International Business Times has more: “About 58 percent of those surveyed said they plan to upgrade thir current tablets, but 16 percent say the iPad 3 will be too expensive to buy, while 35 percent have not determined whether or not they will purchase one. And 74 percent said that the iPad is the ultimate tablet.”

The study also found that men are more interested in the new device than women, with 51 percent of men wanting to buy an iPad 3 versus 25 percent of women.

The iPad 3 is rumored to come out next month, and meanwhile rumors of the Kindle Fire 2 are circulating, which could have an influence on these numbers.

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According to B&N, the update includes bug fixes and system improvements. Early reports suggest that it also has a replacement email client and a new Netflix app. Some users have complained about these apps, so I’m sure they will be pleased with the change.

The update will be pushed out to you this week. But if you don’t want to wait, you can download the update here.

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The Twitter blog explains: “Twitter for Android is now optimized to run on Android devices running Ice Cream Sandwich, as well as on the Kindle Fire (available today through the Amazon Appstore) and the Barnes & Noble NOOK Color and NOOK Tablet (available February 23 though the Barnes & Noble NOOK Store).”

The update includes the ability to “swipe a tweet” from your home timeline in order to reply to it, retweet it, favorite it or share it. You can also view the Twitter user’s profile without having to leave your timeline. There is also a new tool to help you find friends.

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The books description has more detail:” Instant wireless communication puts everyone in touch with everyone else, twenty-four hours a day. But one thing hasn’t changed: the need for sleep. The world is slowly splintering into Tribes held together by a common time zone, less than family and more than nations. Art is working to humiliate the Greenwich Mean Tribe to the benefit of his own people. But in a world without boundaries, nothing can be taken for granted-not happiness, not money, and most certainly not love.”

You can find this eBook in most eBookstores as well as at Feedbooks.

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The company released its fourth quarter earnings today and revealed that unit sales for the various Nook devices increased 64% during the third quarter as compared to the same period in 2010. Digital content sales, which includes eBooks, digital magazines and apps, increased 85% on a comparable basis.

Overall, Barnes & Noble reported that total sales increased 5% as compared to the prior year, from $2.3 billion to $2.4 billion. Retail sales increased 2% from $1.46 billion to $1.49 billion.

Today, the company also announced the new Nook Tablet 8G for $199. The new tablet has less memory and is cheaper than the $249 16GB Nook Tablet, but has the same functionality. This will give the book retailer a better edge when competing with the Kindle Fire. B&N also dropped the price of the Nook Color to $169.

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Brian Brushwood

Joey O’Connor’s book The Grove Center for the Arts & Media won the “Best Designed” eBook and for his title Create: Transforming Stories of Art, Life and Faith. Stephen B. Lewis won the award for “Best Content” for his eBook “Pocket Stones,” which was written by Barbara-­Ann G. Lewis and illusrated by Barbara Polk.

The contest is part of Vook’s revamping of its digital publishing platform, a multimedia tool for publishing eBooks. As part of the revamp, the company listened to feedback from its beta users, to make the process of creating eBooks with its system easier. The publisher did away with 200 bugs in the system and added 31 new features, which were recommended by users.

Literary agent Scott Waxman, founder of Diversion Books, explained how he works with the platform in a statement: “We used the Vook platform to quickly create Mark Cuban’s eBook How to Win at the Sport of Business in only a few hours. With Vook, we can create eBooks with more control and great attention to quality.”

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Utah is by no means the first state to push for open source digital textbooks; several states including California and Washington have launched similar programs. This program, while it may have been encouraged by other states, grew out of 2 year digital textbook pilot programs. The pilots were led by David Wiley of BYU’s McKay School of Education, and they were funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The textbooks for the pilots were drawn from the CK12 Foundation.

“Utah’s open textbooks are a great use of technology,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Larry K. Shumway. “Texts get into classrooms quickly and can be updated as needed rather than on a publishing schedule – something that’s particularly important in science. The open textbook also adds to Utah’s reputation as the most cost-efficient school system in the country. This is a fantastic way to get the latest textbooks into the hands of Utah’s nearly 600,000 public school students.”

Utah is planning to have texts available for all grade levels, and the books will be made available in time for the fall semester.

via

image by El Frito

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Here is more from DigiTimes: “Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) has obtained ODM orders for 10-inch Kindle Fire from Amazon and will begin shipments in the second quarter of 2012, while Wistron is likely to start ODM production of Nook Tablet for Barnes & Noble, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers.”

The piece goes on to explain sales data for both devices during Q4 2011. Here is more: “According to IHS iSuppli, Amazon sold 3.9 million Kindle Fires and Barnes & Noble sold 1.92 million Nook Tablets in the fourth quarter of 2011.”

A 10-inch Kindle Fire would look more like an iPad, and may cost more than the existing Kindle Fire, though it’s sure to be less than Apple’s tablet. Would you buy a Kindle Fire 2?

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A Dream of Red Mansions Collection, a $150 Chinese language eBook app, is the top grossing iOS book app this week.

We’ve used Google Translate to translate the iTunes description to give you more detail about the app. Formerly known as the ‘Stones,’ the collection is a book of  four masterpieces written during the mid-Qing Dynasty.

The app by Comics, free eBooks and Bible reader apps also continued to do well on the list. Below, we’ve listed the top ten grossing iOS book apps of the week.

continued…

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Reading options on the HP TouchPad are about to get a little bit thinner.

Time posted a notice over the weekend that they are bout to abandon the platform. This publisher was one of the high points at the TouchPad launch, and apps for Time Magazine, People, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune were available shortly after launch. But now it looks like all that work was for naught; the apps will no longer be updated after 10 March.

Time plans to refund customers for their unfilled subscriptions; there’s no word yet on whether the apps will continue to function after the EOL, but it seems likely that previously purchased content won’t be available for download after the cut off.

If you cannot live without these magazines on your TouchPad, you might want to consider Zinio. This digital magazine distributor still has a TouchPad app, and there has been no indication that it will be retired.

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Every so often I like to highlight a free eBook that helps you make eBooks. Today I would like to show you Publishing with iBooks Author, a guide that is free to download from O’Reilly. The book description has more detail:

This book is intended to get you up and writing in iBooks Author. You’ll learn what to expect from this new tool and what its strengths and limitations are. You’ll see how you can create beautifully designed pages and how you can bring those designs to life with interactive content in ways that, before now, were only possible in a web browser on the Internet. You’ll also find out how to navigate the occasionally tricky terrain of Apple’s ecosystem so that you can get your book published to the iBookstore.

You can find this eBook on the O’Reilly website. It’s available for download as PDF, Epub, or Kindle.

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For your weekend reading pleasure, here are the most popular eBook headlines of the week, including an eBook format infographic, the best apps of the week and another Siri-al killer video (embedded above).

Click here to sign up for eBookNewser’s daily email newsletter, getting all our publishing stories, book deal news, videos, podcasts, interviews, and writing advice in one place.

1. Siri-al Killer
2. Kindle Fire on Sale at Walmart
3. 5 Myths About eBooks Debunked
4. How to Convert EPub Books for use on Kindle
5. Siri: The Holiday Horror Movie
6. Infographic: eBook Formats and Devices That Read Them
7. Best Apps of the Week
8. Should Reading Be Social?
9. How To Convert PDFs to ePub or Kindle Files
10. US Air Force Looking to Buy 18,000 iPads

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The school district adopted the iPad as part of its Advantage 2014 program, an ongoing project to improve math and reading test scores among third graders. Half of the 16 Kindergarten classes in Auburn were assigned iPads, and the other half were kept as a control group. The students were tested in September and November, with identical tests being applied to both groups. The kids in the pilot, on average, performed slightly better on the test.

I think we should wait for more data before accepting the good news. For all we know, the improvements noted today might be due to the students getting more time with the literacy apps than the control group spends with the regular curriculum, or it might be due to some variation of the observer effect. The students might be performing better simply because they’re being tested, not because the iPad is having  noticeable effect.

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image by Sistak

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HarperCollins is suing Open Road claiming that a 1971 contract with author Jean Craighead George gives them the rights to the eBook.

Open Road released the following statement: ” We are confident that we have secured all necessary eBook rights from the author Jean Craighead George and that we will prevail.  HarperCollins’ claim is nothing but an attempt to seize rights that were never granted to it and to change the existing law with respect to eBook rights.  Since the rights in question arise from the 1971 contract between Jean Craighead George and HarperCollins, Ms. George has asked to intervene in the action as a Defendant. We are confident that we and Ms. George will succeed in this action.” continued…

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The Israeli author published 88 pieces of “micro-fiction” as images in a Facebook album to create what he is calling a Facebook book. He explains the idea in this blog post: “The idea of publishing an entire new collection of very short stories on Facebook was, in part, an experiment to see how literature can become more social…wanted to see if it could be different: how literature could evolve if the reader can see who of his friends likes the same stories, who is sharing the stories he shared with others, how does the book endure with readers’ comments on every page, visible to all.”

Electric Literature has published a sample from Epstein’s collection on their Facebook page, which will be translated from the original Hebrew into English.

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