Tag: Opinions
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Finding foreign language ebooks on Google Play Books
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When Google Play Books launched in Poland, the first thing I did was to check out how many books were available in Polish. A simple feature to find and/or filter books by language is offered by Smashwords or Project Gutenberg, but you have to use tricks to get a list of foreign language books in Kindle…
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Instant translation is a killer feature of Google Play Books
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I was disappointed when Google launched the ebookstore back in December 2010. The iOS app suffered early-stage errors, but most of all the store was only available in the United States. There is, however, a single feature that makes the Google reading ecosystem extremely useful for non-English users like me: instant translation. When Google Play…
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Ebooks will disappear sooner than paper books
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“Will books die?” Many people still ask themselves this question, and 99% of them mean “will ebooks replace paper books?” There is no solid justification for this common fear. During our lifetime print books will be kept in a form we know now. They are almost perfect. There is not too much to improve. Maybe…
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Ebooks are beautiful
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Ebooks are convenient, nobody will discuss with that. You can easily search and annotate them, or share a passage on Facebook. They can be adjusted to reader’s needs and taste. But have you ever thought of them as beautiful things? The list of benefits ebooks offer is longer, but the fact they can give what…
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Ebooks: you have to make up your mind at the very beginning (chart)
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This chart was published by Jean Kaplansky from Aptara a year ago. I missed it, sorry for that. It’s a bit outdated now (doesn’t show Kindle Paperwhite or iPad Mini), and you can complain that it’s too simple, but it does one great thing. It shows that once you enter one ecosystem you’ll have to…
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Is the last bastion of the paperback 40,000 feet above?
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Ad agency Droga5 Sydney won last year Australian airline Qantas account. One of the projects they managed to create is called “Stories for Every Journey”. It’s a collection of novels, in a paperback form, tailored to each flight’s duration, so that passengers will manage to finish them just as their plane lands. The project was prepared…
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Two less obvious, but increasingly important, benefits of ebooks
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The benefits of ebooks most people talk about are convenience and price. No one discusses convenience – it’s the strongest reason why people decide to add electronic file to a list of formats they consume books. There are a lot of doubts about price. In many cases digital editions are not considerably cheaper than print…
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Send to Kindle – single feature request
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Amazon is rushing into read-later / sharing buttons area, by offering ‘Send to Kindle’ button for websites and bloggers (which is not the best idea). In the meantime, one of the most obvious features is still missing in either a browser extension or a desktop application. Kindle is, first of all, for reading books, not…
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Minimalist Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ cover photos for a book lover
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Recently I was thinking of how to creatively support two major events for book lovers happening this week. One is World Book Day 2013. Designated by UNESCO, it’s a worldwide celebration of books and reading, happening this year in over 100 countries on March 7. A main goal of World Book Day is to encourage children to explore…
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We need to change books, if we need books to change us (quote)
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Books don’t make us better only in one case: if they are not available when we need them. The world we are living is the world of now. I want a movie, I get a movie from Netflix. I want a game, I get a game from Google Play. I want to speak with my dad…
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Why and how bookstores can benefit from Google Street View
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I’m sure you’ll agree, that no bookstore website looks as good as the bookstore itself. There is no magic in seeing flat book covers in a grid view. Trying to mimic the bookshelf feel the way book apps do is one way to go. The other emerging possibility is Google Maps. Since late 2011 Google…