feature included. It is now better equipped to recognize tap typing, which makes it easier for users to input text even when they are engaged in chatting via messages; there is a new emoji keyboard as well. Overall, it's another layer of sugar coating that Jelly Bean has been provided with, which no doubt will keep us satiated until the bigger Key Pie Lime update comes along, despite the belief that it is more than six months away and that there will be lot of action taking place until then.
Android 4.3: New Features Discussion is a post from: E-Reader News |
Kindle Singles Introduces the Long-Form Interview
| Long-form journalism and short-form fiction have become widely popular formats with readers, and a number have platforms have been launched to focus solely on this type of reading. Now & Then Reader, Atavist, and Kindle Singles have all seen bestselling titles as readers take to the type of reading that provides a faster read than a full-length book, but still provides more depth and insight than a magazine article. Today, Amazon announced a new category for Kindle Singles, the Kindle Singles Interview, a series which stands to be as popular as the single-title e-shorts that takes readers into far more information than a typical print or televised interview would have space for. "In September of 1962, novelist Alex Haley's conversation with Miles Davis launched the Playboy Interview, and pioneered the idea of a long-form, extended dialogue with the great personalities of our time," said David Blum, editor of Kindle Singles, in a press release on the announcement today. "We hope to carry forward that tradition, and use the unlimited digital space to engage great artists and thinkers in conversation with skilled writers and interviewers." The first title available in the Interview series is with Shimon Peres, president of Israel, who had a number of insightful things to say, including remarks about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, as well as assurances that the upcoming peace talks with Palestine are a positive move, referring to their leader as a “partner for peace,” even while expressing his concerns over Israel’s current concern with Iran. Future titles in the Kindle Singles Interview series will be available at Amazon.com, and this first title, “The Optimist,” is available now for 99-cents.
Kindle Singles Introduces the Long-Form Interview is a post from: E-Reader News |
How to Use Excel’s VLOOKUP Function
Excel's VLOOKUP function is an extremely useful tool, and learning how to use it is easier than you think! |
Digipalooza ‘13 kicks off next week!
| On Thursday, August 1st, hundreds of librarians and publishers will join Team OverDrive in Cleveland, Ohio for Digipalooza, the 4th international user group conference. Librarians from around the world will participate in educational and interactive sessions covering topics such as the future of digital media, trends and lessons learned from Big Data, best practices for increasing awareness, usage, and customer engagement, and publisher previews from AudioGO, Books on Tape / Random House, Harper Collins and more.
On Saturday morning, keynote speaker, Mitch Albom, a best-selling author, screenwriter, playwright and nationally syndicated columnist will take the stage. Mitch is the author of five consecutive New York Times bestsellers, and readers are eagerly awaiting his new novel, The First Phone Call from Heaven, coming 11/12/13.
Attendees will also be among the first to see a live demonstration of Streaming Video and OverDrive Media Station, and hear OverDrive CEO, Steve Potash's Crystal Ball Report on what's next in eBooks, audiobooks and video for libraries, schools and readers around the world.
At Digipalooza, we work hard and find some time to play hard, too. Attendees will party like rock stars at the exclusive party at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum and experience the first-ever Rolling Stones: 50 Years of Satisfaction exhibit.
If you're joining us for Digipalooza, we wish you safe travels and look forward to seeing you next week. If you haven't received your checklist and last minute reminders yet, please email digipalooza2013@overdrive.com for details on what to pack, Wi-Fi, weather and more. Whether you'll be in attendance or not, join the conversation all weekend on Twitter by using #digip13.
Adam Sockel is a Marketing Communications Specialist with OverDrive
 |
Going on Vacation? Hide Your Tablet in Plain Sight
| As prices came down on expensive tablet devices and more consumers could afford to invest in the convenience of complete portability, new concerns arose about theft and damage. A survey from digital magazine distributor lekiosk revealed that only half of the tablet users surveyed reported that they take their tablets with them on vacation; of the remaining half who do not travel with the devices, twenty-five percent cited concerns about theft as the reason they leave them at home. Nathaniel Philippe, lekiosk's Head of International Business Development, said in a statement on the survey results, "When it comes to providing entertainment, tablets like the iPad are extremely versatile – that's why so many Brits have started taking the devices on holiday with them. But there aren't as many iTravellers as there might be – because people are worried that their precious slates will be targeted by sea- and pool-side thieves. And even the Brits who do take their tablets on holiday with them are resorting to watching them like hawks – or taking a risk and hiding them under piles of clothing. That's why we've developed these very special anti-theft devices that let Brits hide their tablets in plain sight – and experience the kind of true relaxation that everyone goes on holiday to find." To help ease travelers’ concerns–and keep them from resorting to hiding their expensive technology under clothes or inside their shoes, as many survey respondents reported doing–lekiosk has introduced a ne anti-theft tablet case that is so simple as to very nearly be brilliant. Disguised as a standard, inexpensive print magazine, lekiosk’s tablet cases let users enjoy their tablets poolside without drawing the attention of a would-be thief, just waiting for them to put their tablets down and go for a swim. Anyone with ill intentions who happens to walk past an empty lounge chair, looking for the opportunity to help himself to an expensive iPad, would see only a typical paper magazine. lekiosk is an iOS, Android, and Windows 8 app that allows consumers to purchase magazines from a rotating 3D news-kiosk and start reading them in just a few clicks, allowing users to create a virtual library of their content. It is already one of the most widely used digital magazine apps in Europe, with one out of every four consumer iPads having installed the free app.
Going on Vacation? Hide Your Tablet in Plain Sight is a post from: E-Reader News |
Clive at Activate
| Clive Beale, our Director of Educational Development, was at the Guardian’s Activate conference two weeks ago. He was giving a talk in the alarming and upsetting PechaKucha format, where twenty slides are displayed for twenty seconds each, giving the speaker six minutes and forty seconds to talk in twenty-second bursts. Hats off, Clive: I swear there’s no format more terrifying. (If anyone ever asks me to do one of these, I’ll just show twenty landscape photographs. Scratch that: if anyone ever asks me to do one of these, I’ll say no.)  Clive makes an analogy. Click to view the whole talk. Click here or on the picture to see Clive give a lightning-fast explanation of why learning to code is so important. Clive is at the Scratch conference in Barcelona this week; if you’re there, please go and say hi, and have a chat with him about learning with the Pi. He’s got an awful lot more material to share with you than will fit into seven minutes.
|
Nvidia Reveals Next Gen Tegra 5 Chip Based on Kepler Architecture
| Nvidia just ensured smartphones and tablet devices of the future will be far more powerful by announcing its latest chip offering, the new Tegra 5. Designed to deliver a far more potent processing punch while draining the least on battery resources, the new Tegra 5 chip could finally ensure the introduction of such processor-intensive features as augmented reality or image processing on mobile devices, which was unthinkable on mobile devices so far. Codenamed Logan, the chip draws a lot of similarity with its present generation 600 series and 700 series GPUs in that the same Kepler architecture is retained. What's new is a “low-power inter-unit interconnect” that has been optimized especially for mobile devices. What emerges in the end is a chip that draws even less power than a third of current generation GPUs, without compromising on performance in anyway. “We achieved this efficiency without compromising graphics capability. Kepler supports the full spectrum of OpenGL – including the just-announced OpenGL 4.4 full-featured graphics specification and the OpenGL ES 3.0 embedded standard. It also supports DirectX 11, Microsoft's latest graphics API,” the company revealed in its blog today. Daniel Vivoli, senior vice president at Nvidia said it is the new concept of GPGPU or general-purpose graphics processing unit computing that we are approaching in which many of the tasks that were traditionally handled by the CPU is now being processed by the GPU. However, he stressed on the need for both the CPU and GPU to work in tendem to ensure optimum utilization of available resources. Daniel revealed that Project Logan also boasts several advanced rendering and simulation techniques such as compute-based deferred rendering, advanced anti-aliasing and post-processing, physics, simulations, and Tessellation. This Tessellation refers to the ability of the chip to create geometry on the GPU dynamically from high level descriptions. The chip accomplishes this in such a manner that the triangles in the geometry are sized based on the user's viewpoint, thereby freeing up the chip to engage in other tasks. Nvidia referred to Compute-based deferred rendering as something “which calculates the effect of all lights in a scene in a single deferred rendering pass. This OpenGL 4 capability greatly improves deferred rendering efficiency and scalability compared to current OpenGL ES-based implementations, which require an extra pass for each light source in the scene. The scalability of the compute-based approach also paves the way to even more advanced lighting models, such as using virtual points of lights to approximate global illumination effects.” Anti-aliasing and post-processing techniques ensure multi-sampling is more programmable, which works towards enhancing the overall scene. The tech also supports several film-quality post-processing effects, such as motion blur and depth of field. It also supports advanced modeling of physics engines, which adds a touch of reality to the scenes, physics, and simulations. It also opens up avenues to new and innovative ideas for gameplay mechanics which make extensive use of the physics engine. However, Nvidia didn’t come up with any figures to denote how much of an improvement the Tegra 5 chips marked over Tegra 4. Tegra 5 is slated to arrive only in 2015 as Nvidia has only just begun to ship its Tegra 4 chips which will be powering the upcoming SlateBook X2 tablet from HP. Refer to the company blog for more on this. Nvidia Reveals Next Gen Tegra 5 Chip Based on Kepler Architecture is a post from: E-Reader News |
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
New 2nd Gen Nexus 7 Could Be the Best Tablet for eReading
| In one of the worst kept secrets ever, Google officially unveiled the 2nd generation Nexus 7 tablet today. Various leaks before the announcement revealed all the key details ahead of schedule, so there weren’t really any big surprises. Google’s latest 7″ tablet runs Android 4.3 Jelly Bean and comes in three varieties, there’s a 16GB [...] |
Pato surveillance system
| Pato is a little green bird who Jorge Rancé found, injured, on the street in Barcelona, and rescued. He was in a bad way, with a broken leg and the feathery equivalent of a terrible hair day.  Pato after a visit to the vet, his broken leg in plaster Jorge took Pato to the vet to be patched up, and took him home to recuperate in a large birdcage at his house. But he worried that he wouldn’t be there to oversee Pato’s recovery while he was at work. Fortunately, Jorge has a Raspberry Pi. So, using a Pi-Face to interface between the Pi and some sensors, he set up PATOSS: Pato Surveillance System. Now Jorge (and you) can check out how Pato is doing from anywhere in the world. PATOSS monitors Pato’s recovery by streaming video of what he’s up to to the web, checks on the ambient temperature and the water levels in his little dish, and tweets once an hour to let Jorge know whether everything’s as it should be, with a live picture from Pato’s webcam. The data is transmitted via a wifi dongle. (If you’re following the PATOSS feed today, don’t panic; Jorge says that the water level monitor is not currently hooked up, so it’s reporting low levels, but Pato does actually have plenty to drink.) Jorge has full build instructions on his website, with a hardware list (and prices), code, diagrams and tips on housing. The whole PATOSS system is Creative Commons licensed so you can adapt it for your own needs – it’ll be interesting to see if anyone comes up with a Raspberry Pi camera board variant.  PATOSS (left) and Pato (right) This sort of build is easy to replicate at home. We think it’s a particularly good project for kids with small pets at home who want to apply some computer science to something they really care about. They’ll be able to see real-world results and share them with friends: what could be better than being able to check up on Woffles the hamster’s daily grind via Twitter from school? If you and your children’s pets end up using a PATOSS system at home, please let us know – I’d love to share your results!
|
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Review of the Pocketbook Color Lux eReader
| The Pocketbook Color Lux is one of the first e-readers in the world to use the new E Ink Triton 2 color technology and a front-light. Today, we dive right into this new device and give you a sense of what it brings to the table and how it performs under real world circumstances. Is it a must buy or should you avoid it at all costs? Hardware The Pocketbook Color Lux features a 8 inch color touchscreen featuring a resolution of 800 x 600. The main selling point is that it has a front-lit display and utilizes E Ink’s new Triton 2 technology. Triton 2 is the next generation color display screen for your traditional e-reader. There is an added layer of film that will give customers a higher degree of contrast and better color display from the previous generation. Triton 1 had a grid of 2×2 pixels, red, green, blue, and white and used a square color filter array. Meanwhile, Triton 2 has the same color display, but instead of using square pixels it is using rectangular. It should give you 4096 degrees of color with 16 levels of each. Underneath the hood is a Freescale 800 MHZ processor and 256 MB of RAM. This is probably the weakest aspect of this device overall. Menu navigation, turning pages, loading PDF files and frequent lagging is something you will frequently encounter. For example, it normally takes two full minutes for a PDF file to load and most of the online functionality takes six to eight minutes for all graphic assets to load. Simply exiting a book and going to the main menu is not instantaneous and will irk a number of users expecting quick results. There are 4 GB of internal memory and you can expand it up to 32 GB via the Micro SD card. The Color Lux is powered by a Lithium-Polymer, 3000 mAh, that should be good for turning 5400 pages without frontlight before needing a recharge. Powering is done by plugging the device into your computer via the Micro USB cable. One of the great things about this device is that it is able to play music and audiobooks. There are no built in speakers, but it does have a 3.5mm headphone jack. The entire audio engine is actually fairly solid and has basic features to shuffle a playlist and handle a large audio library. In the end, this is a large screen e-reader, and bucks the trend of your traditional six inch device. It has full color E Ink and has a unique slider to adjust the intensity of the front-lit display. Sadly, Pocketbook is using the same amount of RAM and the same processor as it used three years ago with the 902, 912, and most of the other models. Trying to use new technology with crummy internals does not give the users the best experience. It is no surprise the company has given up on the US market and only markets its e-readers in Eastern Europe and Russia. Software One of the strengths of the Pocketbook Color Lux is the extensive app library and slew of new programs. It has a number of new apps, such as a kids coloring book and drawing app. This simply makes the Triton 2 display really shine and is a joy to use. There is also a number of games, such as Solitaire, Sudoku, Chess, and a few others. Its large app library makes it a good family device. The main menu gives you the last five books you have loaded on your device or editions you have opened. There is a Settings, Apps, and Bookstore link that directs you to Bookland. There are a number of settings to augment, with one cool feature that can disable the WIFI timeout, something you could not do on previous Pocketbook devices, and the ability to install firmware updates automatically. The large screen display really makes the keyboard shine and is quite easy to enter internet addresses to browse the web. The web-browser does not have a ton of options to disable Javascript or disable images, so you might not want to visit sites that have lots of graphical assets. Luckily, there is an RSS feed app that allows you to enter a number of websites and pull their information in raw text format, which is the best option to stay abreast of all the latest news. There are four software driven buttons on the side of the device that are likely to see regular use; home, back, forward, and settings button. If your device ever becomes unresponsive, you can hold down on page forward and page back, and after about 30 seconds, should make it responsive again. This is easier than always doing a hard reset or powering it off. One of the strongest elements of the Pocketbook Color Lux is the extensive software library. There is something for everyone, although anything to do with the internet is fairly slow. Most other apps tend to respond and load fairly quickly. The Pocketbook Color Lux reads a myriad of ebook formats that should resonate well with people who download a ton of content from the internet or have an extensive library of digital tomes. It will easily handle PDF, PDF (DRM), EPUB, EPUB(DRM), DJVU, FB2, FB2.ZIP, DOC, DOCX, RTF, PRC, TCR, TXT, CHM, HTM, and HTML. Over the course of our review, we loaded almost every type of book into it, to see what it handled best. EPUB is the best format in terms of being able to provide you with the most robust experience. Page-turns occur very quickly and there are a number of options to employ to make notes and highlights, and look words up in the dictionary. The full color screen really makes the cover art shine. One of the things that completely surprised me and blew me away was the number of fonts available to change the text. There were over 16 different open sourced fonts, mainly Droid Sans and fonts with Droid in them. One of the main drawbacks is changing the font, line-spacing, margins, and font size require you to visit a separate full page menu. This does not provide the users with any kind of visual representation of how the text will look when you make changes. Most e-readers either refresh the text on the screen live, or have sample text that changes automatically whenever you make a change. This Pocketbook model warrants you to enter the font menu, make changes, save it, and then go back to your book. Often you have to do this a few times to find the optimal output format. It is needless extra steps that may incur the ire of hardcore readers. You would figure a full color touchscreen e-reader would excel reading technical documents or other manuals. Surprisingly this fails in almost all regards. The larger the document, the longer it takes to actually open it and make any changes. When we loaded in a PDF comic book, it wouldn’t even turn a page and crashed. The DND Monsters Manual, which we load on every e-reader we test, really struggled. The largest shortcoming is not the delay or crashing when you load PDF documents or try and turn pages, but pinching and zooming. When you pinch and zoom content, all text and images start to get bigger. This pushes text and images off the page, onto the next page. For example, if your image is at the bottom of the screen, and you try and pinch and zoom to enlarge it, the picture will be split between the page you are on and the next page. The rendering engine they use to handle PDF pinching and zooming is abysmal. Pocketbook GUI and programming engineers really need to look at the libraries used by Kobo, Sony, and Amazon to try and work out all the bugs. Wrap Up It is not too often that we are really disappointed by a modern day e-reader. The devices have been on the market long enough for a universal standard for quality and control to be developed. People may have differing opinions about specific companies like B&N, Amazon, Kobo, Bookeen, Onyx, Icarus, Bebook, Sony, or Ectaco. Really, in the current e-reader space, these are the companies with an extensive portfolio of devices and have all been in the game for three years or more. Pocketbook has been in business for as long as we have been doing e-reader reviews. The company has always used the exact same internals on every single model. The philosophy of skimping out on processor and RAM will never adequately deliver a seamless experience to the end user. The Color Lux is simply unusable in its current form and should be avoided at all costs. The only thing this device does right is read EPUB books and run apps. It is easy to switch the orientation from landscape to portrait mode, 360 degrees, but it is done via the software and not a built in gyroscope or accelerometer. Everything else, just makes you wait for a number of minutes for your commands to go through. At over $300, this is too costly to take a punt on and prove us wrong. PROS Extensive app library Colors are washed out due to the Triton 2 extra layer of film Rating: 2/10
Review of the Pocketbook Color Lux eReader is a post from: E-Reader News |
