Foxit Software, famous for their Adobe Reader alternative Foxit Reader, has entered the eBook Reader race with the release of Foxit eSlick. A competively priced (US$229.99 direct, US$259.99 rrp) alternative to the Kindle and Sony Reader, eSlick uses Foxit’s PDF viewer technology to let users read PDFs on the electronic reading device.

Foxit Software, famous for their Adobe Reader alternative Foxit Reader, has entered the eBook Reader race with the release of Foxit eSlick. A competively priced (US$229.99 direct, US$259.99 rrp) alternative to the Kindle and Sony Reader, eSlick uses Foxit’s PDF viewer technology to let users read PDFs on the electronic reading device.
All-in-all the specs for the eSlick are quite similar to its competitors. It uses E-ink technology for the display, has a 600 x 800 screen, includes 128MB of RAM, weights 6.4 ounces (180 grams) and measures 7.4 inches x 4.7 …

As Trevor Cook pointed out today in his Crikey blog, it wasn’t so long ago that people were predicating newspapers would only last another few decades — now of course that predication looks rather generous. On top of all the gloomy talk on blogs and in the media about the decline of newspapers, Jon Stewart has also chipped in with a little humor:

Will the major newspapers, as we currently know them, still exist in two years?

The Nieman Journalism Lab is reporting (although unconfirmed at this stage) that there are 10,000 Kindle owners subscribed to the paid electronic edition of The New York Times.
One other important note from that internal New York Times memo my colleague Zach got a hold of: The company reports it has “more than 10,000 paid subscribers” to an electronic edition of the newspaper on Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader.
Very interesting if it’s true. 10,000 isn’t a big number by itself, but if you compare it to the number of rumoured Kindle owners — around 240,000 according …

Will seniors be left behind in a paperless world? Jonathan Zimmerman thinks so. Unfortunately after marking a valid point — that the dwindling number of newspapers is very bad news for the 72% of Americans aged 70 or older who don’t use the Internet — he goes down the path of dismissing reading news on the Internet as being inferior to reading news in a newspaper. It’s a slippery slope when you go down that path because all you’re really doing is expressing your preference for, and comfort with, the status …

Last week Random House announced that pensions would be frozen at current levels for existing employees and future hires would receive no pension amid declining sales and a gloomy forecast for 2009. This week they announced that they are broadening their digital book business by expanding their e-book offerings to include titles by authors such as John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as an old-time kids favourite the “Magic Treehouse” series, plus thousands more. Sounds like they are getting their house in order? (sorry).
Random House currently publishes just over 8,000 …

TeleRead.org reports that while traditional paper book sales have dropped in 2008, sales of E-books have actually increased 55.2 percent in the same period. To be fair, paper book sales still dwarf E-book sales, by a massive margin — but I expect that the increase in E-book sales will continue in 2009 as electronic E-book readers improve and become more accepted. And as people start to resent the ever increasing postal rates for paper books purchased online.

Don Fluckinger’s latest article at PDFzone looks at the e-Book market and how while the Kindle and Sony Reader are getting more popular, reading e-books — as PDF files of course — on personal computers is still the most popular method.

Courtesy of Ian P. Christian, a review of BeBook, an E-Ink reader:

iOMM have released PokatReader: a presentation and document management tool for PDFs.

Have difficulty seeing the screen, or maybe just sore eyes — heck, you might even want to make your own audiobooks — well, SpokenText has got all the answers (well, many of them so it seems) with its mostly free service for converting documents into audio recordings.
You can record PDF, Word, plain text, PowerPoint, RSS news feeds, emails and webpages into Podcast and MP3s.
Take a look at the demo I prepared earlier….
1. Original PDF: Use “Create Adobe PDF Online” to save as PDF
2. SpokenText MP3: Use “Create Adobe PDF Online” to save …

Charlie Sorrel of gaget lab, talks of the dream of Wired Editor Leander Kahney –who yet in turn comments on the 9to5Mac’s rumor on the “The Brick”.
Kahney wishes for two touch-screen iPod Touches joined at the hip — useful for ebooking, notebooking, or sharing with another person (not so sure about this one…).
Both Leander and Sorrel think it’s a slim chance, but it’s something they’d both love to see.

An up-and-coming company, Flat World Knowledge plans to go live in January 2009, offering an alternative way for students to purchase their textbooks (in mostly digital form). Online versions will be free, PDF versions will be cheap, and print on demand versions will be modestly priced. You’ll be able to view these on devices such as Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s e-Book reader, and so on.
All of the electronic versions will be DRM-free, meaning that even though it is not legal to copy for friends, it is possible (and quite easily so). …

Check out this short demo of the Plastic Logic reader — it looks pretty slick. It’s going to be a very impressive device within a few years time.

I predict that within 5 years the majority of working professionals will be doing all of their reading on electronic devices — fiction books, newspapers, work memos, training manuals — you name it, it will be done on a device like the Kindle or the Plastic Logic reader. The reasons are clear: it’s easier, less wasteful and more efficient.

Do you think iTunes is the best thing since sliced bread for organizing your music? If so, you might be interested in an article on lifehacker that advocates the use of iTunes for organizing your PDFs too.
iTunes supports PDFs so you can add them to the library and then add them to playlists or filter them using smart playlists, just like you can music. It’s even possible to create multiple libraries with iTunes, so you don’t need to mix up your tax records with your Rage Against the Machine music …