Comic Reader Mobi: The Comic Book Reader Specially Designed for Cell Phones
The Blurb:
"I'd love to read comics on my phone But the screen is way too small"
But wait! It's big enough to look at pictures,watch movies, and even play games! So whats wrong with comics?
You can see all the art on the page without any problems. You can even see the whole layout and all the action without any difficulties.
Its not the comics that are too small, its the TEXT thats too hard to read!
But thanks to Comic Reader Mobi, thats no longer a problem!
Simply tap on the text and watch it pop out to a readable size!
Its simple, its intuitive, and now you can finally read comics anywhere you want! Unlike other solutions, Comic Reader Mobi works on standard CBR,CBZ,RAR and ZIP files. No need for propreitary formats, or specially redesigned comics!
Sony Reader PRS-505 and the new Sony Reader Pocket (PRS-300)
In most cases the PRS-505 will cost you around $300 on eBay, whereas you can find the new PRS-300 going for about $200 at various retailers. Either one would make a great gift, for yourself or someone else. In addition to the larger display, the PRS-505 has a few more features that explain the $100 price premium. As usual, Wikipedia tells all.
The Heretofore Obsolete PRS-500
The older PRS-500 is a 6-inch display like the PRS-505, but since it doesn't read the new industry-standard epub file format you can usually find them for about $150 on eBay. But wait! Sony just announced a free firmware upgrade that will make your PRS-500 capable of reading the new epub format. So if you'r nimble and willing to deal with a bit of a wait, you can get yourself a nice little deal.
From J. Robert Smith
What's notable about Sarah Palin's book tour, which starts midweek, is where she's not going. She's not going to L.A. or New York, Boston or San Francisco. She's going smack-dab to the middle of the country. Fly-over country, liberals call it. And it's a shrewd move, not only in selling books, but positioning herself for a presidential run in 2012 if she chooses that path.
It's a strategy right out of the late Sam Walton's playbook: go where there's demand and the competition ain't. Walton, who could have run and won political campaigns, built Walmart into the behemoth it is today by opening his discount stores in small towns in the heartland, towns that the eight-hundred pound gorilla K-Mart ignored.
Walton conquered the discount retail category from the heartland out. He didn't so much clobber K-Mart as steal a march on it. Palin may just prove that a heartland strategy does more than sell blenders and books. It may be the foundation for winning a national election.
Is This The Ring That Inspired Tolkien To Write The Lord of the Rings?
From The National Trust:
Placed for years within a glass-topped cabinet, beside a little type-written note, this solid gold ring might have caught the eye of specialists – but for most it might warrant no more than an admiring glance.
Made in the fourth or fifth century, with its chunky bezel mounted on a faceted 10-sided hoop, it is engraved with a compelling, if primitive profile of Venus. This goddess is no beauty, with her exaggerated nose, spiky headdress and one oversized eye.
The ring was discovered in the late 18th century by a farmer at the remains of the nearby Roman town of Silchester.
No one knows quite how the ring came to The Vyne, but its story did not stop there. By an extraordinary coincidence, just a couple of decades after its discovery, a Roman lead tablet bearing an inscription about this very ring was found at a temple site at Lydney in Gloucestershire. It was engraved with a curse imprecating woe upon the person who had stolen the ring.
The original lead tablet is now at Lydney; but alongside this ring in the little cabinet is a replica, so the two can be admired together.
By 1928 the great archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler was at work excavating the rich finds at Lydney where he was told the tale of the two finds.
And, so some conjecture, it is almost certain that he would have passed this exciting story to another who was advisor to finds at Lydney – an expert in early English – an Oxford don, named Tolkien.
A ring – and a curse. Enough to make anyone wonder: could this be the ring that inspired an iconic tale, my precious? We, of course, couldn’t possibly comment...
My Viewsonic Viewpad 100 eBook Project: I Discover Manga Meeya CE and Decide To Use My Viewpad 100 as a Comic Book Reader
Manga Meeya CE (MMCE) is a terrific piece of Japanese abandonware available here. It's a comic book reader that's just wonderful -- it's responsive and gets out of your way. I can run as-is on an Airpanel running Windows CE.net 4.1, but if you have a Viewpad 100 running Windows CE 3.0 you can make it work like a champ by installing Alpaxo's RedGear Compatibility Layer.
My Viewsonic Viewpad 100 eBook Project: I Give Up and Buy a Sony PRS-505
OK, OK, I haven't really given up on my Viewpad. But I did buy one of these on eBay. I got the Sony PRS-505 for the following reasons:
Since I don't do a lot of traveling, I don't need the purchase-over-the-air capability of the Kindle.
My only complaint: The built-in font isn't all that great. Lucky, the tech-savvy among you can change the default font using the insanely-detailed instructions found on MobileRead. The font shown above is Caecilia. Being perhaps a little older, I chose Caecilia Bold. You can, of course, bump up the font size to Medium or Large too.
The Wikipedia summary:
Forever Amber tells the story of orphaned Amber St. Clare, who makes her way up through the ranks of 17th century English society by sleeping with and/or marrying successively richer and more important men, while keeping her love for the one man she could never have. The novel includes portrayals of Restoration fashion, politics, and public disasters, including the plague and the Great Fire of London.
While many reviewers "praised the story for its relevance, comparing Amber's fortitude during the plague and fire to that of the women who held hearth and home together through the blitzes of World War II", others condemned it for its blatant sexual references. Fourteen U.S. states banned the book as pornography. The first was Massachusetts, whose attorney general cited 70 references to sexual intercourse, 39 illegitimate pregnancies, 7 abortions, and "10 descriptions of women undressing in front of men" as reasons for banning the novel. Winsor denied that her book was particularly daring, and said that she had no interest in explicit scenes. "I wrote only two sexy passages," she remarked, "and my publishers took both of them out. They put in ellipsis instead. In those days, you know, you could solve everything with an ellipsis."
Despite its banning, Forever Amber was the best selling US novel of the 1940s. It sold over 100,000 copies in its first week of release, and went on to sell over three million copies.
And from a 2002 re-appraisal by Elaine Showalter:
The novel came out in England in 1945. While English women were weeping over Celia Johnson's stoic portrayal of sexual renunciation in Brief Encounter they were also bonding over the bawdy, upwardly-mobile Amber St Clare. Forever Amber was published at a time of social upheaval in Britain, the beginnings of the welfare state and the erosion of an ethic of social and marital deference. Divorce petitions skyrocketed during the war, rising from 9,970 in 1938 to 24,857 in 1945. Moreover, Winsor's readers, the majority of them women, identified with Amber's calamitous life and admired her fortitude in times of hardship. The great fire of London would have seemed familiar to those who had had lived through the blitz. The random nature of plague would ring true for those who had lived with the constant fear of buzzbombs and V2 rockets.
In its day Forever Amber was a standard reference in popular culture, such as in this scene from The Jack Benny Program:
Old Man: I just finished reading a sad book.
Jack Benny: What was it?
Old Man: Forever Amber
Jack Benny: Forever Amber? That’s not a sad book.
Old Man: It is when you’re my age, Bub!
And for another racy book see Robert McHenry's post on the Britannica Blog on the 50th anniversary of the banning of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
