The Digital Reader

Yesterday I had the joy of announcing TDR’s first event, a petting zoo that I am co-hosting with O’Reilly, a technical publisher, at their digital publishing conference. This morning I got an email that promised to make the event 10 times more interesting than before.

The image at right shows the work of Nick Chen. That’s not a dual screen ereader; it’s a pair of single screen devices that are designed to work cooperatively over a wireless connection. And yes, he can network 3 or more devices together.

I last covered Nick back in May, and his gadgets are worth seeing even more now. And that’s why I’m happy to say that he has greed to bring them to the petting zoo.

If you’d like a teaser of the ereaders in action, there’s a video after the break. (If this video doesn’t make you want to attend, I don’t know what will.)

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O’Reilly’s annual digital publishing conference is coming up in  few weeks, and I have a special treat for you. For the past couple months I have been working with Joe Wikert of O’Reilly to put together an eReader Petting Zoo.

I think we have an impressive collection of ereaders and tablets.

How impressive? Well, I reached out to manufacturers I know and we have  promises from Ectaco to send their new Jetbook Color and several tablet manufacturers have promised to send their current product. Sony also contributed an eReader, and B&N will be sending  couple Nooks. Joe has reached out to Kobo, and they’ll be sending a KT and Kobo Vox. We even have  promise from Qualcomm to send a Mirasol device.

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If you’ve ever wondered bout the influence of book bloggers, here’s your answer.

Reed Exhibitions, operators of BEA, NY Comicon, and  bunchaton of other trade shows and conferences, has just bought the Book Blogger Conference. This con had only been held twice and they’ve already become such  valuable property that Reed snapped them up in order to integrate BBC with BEA. That’s the value of book bloggers.

From now on, the Book Blogger Con will be held during BEA, not after. In its first 2 events Book Blogger Con was co-located at the Javits Center, but it was conveniently held after BEA ended. Now it’s going to be held during BEA, and that means it’s going to conflict with other events. Drat.

On a related note, it looks like I won’t be attending BEA this year; it’s scheduled for the same time as SID Display Week. This is a screen tech conference and I need to go meet the tech companies just as much as I need to meet publishers.

Do you recall that Android watch that Velocity Micro showed off at CES 2011? That one never made it to the market, but a similar device showed up at CES this year. Charbax found it in the Shenzhen Phaeton booth.

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I won’t be live-blogging today’s news, sorry. I was supposed to have the invite via eBookNewser, but when I got to the desk they could not find my name on the list.

If any of my readers knows someone at Apple, please convey to them what a mistake this was.