360|Whisperings » announcements

Sony Ditching Proprietary eBook Format! Huzza!

John — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:18:06 +0000

This is awesome news for eReader users and publishers! It’s one less format to support/worry about, and frankly it was one we hadn’t even started to look at. But we should, so consider this an update! LRF Format coming soon, probably later today, for all currently released titles! (Thanks Calibre!)

Over on the MobileRead forums, they’ve created a list of compatible ePub readers, great work.

I’m really glad there’s some consolidation shaking out (finally). I’m really shocked it was Sony of all company’s that backed down on proprietary. I mean, it’s Sony, I don’t think they’ve ever released hardware that didn’t have an accompanying proprietary memory stick, or file format. ATRAC anyone?

This is big. ePub is a great format, i’ve not complaints about it. I’d love to see Amazon put their pipe down long enough to see the forest for the trees. The Kindle is (sadly because I own one) approaching flash in the pan status. Amazon’s own practices are going to marginalize it as a device.

As publishers, we’re happy to support as many formats as our readers require, but to be honest, the fewer the better since the desparity in each format 1. makes supporting many very hard and 2. it makes the offers very different from one to the next.

Have you checked out our latest releases? You should.

Our thoughts on Amazon, and Orwell

John — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:50:08 +0000

In a word, WHACK.

It’s crappy that Amazon’s TOC strips consumers of their basic rights of ownership, it’s crappy that they felt it ok to reach in and exercise their crappy right.

That’ll never happen here. All purchases are final as far as we’re concerned. If an author wants to pull their content, we of course support that, but we won’t be trying to take back what you purchased.

We’ll of course do our best to ensure that something like what happened with MobiReference, doesn’t happen with us. Knowing the authors, helps there

Bottom line, if you pay for it, it’s yours.

New Content Our first pieces!

John — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:59:21 +0000

It’s been a definite learning curve in figuring out how to offer up eContent in various formats. While we’re still working on figuring out how to handle access/payment for single works through a Word Press Blog, we do have some awesome stuff up on the Kindle store now for those of you with Kindles.

Tom’s 3 part article condensed into a single article on moving from unstructured development to structured development with the Cairngorm Micro architecture.

Nils Thingvall‘s “History Manager in a Nutshell” and Eric Matthys‘ “MATE Framework Review” are the first in the Real Eyes Library series.

and Daryl Ducharme’s ‘Using Flex Builder for Flash Development” is up there as well.

We’re really excited to have these inaugural titles up, and we’re actively working on several more, as well.

Stay tuned, we’ve got lots more on the way!