Romantic Reads » technology

Sony Reader moves to open format

Leah — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:09:23 +0000

A NY Times article this morning reports that by the end of the year, Sony will drop its proprietary software for the Sony Readers and move to the much more consumer-friendly ePub format, the standard to which all publishers are pushing ebooks. This would allow Sony Reader owners to buy titles from any etailer that sells ePub, giving them greater flexibility in cost comparison.

The article also states that later this year Sony will introduce a new Reader that will be able to wirelessly down books in the same fashion as Amazon’s Kindle.

Free Read: The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen

Leah — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:13:41 +0000

View this document on Scribd

I have to admit, I don’t know much about the social networking (or maybe in this case social “netwriting”) site Scribd, but according to GalleyCat, the site has 50 million readers. You can find everything from full novels by bestselling authors to sheet music. There are also a number of excerpts, including one from Suzanne Brockmann’s latest.

The Tess Gerritsen novel can be read either on screen or downloaded as an Adobe pdf from the Scribd site. It all seems pretty cool to me. Happy reading!

Technology we can use

Leah — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:34:03 +0000

Mobile Content Today just reported a new Gift Finder application that Target has made available for the iPhone. Line up age, price range, sex and personality, and let ‘er rip.

How fun would it be to have the same kind of tool for books? You could have genre, setting, personality or really any number of categories spitting out recommendations. I think it would be an especially great way of getting readers to try out new authors.

Amazon and any number of stores have similar gift guides, but none that I know of exclusively for books.