Samsung tipped to offer a Kindle-killing e-ink Galaxy S6 case – TechRadar

Samsung is reportedly to offer a special Galaxy S6 case that incorporates an e-ink screen, letting it double as a Kindle-style e-reader.

Samsung is the master of adding extra features to its top phones, and rather than cleaning up its act in 2015 it’s going offer them as accessories.

One of the most interesting reported add-ons is a case that offers a second e-ink screen, letting the Galaxy S6 work like an e-reader on the side, much like the Yotaphone 2.

Accessories galore

Also in the works according to a Polish Android enthusiast website are a blood glucose sensor designed to help those with diabetes and camera lenses intended to add flexibility to the rumoured 20-megapixel main sensor.

The site compares these lenses to the Galaxy K Zoom, an optical zoom Android phone from last year, but a solution roughly based on the Olloclip system that’s been available for years seems more likely.

OppoClip puts pieces of glass in front of your normal phone camera lens to give it a different view, such as one more zoomed-in or a fisheye perspective.

Of course the Galaxy S6 is unlikely to be left wanting on the tech front either, with a 20-megapixel camera, 64-bit CPU and fingerprint scanner all on the cards.

Samsung is expected to launch the new phone, with of without flashy extras, during the MWC 2015 show in March.

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Amazon Unveils New Segment of Kindle Direct Publishing – iSchoolGuide

Amazon.com has recently announced a new segment of Kindle Direct Publishing – KDP EDU to help educators and authors in producing contents for students.

(Photo : David McNew | Getty Images News) Amazon

Amazon.com has recently announced a new segment of Kindle Direct Publishing – KDP EDU to help educators and authors in producing contents for students.

KDP EDU was specifically designed not just to prepare contents but also to promote eTextbooks and other contents that can be downloaded or viewed in a wide range of devices like Fire tablets, iPad, iPhone, Android smartphones and tablets, Mac, and PC.

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With the help of Amazon’s new Kindle Textbook Creator tool, the educators and authors can easily turn PDFs of their textbooks and course materials into Kindle books and once the book is ready, they can now upload it to KDP.

“Kindle Textbook Creator makes it easy for anyone to take any PDF and create a richly featured and widely available eTextbook,” said Chuck Kronbach, Director, Kindle Direct Publishing in a press release. “We look forward to seeing how authors use the new tool and getting their feedback to guide us in adding more features to KDP EDU over time.”

Kindle Textbook Creator comes with different features that can help enhance students’ learning experience. Included in the features are the Multi-Color Highlighting, Notebook, Flashcards, and Dictionary.

Author of Full Color Illustrations of the Fourth Dimension Chris McMullen said that he loved Kindle Textbook Creator and commended that it was a great solution for issues he had with converting many of my math-intensive print books to Kindle format.

“Educational content often includes many equations, graphs, and tables. Kindle Textbook Creator made it easy for me to convert the print version of my geometry book to Kindle and reach even more readers,” McMullen said.

What’s more interesting is that with KDP, authors of the books can now earn royalties of up to 70%, while keeping their rights and maintaining control of their content. Authors are now given the option to enroll their books in KDP Select for additional royalty opportunities.

To learn more about publishing textbooks through KDP, visit kdp.amazon.com/edu.

Tags : Amazon, Kindle Textbook Creator, eTextbooks, Kindle Direct Publishing

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KINDLE: A portrait of a struggling artist – East Oregonian (subscription)

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Published: January 24, 2015 12:01AM

Photo contributed by Nick Jaina

Northwest musician, artist, author Nick Jaina shares stories of self-doubt and success in Pendleton.

Self doubt is a stage of an artist's development that tends to receive little attention. Semi-autobiographical novels like James Joyce's "The Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man" and Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn" describe one's life decisions made in bad faith before romantically discovering an almost divinely bestowed creative talent. However, the experience of devastating failures and the loss of faith in one's own abilities after discovering one's vocation is rarely explored. Portland songwriter Nick Jaina's first book, "Get It While You Can," seeks to fill in those gaps.

For well over a decade Jaina has been consistently releasing albums; first with his cult Portland band The Binary Dolls and then under his own name on a variety of Pacific Northwest indie labels. In recent years he has branched out into composing works for modern ballet troupes and even a one-man stage show. Penning a book feels like a natural progression for the multidisciplinary artist. Or perhaps it is a reaction to feeling an unease and dissatisfaction with the progress of his career as a songwriter.

"Get It While You Can" contains all the aforementioned stages associated with an artist's bildungsroman — awkward formative experiences, an epiphanic realization of Jaina's purpose and subsequent artistic triumphs — but the self-doubt, frustration and the measuring of what "success" means to an individual artist versus their audience (as particularly well illustrated in the recounting of a concert performance at Folsom Prison) functions as the book's overarching theme.

In the book, Jaina's life is in thrown into a tailspin after a lackluster show in Tacoma by the theft the acoustic guitar he had played since his teens. From there he re-examines the series of events that led him to pursue writing music and comes to terms with how his career as a songwriter has taken shape. These scenes take place in a variety of locales — from an aborted stint at California State University in Monterey Bay, working a series of mundane jobs in Portland, attending a Vipassana mediation retreat in Washington, embarking on cross-country tours, and finally retreating to Colombia to work on this very book. Occasionally Jaina ruminates on the similar crises of faith suffered by some of his musical heroes (Johnny Cash and Nina Simone) while watching video clips of them on YouTube.

It wouldn't be entirely accurate to label "Get It While You Can" as a memoir. It was originally intended to be a compilation of previously published writings for the webzine Somnambulist entitled "Unsent Love Letters" as well as an assortment of essays. Those essays eventually evolved into the chapters that make up the bulk of the book. Portions of "Unsent Love Letters" are interspersed throughout and, while they are tender and at times humorous musings on romantic relationships, their presence tends to disturb the rhythm of the rest of the book. The story behind his artistic development and coming to terms with success — or the lack thereof — is the more compelling part.

Although most Nick Jaina performances are exceptional concert experiences, his appearance in Pendleton this Friday will stand out from the rest. The performance of his songs paired with readings of excerpts from "Get It While You Can" will provide a rather unique telling of the story behind the music that goes one step beyond the typical "VH1 Storytellers" mode.

Nick Jaina performs at the Great Pacific (403 S. Main, Pendleton) at 7 p.m. on Friday, January 30.

———

James Dean Kindle is a singer-songwriter and musician and part-time Pendleton resident. You can contact him at jamesdeankindle@gmail.com

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Amazon Kindle Textbook Creator lets users create educational content – SlashGear

Brittany Hillen

Amazon has introduced its new Kindle Textbook Creator, a tool that lets users create digital textbooks and related materials that include educational elements, not the least of which are flashcards. Students will then be able to access this content on the same devices other Kindle content can be accessed on, including their Fire tablets. The tool is currently in a beta stage, and as with the Kindle Direct Publishing platform, those interested are able to directly upload their content for others to enjoy.

Amazon revealed the new beta option yesterday, saying it is a segment of the larger Kindle Direct Publishing platform. Under it, users can upload a PDF file with their textbook and have it transformed into a Kindle book. Given the nature of tablets and smartphones, users are able to give readers additional features that aren’t available with an ordinary paper book, as well.

With the Kindle Textbook Creator, the resulting ebooks that are created offer several different features to readers, among them being the aforementioned flashcards, as well as the ability to highlight content in different colors, which also helps in categorizing it; there’s also a notebook for taking notes including copying in passages.

A dictionary is also available to students, letting them more easily look up definitions and information on Wikipedia and elsewhere. As with other Kindle books, users will be able to access the content on whatever devices they have with the Kindle app, such as toggling between a tablet and a smartphone. The same KDP financial terms apply as in other segments of the platform.

SOURCE: BusinessWire

Amazon Kindle Textbook Creator turns authors into teachers (and vice versa) – Engadget

While e-books are everywhere, electronic textbooks never really caught on, despite their potential to bring immersive learning at a lower cost. Amazon is trying to change that with the Kindle Textbook Creator, a free app from its newly formed Kindle Direct Publishing EDU division (KDP EDU). It helps authors rapidly turn dry PDF files into more engaging e-textbooks for use on Android devices, desktop machines, iPhones, iPads, and of course, Kindle Fire tablets. As Techcrunch points out, the app is designed to help educators upgrade existing e-textbooks, rather than create brand new books like Apple’s iBooks Author.

Once you’ve converted an e-book, it’ll automatically have features like multi-color highlighting, text and image capture, memory aid flashcards, and Wikipedia/dictionary definitions. That’s pretty basic functionality for now — Apple’s iBooks Author enables video and other rich content, for instance — but Amazon said it will add more features down the road. Once educators have converted an e-textbook, they can publish it through Amazon’s KDP and earn royalties up to 70 percent, while keeping full rights control. The books can also be enrolled in Kindle Unlimited or Amazon’s Lending Library. If you’d like to give it a go, it’s now available in beta (for English texts only).

Source: Amazon

More Coverage: Techcrunch

Tags: amazon, e book, e books, e reader, e readers, e-book, e-books, e-reader, e-readers, eTextbooks, KindleTextbookCreator

Drop Some Knowledge With Kindle Textbook Creator – PC Magazine

The Web giant is looking to elevate eTextbooks with a new tool dubbed Kindle Textbook Creator.

Living in a digitized world is convenient, yes, but let’s face it — there are still some things that are better in physical form. Textbooks, for instance.

Amazon wants to change that. The Web giant is looking to elevate eTextbooks with a new tool, dubbed Kindle Textbook Creator, which is designed to help educators and authors easily prepare, publish, and promote digitized educational texts.

With this new resource, teachers and textbook authors can turn their PDFs and course materials into Kindle books that can be accessed by students on a range of devices, including Fire tablets, Apple’s iPad and iPhone, Android smartphones and tablets, as well as Macs and PCs.

“Kindle Textbook Creator makes it easy for anyone to take any PDF and create a richly featured and widely available eTextbook,” Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing Director Chuck Kronbach said in a statement. “We look forward to seeing how authors use the new tool and getting their feedback to guide us in adding more features.”

Amazon says the new platform isn’t just beneficial for authors — it will actually “enhance the learning experience” for students thanks to features like multi-color highlighting and more. Books created with Kindle Textbook Creator also include a Notebook feature, which lets you capture key passages, images, and bookmarks for easy reference. Students can also create their own digital flashcards to study important terms and definitions in each chapter, easily look up definitions of works they’re unfamiliar with, and access their etextbooks across devices.

With Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, authors will earn royalties of up to 70 percent, and keep the rights to the content. For more, head over to Amazon’s website.

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