This morning in New York City, Apple introduced iBooks 2 – a dramatic upgrade to the current iBooks application with an Educational spin.
Text books take on a new life with a more interactive, captivating, and extremely visual feel. Citing the challenges in the education field, along with the high demand of the iPad in the teenage market, Apple hopes to bring the two together to revolutionize the field.
More than just reading, index links bring you to an interactive glossary; you can lookup words on the fly, pinch to get back to the table of contents, or view in a normal reading style in portrait mode.
More Interactive Readers can jump to specific pages, or search for specific terms. Swipe through galleries of images, removing the limit of just one image in places where more would be better. At the end of chapters there are interactive Q&A sections – all with the goal of getting immediate feedback.
Highlights & Taking Notes
Taking notes and highlighting text are easier than ever. Using simple swipes you can highlight sections of text, choose a color and add notes. Tap on the toolbar and all of your notes are in one place – and, they’re organized in easy-to-follow and study-ready cards.
Interactive text books are available in the iBookstore in a new category called “Text Books.” More as this develops…
Amazon has announced that this year’s holiday shopping season was a record-breaking one for Kindle sales and for third-party businesses that sell their goods on Amazon. This season also marked a major milestone for independent publishing, as the #1 and #4 best-selling Kindle books were published independently by their authors using Kindle Direct Publishing. Check the full release after the jump. +Continue Reading
Apple has released a significant update to their iBooks iOS application, brining it to version to 1.5. This latest update adds the following new features, along with some performance and stability improvements: Nighttime reading theme for making reading easier in the dark; a full-screen layout; improved font selection; new classic covers for public domain books; support for pop-up footnotes and more. The download is available now on your iDevice, or through iTunes.
If you are a fan of the eBook, this hybrid device may excite you a bit. The $99 Kobo Touch will sport new software with new customizations that bring touch to a familiar e-ink screen. The Kobo Touch with Offers keeps its price down through paid advertisements, but the folks at Kobo promise that the ads are not intrusive and don’t interfere with your reading experience. Not a bad deal. For more info (as well as Kobo’s full lineup of devices), check the release after the jump.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire is not only bringing “several thousand” apps to its forthcoming tablet, but word is in that hundreds of magazines and newspapers will be part of their offering as well. Amazon has officially announced that more than 400 “full-color” titles will be available on the Kindle Fire newsstand, including Us Weekly, The New Yorker, and Reader’s Digest, just to name a few. Interactive editions with built-in video and audio will be available as well. Check the full PR after the break….
Thanksgiving is one of our favorite holidays; and is there any greater joy than waking up early Friday morning, fresh off your turkey buzz, to catch some fantastic shopping deals? Well, the folks at Amazon.com know how much we love a bargain (especially when we don’t have to leave our homes to find one), and are once again kicking the shopping season off several weeks early with their Black Friday Deals Store. You’ll find hundreds of different products discounted in all categories, and it all leads up to the big day on Friday, November 25th. Different deals will be available on different days, so make sure you head to Amazon.com/BlackFriday over the next few weeks to see if your favorite gadget is available at a ridiculous price. Click after the break for more info and to preview some of the sale items.
Originally slated for release in November 21st, Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs is available now, both at retailers and electronically. The authorized biography became an Amazon bestseller since Steve Jobs’ passing based on pre-orders alone, making this advance release one that is highly anticipated.
The reason for the biography? “I wanted my kids to know me,” Isaacson quoted Jobs as saying in their final interview at Jobs’ home in Palo Alto, California. “I wasn’t always there for them and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”
Your new Kindle Fire just got that much closer: Amazon has announced that they’ve added Kindles (along with other e-readers) to their trade-in program. In case you’re not familiar with it, this program let’s you trade-in everything from DVDs and video games, to cameras and tablets; there are thousands of eligible items, and the credit you get is applied directly to an Amazon gift card, letting you turn old gear into new gear–Amazon even pays for the shipping. So now, that original Kindle you’ve been holding onto can actually help you get that new Fire you’ve been drooling over–or anything else Amazon sells. To learn more about the program, just click past the jump…
Amazon is stepping up the tablet pressure by releasing its new 7-inch Android-based tablet. The Kindle Fire comes in at an incredibly low $199 price tag, featuring a 7-inch display, free Amazon cloud storage, whispersync for your digital content, Amazon Silk mobile browser, weighs 14.6 ounces, and has dual-core processor and full multitouch IPS display. The real draw here is the access you’ll have to Amazon’r content–over 18 million songs, movies, TV shows, books and magazines, as well as Android apps and games. The Kindle Fire begins shipping on November 15th with pre-orders starting today. Check out the full release after the jump and the first official commercial below.
Alongside the new Kindle Fire comes new versions of the e-ink kindle. The $79 kindle is available to order now and features standard buttons and an e-ink display, whereas the Kindle Touch ($99) and Touch 3G ($149) provide full touch screen technology on an e-ink display. The 3G model includes free global roaming and is also up for pre-order now. +Continue Reading
Amazon is in talks with book publishers to try and launch a “Netflix-esque” e-service for digital books. The premise would be that people pay an annual or monthly fee to access a catalog of e-book content, as opposed to purchasing on a per book basis. There’s no telling how far along talks may be, but this could be a coup for the heavy readers among us. Fears are that this kind of service could de-value books in general, as it would strain the relationships between publishers and other retailers that sell their books.
Pushing their PSN network outage as far under the rug as possible, Sony is uniting all of its online music, video and gaming services under one new banner. The Sony Entertainment Network (SEN) is the Consumer Electronics giant’s way to unify all of its products, delivering content to TV’s, tablets, smartphones, computers,eBook readers, gaming consoles and more. The SEN website is now live and all of its services are ready and usable. Here’s hoping Sony can keep the hackers away from even more of its data…
Amidst rumors (and near confirmation) of a 7″ Amazon Kindle tablet comes an interesting feature from Amazon allowing readers the ability to question authors about their work. It’s called the @author feature and lets Kindle users highlight passages in an eBook, add questions about the passage, and send them off to the book’s author to get a response–a pretty neat idea if you ask me. To start, only 16 authors are actually taking part in the program with more expected to get on board in the future.
This morning in New York City, Apple introduced iBooks 2 – a dramatic upgrade to the current iBooks application with an Educational spin.
Thanksgiving is one of our favorite holidays; and is there any greater joy than waking up early Friday morning, fresh off your turkey buzz, to catch some fantastic shopping deals? Well, the folks at Amazon.com know how much we love a bargain (especially when we don’t have to leave our homes to find one), and are once again kicking the shopping season off several weeks early with their 
Your new Kindle Fire just got that much closer: Amazon has announced that they’ve added Kindles (along with other e-readers) to their trade-in program. In case you’re not familiar with it, this program let’s you trade-in everything from DVDs and video games, to cameras and tablets; there are thousands of eligible items, and the credit you get is applied directly to an Amazon gift card, letting you turn old gear into new gear–Amazon even pays for the shipping. So now, that original Kindle you’ve been holding onto can actually help you get that new Fire you’ve been drooling over–or anything else Amazon sells. To learn more about the program, just click past the jump…
Review: Grace Digital’s Mondo Wi-Fi Music Player
Review: Blue Microphones’ Yeti Pro
Android App of the Week: Graph 89
