Yesterday I posted a set of photos which I thought showed the real iPad Mini. Today I have learned that I, as well as pretty much all other bloggers, was had.
Mike Cane has turned up an Ebay auction for a dummy iPad Mini which looks exactly like the one in the photos yesterday. As you can see, it looks to have a screen identical to the one yesterday.
Whoops.
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The following several photographs turned up on a Chinese language blog this morning. The look an awful lot like the many other leaks for the iPad Mini, thus confirming the widely held belief that the iPad Mini will have a 7.85″ screen.
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I might have my issued with Barnes & Noble corporate but every so often their engineers make me sit up and take notice. There is a new update for the iPad app which quietly makes it more competitive against the many other Epub readers on the market.
My first favorite new feature has actually been there for a while (I can see it mentioned in Google searches), but I just noticed it today. While lots of apps like Aldiko, eReader, and Stanza offer many font, margin, and justification options, the Nook app offers those formatting options as well as several stock themes with specific colors for text, background, links, and highlights.
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As we approach upcoming launch events for both Amazon and Apple, speculation is rife about what the things they’re launching could mean for the reading industry. For example, the Guardian ponders what it might mean to have new 7” tablets available for both Amazon and Apple.
The article seems to me to lose a few points for asking in the headline if such tablets can “revive the news industry” but not really making a good argument in the actual article that it really could. A lot more people read books with ereaders than read newspapers or magazines with tablets. The Guardian even admits this, noting that iPad-only paper The Daily just laid off a third of its staff of 150. But wait—we haven’t had a 7” Apple tablet yet!
Those of us of a certain age are sure to hold warm recollections of Choose Your Own Adventure stories—those fun little interactive tales from the 1980s filled with instructions to turn to certain pages if you made particular choices in the narrative. For a while, they were all the rage, and there were dozens of them published. They kind of faded out, but nonetheless they’re still probably the most commercially successful example of hypertext fiction.
These books have been available as e-books for a while, but a start-up called Visual Baker wants to bring one of them to the iPad and iPhone in a major way. It’s running a Kickstarter project, working with series creator Edward Packard to bring one of his books to the iPad in an interactive, illustrated, animated, and socially-enabled version. The project has a quite modest goal of $12,000, and it has already reached $2,500 in pledges with 24 days to go. (Found via AppleTell.)
On Silicon Valley news and opinion site Pando Daily, Hamish McKenzie makes an interesting observation about magazines and their attempts to jump to electronic versions. McKenzie sees their problems as not so much difficulties moving to digital as it is a problem trying to push an obsolete bundled format in digital.
It’s a similar point to something I said toward the end of my post about the free first issue of Amazing Stories the other day, in which I suggested such an e-magazine might work better as individual stories rather than big bundles of them. In the old days of print, magazines were printed because that was the only economical way to get many different short articles and stories to readers: bundle them up together so they are economical to print.
But in this new tablet-enabled world, people don’t necessarily read magazines—they read individual stories, and they don’t care where they get them. They use aggregators like Flipboard, Zite, or RSS apps like Reeder to create their own personalized magazines out of a variety of sources, and read those instead. Forcing consumers to download a huge chunk of content that they might not even read most of makes less and less sense as time goes by.
Poynter has a post looking at some Nielsen figures on New York Times use over the last few years, finding that time spent with the website from desktops and laptops has been decreasing since 2010, when the iPad first came out.
We asked for the figures to see if the paywall had affected how much time users spend on the site — discouraging drive-by traffic and encouraging more loyal, paying customers to visit. Instead, the figures appear to show how mobile devices are chipping away at the amount of time that users spend on their desktop and laptop computers, the Times says.
It’s funny to think the iPad has only been with us for about 2 and 1/4 years. How has it been changing our reading habits? Maybe not so much for e-books—the device is pretty heavy, and a lot of people still find e-ink easier on the eyes. But studies have shown people are reading a lot more shorter content, such as newspaper or magazine articles, on tablets. And if they’re reading more on tablets, it stands to reason they’re going to read them less on computer screens.
Hello, everyone. Those of you who’ve been following e-reading for a while might know me as former Senior Writer for TeleRead.com, where I’ve been for the last six years. I talked a little about the history of e-reading that happened during the six years I was writing there in my farewell post to the site.
For my inaugural post here, I thought I would go into my own personal e-reading background and what my hopes are for the future of e-books. Once you know where I’ve come from, then you can follow where I’m going. Let’s begin.
That’s what the latest rumor says, and this is the one that I’m going to believe in. (After all, there have so many, many iPad Mini rumors that at least one has to be true, right?)
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We still don’t know if the new iPad will blend, but today I learned that you cannot use it as a bullet proof vest. The gun show Rated RR took an iPad out to the firing range this weekend and they did their best to kill it.
If you were expecting to see it explode, sorry but that didn’t happen. (You’d need to overcharge the battery to see any real explosion.) But the video does have a number of really cool slow motion shots.
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