ENTRIES TAGGED "applications"

Google Opens Mobile Access to Public-Domain Books

Via a Google press release, word that visiting books.google.com/m provides mobile access to 1.5 million public-domain books from within Google Book Search: Today, we're making it possible for anyone with an Android or an iPhone to find and read more than 1.5 million public domain books in the US (more than half a million outside the US) in the…

Popping the Hood on the iPhone Missing Manual App

Over on Teleread, Chris Meadows has a nice review of our iPhone Missing Manual app, which echoes several other reviewers (and my own personal experience with the app): How helpful is the book? I have already found a lot of remarkably useful information just in the space of a few chapters. It would be no exaggeration to say I…

iPhone Updates: Missing Manual Already #2; More Book Apps Hit iTunes

We released David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual as an iPhone App on Friday, and by Saturday it was already the #2 for-pay App in the Books category on iTunes (where it has remained, behind only the Classics App), and it continues to gain ground. In just four days, it has become one of our top sellers of the year…

History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts

A Computerworld blog post from Mike Elgan looks at recent mobile announcements from book publishers. From the perspective of technology, watching book publishers slowly grapple with the tentative migration of books to mobile platforms is painful. Interestingly, the comments attached to the piece are almost all more conservative. The music industry was holding on to physical CD sales so tightly…

Amazon iPhone App Uses Crowdsourcing for Product IDs

Amazon's new iPhone application has an experimental feature, dubbed Amazon Remembers, that blends product discovery and crowdsourcing. From the New York Times Bits blog: The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon's Mechanical Turk program,…

Open Question: Standalone iPhone Ebooks vs. E-Readers

Ebooks as iPhone applications started as a novelty/workaround, but the technique is now being used by Houghton Mifflin for a full-fledged digital rollout. From Wired's Epicenter blog: The publisher recently partnered with a design and development company called ScrollMotion to launch a series of bestselling in-copyright e-books for the iPhone where each title is its own app and a…

Q&A With Co-Creator of Classics iPhone E-Reader

The Classics app is a little different than competing iPhone e-readers: for starters, it’s not free. Classics co-creator Phill Ryu discusses the app’s pricing, design and development in this Q&A.

Mobile First, PC Second

Over on Radar, Tim O'Reilly says the mobile tipping point is upon us: I think about the web as experienced on a PC, and then about mobile as an add on. The tipping point has come; that notion has to flip: if we're trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then…

Tagging the Real World through Barcode Apps

Mobile phones with barcode apps bring digital tools into real-world curation.

Open Question: Digital Ownership vs. Digital Subscriptions

Two tips in Dear Author's recent post "10 Things Epublishers Should Do for Readers" caught my attention: 1. Eternal Bookshelf. An eternal bookshelf means that every purchase you have bought can be downloaded at any time. Most of the larger etailers have this feature but not all. 2. Mass Downloads. Along with the eternal bookshelf should be the ability to…