This can only boost the "sales" of the free application. According to Lexcycle's Neelan Choksi, Stanza has  been downloaded almost 600,000 times, and users are in turn downloading 50-60,000 books a day.

The service comes courtesy of a partnership between Lexcycle (the people behind Stanza) and the online e-book seller Fictionwise. We tested the service out, and had a quick chat with Neelan Choksi about Stanza, e-book piracy and the upcoming Kindle 2.

I'm a big fan of Stanza, as regular readers will know. It has its flaws, but with Stanza, my iPod Touch has become my day-to-day reading device, partly because of the lack of English-language paper books in Spain.

One drawback has been the getting of content. Free is good, but I want new titles. My first question to Choksi was about availability. Would I be able to buy books from Spain? His answer was truthful:

I honestly don't know for sure.  Based on what I've seen on Twitter, yes. That said, it all depends on how well Fictionwise is managing territory rights.

I fired up Stanza (no software update is needed -- the new store just shows up in the online section of the app) to find out. And guess what? It works in Spain! While the browsing of titles is as slick as the rest of the Stanza experience, the store itself is still a little clunky. In fact, it crashed the application when I was giving it my credit card details. Here are some shots of the store, displayed within the app using Webkit:

This should change. "Eventually, you should have a seamless experience, never hitting the embedded browser," says Choksi. The plan is to have the book store operate just like the iPhone's built-in App Store.

After my crash, I headed to the Fictionwise store on my Mac and did the heavy lifting there. After buying the book (Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye) I tried again with Stanza. You purchases are stored in a "bookshelf". Sure enough, my new purchase was there, ready for download:

Before reading the book for the first time, you have to give Stanza your credit card number and name. This is used to unlock the book, an unfortunate side-effect of the publisher-imposed DRM. In fact, this isn't the only problem caused by publishers' paranoia. I asked Choksi why e-books cost the same as their paper equivalents, despite the the savings on printing, shipping and storage. "Printing and other costs of physical books has been replaced by DRM costs," he told us, "also, support with ebooks is pretty high as well."

So, not only does the DRM make it harder for the honest user to buy a book, it also makes it more expensive. No wonder the e-book market is so slow getting started. But of course, there are alternatives.

Stanza offers an open directory meaning that anyone can add a catalog to the application. All you need to do is type in (or click on) a properly formatted xml link and a new catalog will be added to Stanza. There is at least one (very good) repository of books which are both free and of questionable legality. Does Lexcycle see this as a problem? Not really. In fact, Choski is more worried by the DRM that causes it:

"It bothers me personally," he says, "we are big proponents of open-ness and know the value of it and know how badly ebooks needs a standard, and how useless DRM is, and how bad the proliferation of proprietary format and proprietary DRM is for the users." This doesn't mean he's pro-piracy. Rather, he's anti-lockdown. "Our value of open-ness is not an encouragement of piracy in any way."

There's no doubt the e-book market is growing, albeit slowly. Stanza is free, but the business plan is surely to take a kickback for every book sold. What about other readers, particularly the Kindle? The v2.0 of Amazon's reader will arrive early next year, and has the advantage of an always-on connection and the integration of Amazon's trusted, and easy to use store. Is Choski concerned?

"All ships rise with the tide right now. Unless [Kindle 2] is a multifunction device that fits in your picket I'm not worried."

Press release [Lexcycle]
Online store [Fictionwise]
Stanza product page [iTunes]

See Also:

• Free Software Turns the iPhone Into an E-Book Reader
• Stanza Updated With Cover Flow, Online Libraries
• iPhone Beats Kindle in E-Reader Popularity Contest

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

VIVACE generates big power from small currents originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Confession: Until a few days ago, I'd never calibrated my TV. There are a couple reasons for this. First, and most simply, I'm not down with buying a calibration disc that I will likely use once then never touch again. And second, to me, HDTV calibration is the gadget geek's equivalent to chasing the dragon. I've seen endless A/V forum posts of new TV owners begging and pleading for that one true setting for their new high-definition slab—it's not pretty. There is an easy way, though, tucked inside hundreds of THX-certified DVDs already out there, and it's quite possibly already in your movie collection.

The THX Optimizer is a quick and simple calibration tool that I have found gets the job done well enough for most of us non-fanatics. And it comes with a free movie! (OK, it comes free with a movie.) What is it? It's a set of six test patterns that help you choose the key settings for any HDTV calibration: contrast, brightness, tint and sharpness.

Where to get it: THX has been quietly embedding the Optimizer in just about every THX-certified DVD for years—so that's hundreds. There's a complete list here, but it hasn't been updated in a while, because THX is currently refreshing the Optimizer for high-def discs. The only Blu-ray disc currently carrying it is Terminator 2, but when the new version is done, THX will include it on all THX-ceritified BDs, too. Point is, in all, there's probably at least one movie you'd like to own that happens to come with the Optimizer.

One other thing you'll need: To take full advantage of the Optimizer for the tint settings, you'll need some funky blue-filter glasses. THX will send you a pair for a couple of bucks on their website, though there is an additional color pattern in the Optimizer that you can use to eyeball your settings without the glasses—basically, you just make sure that cyan and magenta look as much like the cyan and magenta of your dreams. If you don't feel like you can be trusted with that judgment, it's probably worth it to spend the $4 or so.

Settings you'll want to start with: The good news is, the Optimizer works with pretty much every TV in the world, from your grandma's 19-inch Sony Trinitron to your brand-new 60-inch Kuro. (Yeah, you wish.) I would reset your TV's settings to the factory default before running the Optimizer, and I would also choose to calibrate your set's movie/film/cinema pre-set (if possible), as it should be closer to the ballpark range than the "standard" mode. But if you prefer the usually cooler color temperatures of the standard mode, running it through the Optimizer will at least ensure that its ferocious showroom-floor contrast and brightness will be tamed.

Be sure that any auto-contrast or auto-backlight settings—including any settings with the words "dynamic" or "ambient"—are turned off. In one test scenario, every adjustment we tried to make was immediately be countered by "smart" settings—it was nearly impossible to calibrate the TV correctly. If your set comes with those options, shut 'em down. And leave 'em down.

It also helps to try and run the Optimizer in lighting conditions that best match your usual TV-watching state. Everyone watches TV both during the day and at night, so this won't be perfect. But a happy medium of the shades drawn on a partly cloudy day seemed to work nicely for me.

After you've got everything set up, it's a pretty simple run-through—turn up contrast until just the point where can still see six white-shaded blocks without them merging together, turn down brightness until the last black block out of a different row of six disappears, etc. All of the tests are easy enough to understand for the layman.

But does it work? My Samsung Series 4 LCD now looks a lot better in movie mode, without a doubt. Where it used to look flat and the colors muddy, now blacks look blacker and colors more contrasty, but in a far more natural way than the "dynamic" preset.

Note that this before and after of a still from T2 is not a scientific comparison by any means: the camera's exposure settings are the same in each unprocessed photograph, so the screen image should be fairly accurate, but the room's lighting had changed a bit by the time I was done calibrating as you can see. But on the screen you can still see the darker blacks and better color saturation and contrast that I noticed in person.

So even if the difference is subtle, it's worth doing. Especially since you didn't drop money on a calibration disc, you either bought a THX-certified movie, or dug one out of your existing pile o' DVDs. (Netflixing a known Optimizer-laden title is a cheap third option, of course.) And those demons screaming at you about the huge potential you're missing by not calibrating your set? You can put those to rest. [THX]

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The reader meetup takes place across the street from the Gallery, at a place called The Annex (not to be confused with REED ANNEX where the gallery is hosted.) The address is 152 Orchard Street and we'll be there at 9 SHARP on Friday December 5th.

Doug from Gizmine is coming, since the Gallery is partly his creation, and so will Adam, Benny, Matt, Jesús, John Mahoney, Seung the Intern and Chris Mascari. I'll be there, too, so please come on by and say hello, whether you're OMG Ponies or Buick Lesabre who are some of the best daily commenters a blog could ever ask for, or a casual Giz reader. I welcome you!

I'd also like to take the time to say thank you to Jesús Diaz for the wonderful banners in all the Gizmodo Gallery posts. Man is a rare talent.

The Annex is having another event for someone else at 10 and we'll likely wander somewhere else before then, so get there early so we can roam Manhattan like a pack of wild nerds.

[Thanks to REED ANNEX and thanks to our benefactor gizmine.com]

Gizmodo Gallery
Reed Annex
151 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002

Gizmodo Gallery Reader Meetup
The reader meetup takes place across the street from the Gallery, at a place called The Annex (not to be confused with REED ANNEX where the gallery is hosted.) The address is 152 Orchard Street and we'll be there at 9 SHARP on Friday December 5th.

Gallery Dates:
December 4th-7th

Times:
12/4 Thursday
12-8

12/5 Friday
12-8

12/6 Saturday
11-8

12/7 Sunday
11-4

[Gizmodo Gallery]

Business minister Vincent Van Quickenborne recently talked about plans to promote competition in the telecoms market. “The agreement within the government is that we want to break open the market,” he said to Belgian daily “De Tijd.”

Next year, Belgium plans to issue its fourth UMTS/3G licence that is reportedly worth 40 million EUR.

Broadband provider Telenet wants to acquire the licence, but a number of other operators had also expressed an interest.

At present, the Belgian market is dominated by former monopoly Belgacom, which is still partly owned by the government. Other “players” in the industry include France Telecom-owned Mobistar and KPN, which is a unit of Dutch KPN.

[Via: Reuters]

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• NTT DoCoMo buys 30% of Bangladesh’s Aktel for $425 million

From Barenboim's new book, "Music Quickens Time," quoted in Michael Kimmelman's November 21, 2008 New York Times interview with the maestro.

More: "Since every note produced by a human being has a human quality, there is a feeling of death with the end of each one, and through that experience there is a transcendence of all the emotions that these notes can have in their short lives; in a way, one is in direct contact with timelessness."