There are certain brick and mortar outlets that simply refuse to go down without a fight. Barnes & Noble is one of them and they are partnering with a powerful force to help them make up ground with their Nook eBook reader: Microsoft. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="216" caption="Image via CrunchBase"][/caption] As subsidiary that is currently unnamed will see and investment of $300 million coming from Microsoft to help eBook and educational book sales. In return, Microsoft receives 17.6% equity, valuing the company at $1.7 billion. For B&N, it’s an opportunity to have…

Mikio Katayama, Sharp’s president, is a man not in the business of making weak-assed claims, touting Sharp’s upcoming e-reader as a rival for the iPad. Considering the iPad is much more than an e-reader (okay, not that much more), such a claim would seem ludicrous. But Katayama’s bold as hell. Katayama likes things extra-spicy. Likes shaking things up. But while we puzzle over Katayama’s confidence, the Sharp e-reader is still turning out to be a pretty interesting device. Out later this year, the device will employ a colour display and utilize the new XMDF file format for e-books, which allows…

Today the Internet Archive announced a new service that will provide over a million books for the blind and visually impaired. I was so excited, I practically broke the New Post button to tell you all about this awesome new service, before stopping cold to ponder how exactly Internet Archive planned to bring braille to the internet. Seriously. But my idiocy aside, this is a great initiative. The IA folks have been hard at work scanning hundreds of thousands of books to be digitized into DAISY (a text-to-speech format) for consumption by the print-disabled population, at no cost. Their plan is to…

Your favorite eBook reader just became your least favorite game console. Japanese company KLab has successfully cloned the development kit for Amazon’s Kindle and released it open source – meaning developers can start churning out totally wicked sweet homebrew apps, right? Er, not quite yet. Below is a video of …jeez, do I even need to introduce the damn game?… Super Mario Bros, running on an NES emulator developed with KLab’s kit. As you can plainly see, it looks like crap, and runs lower than full speed. So what’s the point? Probably, ‘because we can’. If you’ll recall, the same mantra was…

I’m not going to make a joke about how nobody reads books anymore. But I might end up making some jokes about how nobody’s going to read Vooks, either. What’s a Vook? I thought you’d never ask. No, it’s not a big sweaty Slavic man cursing through his moustache. The posted video describes the Vook experience as…well, basically, an experience. ‘Vook weaves together content from incredible writers and professionally shot and edited videos by filmmakers,’ says Yahoo News about the technology. …Right. ‘Weaving’. ‘Blending’. ‘Seamlessly integrating two mediums’….