PW has the details from the IDPF’s Digital Book 2007. About those widgets: Will the dogs eat the dogfood—that is, buy the books? Here’s hoping. Typical TeleBlog readers are many cuts above the norm, but for what it’s worth, the message from our unscientific poll is: Don’t do widgets without HTML alternatives for book excerpts. Of course, widgets can involve far more than excerpts—for example, blogs and updated multimedia.
Related: Digital Devices Star at IDPF’s Digital Book 2007, from PW. Based on the account, I’d say the news was underwhelming on the whole. But I read with interest the following: “Telecom Italia’s Librofonino, described as ‘a cellular book’ by Guiliano Muratore, is a pocket-sized device with a large, flexible, rollup screen that is larger than the device when it is unfurled. The device offers world connectivity (in a new country it alerts the user to local content), DRM protection, massive flashcard storage and all kinds of wirelessly delivered content from text to audio.” That alert feature sound nifty even if it’s hardly a breakthrough. Device is shown in photo. See earlier TeleBlog items on the Librofonino.
it’s not a big surprise but I haven’t seen it announced yet and it’s BIG news: Google is planning paid online access to books accessible via their book search
re: widgets
the article says “185,000 unique visitors” since launch
I think it’s not a lot. Actually I would say it’s closer to failure than to success.
DRM protection? DOA! No interest here. Heck, I don’t even buy PalmOS-based eBooks anymore if they have DRM!
Yeah, that is not an offering, but a flaw, unless it means ‘can do this as well’.
If you can do text and html on this, might be about the only thing to tempt me to upgrade my 7 year old phone. 🙂