Online book publishing service Blurb today launched a new way to publish collections of photos – as an eBook for the iPad. The new eBooks come in templated or custom two-page layouts, which readers can swipe through, search the text of and zoom into full resolution images. Publishers pay $1.99 per book and get to keep 100% of the profit beyond that cost. Paper books from Blurb start at $10 each to print on demand. Two buck easy-to-make eBook publishing on demand sounds awesome.

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NoteSlate BLACK - beautiful black slate model

FROM THE NoteSlate website: NoteSlate is low cost tablet device with true one colour display, real paper look design, long life battery (180h !), together with very handy usage and very simple and helpful interface for pen and paper. This easy, compact and portable gadget is used anywhere you want to make any notes, drafts, sketches, any ideas for future reference. Paper for everyone! Write a note and check it later, save it, or delete it. Maybe send it after. Just one colour is enough to express the basics. Keep your life simple. You will love it. For $99.

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By Richard MacManus @ ReadWriteWeb.com: Newsy is a new form of journalism created for mobile devices like the iPhone, the iPad and tablet PCs (see our May review for more details). The company has 14 full-time employees in its news room and 15-20 part-timers. About 3/4 of the staff is editorial, with the other 1/4 comprising audience development, marketing and tech. The Newsy team also teaches a course at the local journalism school, which gives them access to about 40-50 students. About two and half to three years ago, Jim Spencer came up with the idea for Newsy. The first thing that he did was build a prototype, based on a variety of research and some “forward guessing on where things were going.” … Jim Spencer’s new company embraced the idea of “multi-sourced journalism.” Newsy aims to give people wider visibility into a story and show that there’s more than one way to report it. Like everyone else on the Web, it has access to thousands of news sources. So Newsy aims to add context to a story, via all of these sources. There is also the convenience aspect for the user, in having Newsy wrap up the various sources for them. Early on, the company looked at how people were consuming news. They found that there was “solid and strong growth in mobile.” So Spencer and co saw an opportunity for “mobile video news,” as at the time there were very few brands in that space. Also, Spencer noted, video and news frequently commands a premium with advertising. (we will explore the business model further in Part 2 of this interview) Changing the personality of NEWS.

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"JailbreakMe" quickly jumped into the trending topics on Twitter after the announcement on tech news site Redmond Pie. This is possibly the first browser-based jailbreak. In the past, users would jailbreak their phones by downloading an app onto their computers and connecting to the device they wanted to jailbreak.

And the crowd goes wild: A hacker has created a website that will jailbreak iPods, iPads and iPhones running almost any version of iOS, freeing the devices from software restrictions placed on them by Apple. Users who want to access unauthorized apps or use their phones in multiple countries, for example, can surf to http://jailbreakme.com/ to hack their devices. Jailbreaking will void the warranty on a device, Apple says. However, the action is easy to undo by resetting a device to factory settings (and will be undone by downloading any new version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS).

Judging from what we have seen so far, Apple’s new iPad will be a great device for reading e-books. The iPad will obviously come with Apple’s own e-reader software – but that’s only half the story. Users will also be able to read their Kindle and B&N e-book purchases on Apple’s new device. After all, nobody is going to stop Amazon, B&N and any of the independent e-book publishers from creating their own applications. That is, of course, unless Apple decides that these apps now “duplicate” a core feature of its own apps and decides to ban all other e-reader apps from the devices. We have to admit, though, that this seems like a highly unlikely scenario. Apple surely doesn’t want to get caught up in another Google Voice-like brawl. We should also note that Amazon has had absolutely no success in positioning the Kindle as a device for textbooks. The iPad, on the other hand, seems to fulfill all the requirements of most students. The device can display interactive content and thanks to its touchscreen, optional keyboard and the ability to easily annotate text, textbooks might just turn out to be one of the iPad’s killer features.

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