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E-Readers Up Close: Using the Sony PRS-700

By William Stanek
November 18, 2009

The Sony PRS-700 has an internal storage capacity of 420 megabytes (MB) and two expansion slots: One expansion slot for Sony Memory Stick Duo or Pro Duo cards up to 16 GB One expansion slot for SD, SDHC, or...

E-Readers Up Close: Using the Sony PRS-505

By William Stanek
November 18, 2009

The PRS-505 has an internal storage capacity of 192 megabytes (MB) and two expansion slots: One expansion slot for Sony Memory Stick Duo or Pro Duo cards up to 8 GB One expansion slot for SD, SDHC, or miniSD...

E-Readers Up Close: Getting to know the Sony Readers, Part 3

By William Stanek
November 15, 2009

William Stanek here, continuing with the in-depth look at e-readers and e-books. The recap: In my earlier blog entries, I've explored the ins and outs of e-ink, electronic paper displays (EPDs) and e-readers. Now, I'm examining individual readers as a...

Taking a Detour: E-readers A Soap Box

By William Stanek
November 12, 2009

William Stanek here, taking a slight detour in our continuing e-reader discussion. When it comes to favorite technologies, call me a zealot because I probably am. I'm not afraid to proclaim that I love technology that works, and I think...

E-Readers Up Close: Getting to know the Sony Readers, Part 2

By William Stanek
November 9, 2009

William Stanek here, continuing with the in-depth look at e-readers and e-books. In my earlier blog entries, I introduced EPDs, discussed how the technology works, and delved briefly into ways they're being used. Now, I'm examining the Sony Reader as...

Michael Tamblyn's TOC Frankfurt presentation (actually a dramatic recreation thereof)

By Andrew Savikas
November 7, 2009

via blip.tv Shortcovers' Michael Tamblyn was kind enough to record his talk and slides from last month's TOC Frankfurt Conference. I got a lot of great hallway feedback about...

"Web-based ePub validator adds Preflight and API" (via @liza)

By Andrew Savikas
November 4, 2009

From @liza at Threepress:"EpubCheck’s lesser-known companion checks for additional issues like content documents that exceed 300K, which can’t be loaded on the Sony Reader."http://blog.threepress.org/2009/11/04/epub-validator-updates/(ps -- thanks to @liza for making...

So Long iPod, Hello E-Reader

By William Stanek
November 4, 2009

William Stanek here, talking about electronic paper displays (EPDs). In my earlier blog entries, I introduced EPDs, discussed how the technology works, and delved briefly into ways they're being used. Now, I'll dig in and take a closer look at...

Despite recent gains for books, Games still dominate in the App Store (via @dliman)

By Andrew Savikas
November 3, 2009

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica slices and dices current app trends for iPhone and Android (nice data points on price stabilization too): "While it might be true that the number of Book...

New info on upcoming Ibis Reader from @liza's threepress -- another books-in-cloud model

By Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009

Our part of this open ecosystem is Ibis Reader, an in-development digital reading system for a range of internet devices that provides access to books both online and offline....

"E pluribus tunum: Uniform prices for online music are no way to maximise profit"

By Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009

This research suggest maximum value in a digital media market like iTunes (for both producer and consumer) comes from a combination of subscription/membership fee and per-item purchase: "Charging an "entry...

In-depth insight from Tim O'Reilly on lessons learned from Safari Books Online

By Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009

"As I outlined above, Safari adopted a "cloud library" model rather than downloadable ebooks as its fundamental design metaphor. I thought it might be worthwhile to understand how we arrived...

The Meaning of Droid | Monday Note

By Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009

Nice competitive analysis of next moves for big mobile players (via @jafurtado)"One year later, we have a new situation, a real contender for the lead position in the exploding smartphone market....

Android's Impact on eBooks, Reading � Kindle Review - Kindle 2 Review, Books

By Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009

The big Android question is - Is Android going to provide a fourth big channel for ebooks? Well, Android might be Very Important for eReading The first reason is that Mobile Devices and Mobile Internet...

O'Reilly Ebooks Now in Aldiko Online Catalog for Android

By Andrew Savikas
October 30, 2009

The iPhone gets a lot of the attention when it comes to smartphones, but signs point to Android playing a huge role in the growing smartphone market, with 20+...

Safari Books Online 6.0: A Cloud Library as an alternate model for ebooks

By Tim O'Reilly
October 27, 2009

There has been a lot of attention paid to ebooks lately, and for good reason. Electronic books are portable, searchable, and more affordable than print books. The web has accustomed readers to having the latest information at their fingertips; we all ask why books should be any less available "on demand." Amazon’s Kindle has received the most mainstream attention (with...

Bonnie Biafore's Favorite New QuickBooks 2010 Features

By Sara Peyton
October 27, 2009

According to Bonnie Biafore, author of QuickBooks 2010: The Missing Manual, QuickBooks 2010 doesn't introduce any earth-shattering enhancements. Yet, a few of its new features are handy and welcome timesavers. Read on for details about Bonnie's favorite new features in...

Windows 7 is Here! - Win free Ebooks.

By Laurel Ackerman
October 21, 2009

Windows 7 becomes widely available today, and O'Reilly has 2 new books to help you make the most of it.

Hard Numbers Behind the Current and Coming Mobile Future

By Andrew Savikas
October 20, 2009

Every year at Web 2.0 Summit, Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker does a fantastic whirlwind tour of economic and technology trends she's watching, and in addition to a terrifying look at...

BookServer: A Web of Books

By Andrew Savikas
October 19, 2009

I'm thrilled to be at the Internet Archive's "Making Books Apparent" event today in San Francisco, where they're debuting the new BookServer architecture. As the audience for digital books grows,...

Rails in a Nutshell Manuscript Open For Collaboration

By Keith Fahlgren
October 19, 2009

Following hot on the launch of the Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript manuscript three weeks ago, I'm pleased that Rails in a Nutshell, from Cody Fauser, James MacAulay, Edward Ocampo-Gooding and John Guenin is now live and...

Kindle Device and Clipping Limits Now Lifted for O'Reilly Books in Kindle Store

By Andrew Savikas
October 8, 2009

Earlier this year, one of our authors reported hitting some sort of undocumented limit when using the "Clipping" feature on Kindle. And then other readers discovered they were unable...

Customer Loyalty for Mobile Devices

By Andrew Savikas
October 6, 2009

Some of the most interesting data on trends in mobile development has been coming from Flurry, an app analytics company (developers insert little snippets of Flurry code in their...

Anecdotal Evidence from the Digital Shift

By Andrew Savikas
October 5, 2009

Back in 2004, when I spent most of my time doing format conversions and production automation, I had the privilege of turning much of what I learned doing things like...

Four short links: 5 October 2009

By Nat Torkington
October 5, 2009

Brown Cloud Marketing -- advertorial "interviewing" GM of a company offering "DNS in the cloud". This might be a worthwhile service, but the way he markets it (by saying open source is "freeware" and the market leader is "legacy") reveals a rich vein of bozo. Freeware legacy DNS is the internet's dirty little secret (actually, it's the reason we...

Collaborative Publishing: One Brand New Title, One Success

By Keith Fahlgren
September 29, 2009

Another site focused on collaborative publishing, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, launches while we look back on the first attempt to improve manuscripts by engaging the community in an open and collaborative dialog with the authors, Programming Scala.

Microsoft/O'Reilly Alliance Means DRM-free Ebooks Coming from MS Press

By Andrew Savikas
September 24, 2009

Full details are in Tim's post on the Radar blog (and in the Press Release and in the statement from Microsoft ), but thought one part of this deal worth...

Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time)

By Mark Sigal
September 23, 2009

The book business is under assault. Book sales have been stagnating for some time, Amazon is the industry's boogeyman, and more terrifying, book publishers have no idea how to market books in a world (largely) devoid of bookstores. Moreover, in the age of the always on, it's fair to ask, do people even still read anymore? Just as it re-envisioned the Media Player, the Mobile Phone and Mobile Computing, Apple is well positioned to reboot the Book with its forthcoming iPad Tablet. Read on...

Talk Like a Pirate and Think Like a Pirate - Chance to win Ebooks

By Laurel Ackerman
September 19, 2009

Online security is critical for any website or application. To outsmart your enemies you have to think like them. O'Reilly has a number of books that tell you what to be on the lookout for and how to protect your online property from attack, as well as learn about vulnerabilities you may not be aware of. Share your best security advice and tips for a chance to win an ebook!

Show Off Your O'Reilly Media Books!

By Mary Rotman
September 15, 2009

Have a bookshelf full of O'Reilly books like our Facebook Fans Michael Pelikan and Kay Bieri do? Use it to win more! Take a picture or record a short video of your books and post it on the O'Reilly Media Facebook Page before 5pm PT Thursday, September 17, for a chance to win two ebooks of your choice.

Mobile as New Medium

By Andrew Savikas
September 7, 2009

While prepping for my talk tomorrow on mobile publishing at the Digital Publishing Group in New York, I was also popping in and out of a related ongoing email conversation...

New Book "Hacking: The Next Generation"

By Nitesh Dhanjani
September 5, 2009

My new book "Hacking: The Next Generation" is now available.

O'Reilly iPhone App Tips and Tricks

By Adam Witwer
September 4, 2009

As Andrew has discussed in some detail recently on this blog, O'Reilly has started publishing many books as iPhone/iPod Touch apps. Over the past couple of months, we've received a...

Labor Day weekend question: How does O'Reilly help you work better? - Chance to Win Free O'Reilly Ebooks

By Laurel Ackerman
September 3, 2009

We get tons of great feedback on oreilly.com; most of it positive, all of it appreciated. We hear how much people like the content, the format, the authors, and the forums. One additional thing that we're especially interested in, though, is hearing about how O'Reilly has helped you. Has a book helped you build a great project? Has attending a conference given you an edge at work? Has a training course helped you to advance your career or start a new one? Please tell us! We're going to leave this post open for comments through Tuesday 9/8; after that we'll randomly choose 5 commenters to each win a free O'Reilly Ebook of their choice. We're really looking to hearing from you!

Five Things to Consider When Buying a Netbook - Tips from J.D. Biersdorfer, Author of Netbooks: The Missing Manual

By Sara Peyton
September 2, 2009

People buy new gadgets for every imaginable reason. In J.D. Biersdorfer's case, an apartment renovation prompted her to purchase one. "I wanted to have an extremely portable PC with me when I was living out of a duffel bag and sleeping on people's couches while my own place was unlivable," explains the author of O'Reilly's Netbooks: The Missing Manual. "It turned out to be a great solution because many of my friends have wireless networks (or neighbors that have unsecured wireless networks), so I could stay linked to the Internet even while couch surfing all over the city." Based on her personal experiences and research for the book, J.D. offers five important things to consider when buying a netbook.

Agile testing and Beautiful Teams (giveaway)

By Andrew Stellman
August 22, 2009

Testing -- especially on agile projects -- has been coming up a lot lately. Jenny and I have have spent a lot of time talking and writing about the basic ideas behind testing. So we were really excited when Abby...

Four short links: 14 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 13, 2009

Page2Pub -- harvest wiki content and turn it into EPub and PDF. See also Sony dropping its proprietary format and moving to EPub. Open standards rock. (via oreillylabs on Twitter) SQL Pie Chart -- an ASCII pie chart, drawn by SQL code. Horrifying and yet inspiring. Compare to PostgreSQL code to produce ASCII Mandelbrot set. (via jdub on Twitter...

The App Store and the Long Tail Part 2: The Real "DRM" At Stake

By Andrew Savikas
August 9, 2009

Note there's a lot of images in this post, so if you're reading it via RSS, you may want to click through to the original post if you can't see...

Does Digital Cannibalize Print? Not Yet.

By Andrew Savikas
August 6, 2009

One of the big risk factors publishers think about when it comes to digital books is that they will cannibalize print sales. Factor in the lower prices we're seeing for...

Four short links: 4 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 3, 2009

NASA Nebula Services/Platform Stack -- The NEBULA platform offers a turnkey Software-as-a-Service experience that can rapidly address the requirements of a large number of projects. However, each component of the NEBULA platform is also available individually; thus, NEBULA can also serve in Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service capacities. Bundles RabbitMQ, Eucalyptus, LUSTRE storage, Fabric deployment, Varnish front-end, MySQL and more. (via...

Two Cool New Bookworm Features

By Andrew Savikas
July 30, 2009

There's no question that there's plenty of room for improvement among EPUB readers. From simple things like poorly handling multiple author names to more complicated issues like CSS support, readers...

Would an Apple Tablet be an Ereader? Yes and No.

By Andrew Savikas
July 28, 2009

Last Friday the latest round of rumors of an Apple Tablet swelled considerably after a piece from Apple Insider asserted the device is now on the 2010 product roadmap:...

State of the Computer Book Market - Mid-Year 2009

By Mike Hendrickson
July 24, 2009

The market has been on a steady decline since mid-2008 and has continued downward right through the first half of 2009. And there are very few signs that the book-buying slump is going to turn around anytime soon. Overall, the market saw 595,821 fewer units sold in the first half of 2009 than were sold in the same period of 2008. Although we do not have data to show the trends between 2000 and 2003, the market performance this year is the worst we've seen since the fall of of 2001. You'll notice in the chart below that the seasonal patterns have remained consistent, but sales are at a much lower volume than any previous year.