In a live TV interview MCGRAW-HILL’s CEO confirmed that Apple will introduce an iPhoneOS based tablet device. He also mentioned that MCGRAW-HILL has been working with Apple for quite some time. UPDATE: I first saw this on Wired and noticed that it was also on MacRumors. In a couple of hours it was all over the net. I guess some people at Apple must be pretty upset by now. Bookmark...

Today I got an email notification of the release of a Zinio application for the iPhone.  For those of you that haven’t run across Zinio, it is a visually oriented digital reader software.  It was primarily focused on magazines but has been diversifying into books and textbooks.Zinio offers a very compelling reading experience with full colored digital magazines that look pretty much the same as they do on paper, including some nice age turning visual effects. While they do seem to offer more than one viewing mode, with a text only mode which seems designed to make it easy to...

I love my traditional, paper, books as much as any other book lover does.  Holding a reading device while sitting in a confortable armchair doesn’t really equal sitting in the same chair with a nice, original, book in your hands… But… Let’s get real about it… We’re in a changing world.  There are too many of us, placing too much strain on our environment.  Our climate is changing and it doesn’t seem to be for the better.  Can we really justify the continued use of paper books when they are not necessary? Over the past four years I must have...

Stanza seems to be a generally well regarded ebook reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch. As it is available for both Windows and OS X, it attracted my attention. First I downloaded it on my MacBook but it is so minimalistic that it just seemed incomplete to me. As if development had been abruptly halted before the product was ready. As I ran into the snag that Baen sells some pre-release texts only in formats which are incompatible with the eReader software which I regularly used, I decided to give Stanza a chance again. I bought the books from Baen and started reading the first one of them. My...

I’m currently right in the middle of the process of setting up an apartment for my family to move to, within this month. As I have a sizable collection of books, the question of how and where to store them came boiling up as I realized that while I’m moving to a larger apartment, it’s got no bookcases. This got me into thinking about my book reading and buying habits over the last few years. It seems that it wasn’t without reason that I decided to write about eBooks as the vast majority of the books I’ve read over the past four or five years where ebooks. The great...

One of the first things I did after I got an iPod Touch was to install eReader on it. Actually, it might have been the first application I installed, though I can’t be totally sure. I have been reading books electronically for a long time as I have always been a big believer that this is the inevitable future of books. I’ve read a lot of books on my PocketPC and on notebooks and now that I’ve got some on the iPod I feel we are getting closer to what I used to envision for this technology back in 1997. Back then I set out to create both an ebook reading and a creation software. I was...

Amazon is definitely playing it smart in releasing Kindle for the iPhone. From what information I’ve been able to get it seems that the first implementation of the software is still a bit “plain”, but this is a huge step forward. Lets look at how this is good for readers first. To start out, if you own an iPhone (not sure if the iPod touch will work as well) you’ll be able to read Kindle books without having to buy a Kindle. Considering the price of a Kindle, this is surely the cheapest way to get started with Amazon ebooks. The Kindle for iPhone application is free. Readers...