Pobre Gutenberg

New venture Librii is seeking to set up self-sustaining libraries with internet access in poor and isolated communities, writes James Bridle

Yesterday, I wrote about how you can call external audio/video files in an EPUB3 document. This works brilliantly in iBooks and Readium, but so far, nowhere else. What happens when it doesn't work is actually pretty interesting. According to the spec, you can add a fallback message, and indeed a fallback photo or link. In this case, I've used the poster image as a fallback image.

Google has updated its Play Books e-reader apps for iOS and Android to include support for EPUB and PDF files from outside the Play Store. The new feature has been enabled as part of Google's strategy to unite its cloud services, allowing users to either upload their ebooks via its website, or import them from their Google Drive storage. Google says that users will be able to store up to 1,000 files for free, as long as they are under 50MB.

Google ha anunciado el lanzamiento de un servicio de recomendación de contenidos para dispositivos móviles a través de su plataforma Google+. Estas recomendaciones se recogerán en un widget que aparecerá en la parte inferior de la pantalla. Seth Sternberg, jefe de producción de Google+, ha comunicado a TechCrunch la idea es ofrecer una experiencia increíble y única para encontrar contenido.

As you might’ve guessed, Earl isn’t your ordinary Android tablet — the team refers to it as the world’s first “backcountry survival tablet,” and it has a prospective spec sheet that certainly lives up to the name. It sports a 6-inch frontlit e-ink display from LG for one thing, as well as an IR touch array (so you can operate Earl with gloves, naturally), and a flip-out solar panel for on-the-go charging, all encased in a 0.6-inch thick water and muck-resistant chassis.

The recent Sharjah Children's Reading Festival offered a unique spectacle for readers and a snapshot of children's book publishing issues in the Middle East.

Plenty of people rightly mocked the news a few years ago that the Associated Press was working on a plan to "DRM the news." The idea was to put some sort of licensing mechanism together to get news aggregators to pay to promote their news.

Diego Moreno, editor de Nórdica Libros, está convencido de que las claves son hacer bien las cosas y cobrar un precio razonable por un trabajo de calidad.

Children are spending more time time reading on computers or other electronic devices than on books, magazines and comics for the first time, according to a study out today.

Lee una muestra de Booqui y Quiboo buscan un pollo de Alfons Freire o descárgalo con iBooks.

The U.S. consumer book publishing industry had a strong 2012, fueled in part by the growth of ebooks.

The American Association of Publishers announced their latest annual BookStats report today, and while the full report won’t be up for sale for another week or so, I got an early look at some of the data. I’m not allowed to share the full set of data that I saw, but I can tell you it was a shock.

Research from McKinsey seems to suggest that print-based media still commands a large proportion of time spent by consumers of news — but that is just part of the larger picture media companies have to understand.

Onyx was the first to show off a working smartphone prototype with an E-ink screen last year, and they’re back again today with a new prototype.

Charbax caught up with Onyx at the HKTDC Hong Kong Electronics Fair this week, where they showed him the new gadgets. But the new smartphone and tablet run Android and have frontlights.

The iPad app of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps is breathtaking to look at but the storytelling is desperately slow, writes Anna Baddeley