Google Books is paying

Google would pay $125 million to settle two copyright lawsuits where his book-scanning efforts were compromised by the Association of American Publishers.

The new agreement will allow Google to show a 20% of each scanned bookto the users without paying anything. The full text could also be available for a certain price. This could be a good measure but thinking on technical or scientific books I wonder if this 20% is a big big mistake.

The NYT explains that Google plans to take 37 percent of the revenue, leaving 63 percent for publishers and authors.

New blog on book innovation

I've just opened a new blog called: Book Innovation.

Feel free to post your comments and even send me your posts if you want to publish them in it.

Sony eBook Reader PRS-505 (part 2)

After being with the Sony PRS-505 e-book reader for a couple of months and testing it with different contents (books, articles, blogs)., the final conclusions are:

• e-Ink tech is on his first steps;
• Color is a must have for our market (e-Ink is still B&W);
• Lack of interactivity is a big problem;
• Battery in the Sony reader is amazing (10 days in active mode)
• As a simple reader is very good, but don t ask for more. Very simple solutions could be created for this reader, but this is not our interest right now (iPhone solutions are).
• Music player integrated is awful (horrible sound quality)
• A technology to allow reformatting texts is needed (so you are allowed to increase text size).
• iREX should be my next Laboratory Toy.

Sony eBook Reader PRS-505 (part I)

First impression on this ebook reader when unboxing is ....."nice gadget" but let's see what's inside. And what we find there is a very good ebook reader but nothing else: no wifi connection, no color, no interactivity and little problems with PDF reading. Design could be also better....allow Apple do this for you!

It's a very good reader because it has no other ambitions and reading ebooks in the .lrf format is a nice experience. I've been reading some articles and parts of different books for the last two weeks (in very changing light ambiences) and no problems came up with this issue.

But connection or interactivity with the reader are a must-have for the next version. Sony must also allow PDF to be correctly displayed in his screen (zoom is not enough) and,

maybe, think about producing a bigger screen with touch capabilities (and eliminate lots of

useless buttons). IRex is doing quite well with its last product Iliad 2nd Edition but at a much higher price ($599 vs $299).

E-ink technology is in his first development steps so we will have to wait till improvements are available for this readers (faster changes between pages, better transitions, ink colors).

Reader is prepared for leisure but not for professionals: no medical or biology or painting books are possible without colour and other improvements.

On eBook devices

I've been recently looking at those new eBook readers coming from different companies: Amazon, iRex, Sony, Bookeen, Hanlin and others. I was asking myself which one could feed my actual needs.

All of them are based on e-ink technology and, depending on the price (from $200 to $650) they offer more functionalities. For me, two things are the most important: 1) battery life and, 2) the chance to easily upload and storage all content formats (Word, PDF, txt, html, epub, etc.).

After reading different reviews and opinions, I decided to give a try to Sony PRS-505. I will let you know my experience with it in a few weeks.