The Amazon Kindle costs $260. The Barnes and Noble Nook costs $260. The Sony reader is $300. Clearly there’s an established price point for what we call an e-book reader. Jumping into the e-book fray comes the Intel Reader, for fifteen hundred U.S. dollars. No WiFi, no associated book store, but it does include a 5 megapixel camera, and a host of features designed to make it the best choice for vision impaired people. → Read More
Hugh McGuire’s goal is to make all public domain (expired copyright) books available free online in audio format. He’s created LibriVox to reach that goal, and it is a terrific open source, public domain project. Volunteers suggest public domain books and record chapters. Finished books are cataloged and podcasted LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project. I think this is a terrific project, and the content will be very welcome on my long drive back to the bay area this week from Seattle. I also plan to volunteer and read chapters (I promise not to sneak in plugs for TechCrunch either). Check out examples such as Jack London’s Call of the Wild and Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Carol. Jon Gordon has an interview with the founder. Thanks for the tip Dave. → Read More
