Amazon released their digital book reader today, Kindle. It’s an ebook reader built using the same eInk technology found in Sony’s eReader - and also sports SD memory slot, EV-DO data access, and a keyboard.

I, like many others, have wanted the ubiquitousness of digital books in the same way that the iPod ‘revolutionized’ the music industry and made it easy and common to carry your entire audio collection in your pocket. Digital books aren’t new, I’ve read entire series of books on my old iPaq using Microsoft’s Digital Library and really enjoyed the experience.

It seems rather humorous that Amazon named a “book replacement” after something you burn. Are they implying a Fahrenheit 451 future? To its credit, Amazon used Neal Stephenson’s “Diamond Age” in the initial screenshots of Kindle - implying a utopic vision of digital literature access.

Another funny comment was the beginning of Amazon press release:

“Why are books the last bastion of analog?” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos asked an audience at New York’s W Hotel in Union Square as he unveiled Amazon Kindle, the online-retail giant’s new electronic book reader.

Probably because so far, book publishers have felt justified charging full, hardback pricing for what is an entirely ephemeral medium. Why should anyone want to pay $20 for a digital book? Apple was one of the first to identify, and more importantly strong-arm the labels, into the pricing sweet-point of $0.99 for a song. Cheap enough for consumers to find it a better value than scouring music sharing applications and services.

Books are priced at $9.99, still more expensive than a mass-market book, but perhaps an expected pricing, commensurate with the price of an audio Album. Newspapers are about $9.99 / month, and magazines a reasonable $1.99 / month. However the licensing isn’t clear (can I resell my digital books when I’ve finished them?) iTunes tracks aren’t, so I would assume books aren’t either.

The demo video says Kindle has access to “hundreds of blogs”. Aren’t there actually millions of blogs? Assumedly they are only providing access to a select number of blogs with quality content. Also surprising is that you have to pay a monthly fee of approximately $1.99 each (some more, some less) to access these blogs. Are they sharing that revenue back to the blog owners?

It does have built-in access to Wikipedia. But will I be able to add access to my own portals, perhaps via an API? You can send PRC, Mobi, Word or Text documents, but what about PDF’s? Also, there is a small fee, 10¢, for “converting” these documents.

A couple of really additional good looking things about the Kindle. The screen refresh looks quicker than the first generation Sony eReader. The wireless EV-DO access if free, assumedly covered as a percentage of your purchases, but you don’t have to directly pay for it.

Overall, Amazon’s Kindle does look rather compelling. Wireless access is especially powerful for accessing online information and easily downloading information from wherever you are. Perhaps a death-toll to Airport book stores? The price of books is probably reasonable and cheaper than the physical version.

Surprisingly, Amazon didn’t play up the environmental benefits of buying digital books instead of large amounts of paper and glossy magazines or newspapers. This could have a huge impact on consumer paper usage and waste and should probably get some more attention. Of course, it does mean “yet another device” to add to your bag.

Henri Bergius has the info on how to run OpenStreetMap on for mapping on your Nokia N800. In fact, it’s incredibly simple. Using MaemoMapper, just add http://tile.openstreetmap.org/%0d/%d/%d.png. to your Map repositories.

This is nice in a couple of ways. First, MaemoMapper, and the underlying Maemo, are open-source applications. So it’s nice to use open geodata. Second, using and caching Googlemap/Yahoo/et al. tiles is probably a violation of their Terms of Service, especially when you use them for realtime navigation. By using OpenStreetMap as the default mapping tile provider, MaemoMapper now provides a base functionality that is free for stringy ToS that could get it into trouble and question its existence.

GigaOM is carrying the story about SkyHook’s WiFi positioning technology will be integrated into SiRF’s next generation GPS chips.

What this means is that hardware devices will be able to use a single solution to get both GPS Satellite positioning as well as WiFi positioning, essentially providing both a clear sky and urban-canyon/indoor positioning solution.

Therefore, these devices will be able to rely on positioning regardless of the visibility of the user to the sky - and provide LBS with a higher reliability.

There’s no word on when the first devices (looks like an iRiver media player) will roll out - or what their interface to applications will look like (single “what is my location?” queries?), but whatever it is, it will no doubt be very exciting.

At CES this year, Nokia released the N800, an updated version of the developer friendly N770 internet tablet. They incorporated some of the feedback from users for more memory, a built-in camera, stand, and speakers/microphone.

What is most interesting (to me) is the built-in support for GPS and location devices in the N800 OS, Maemo. Maemo is based on Debian Linux, and the GPS support is done by building in gpsd, the location-daemon. gpsd provides a common interface for location-based applications to access to the GPS information via the low-level service. Therefore, when you connect your Bluetooth GPS device to the N800, gpsd provides the location to any and all apps that may request it, like MaemoMapper or MaemoBlog to publish to geographic blogs via GeoRSS XML-RPC.

There is detailed information available from Maemo.org, HowTo use GPS framework in OS2007.

I would argue that it would have been better to just include a GPS chip in the device itself. Currently an external device is required to be purchased and connected to use the location information - not something a typical user would do whenever they are traveler or quickly use the device out and about.

A better possibility would be to incorporate WiFi geolocation, such as Skyhook’s Loki, to provide location information over gpsd by the visibility of WiFi access-points. This would work much better in urban areas anyways where WiFi could be more visible than GPS signals.

I’m looking forward to hopefully getting my hands on one and see about geolocating the N800 camera images and WiFi/GPS/Cell tracking.

Based on Allan Doyle’s thoughts on using Maemo Mapper, I was finally inspired enough to figure out how to setup and use Maemo Mapper for the Nokia 770.

Maemo Mapper is a Maemo-specific mapping program that replaced GPSDrive after it kind of sputtered out on being ported to the Nokia 770 platform.

Installing & Setting up

Obviously, you’ll first need a Nokia 770 to start. I would also recommend getting a larger MMC card (1GB or 2GB) to store the cached maps and GPX files. A GPS unit is optional.

It is possible to grab map tiles as you move. This is a good option if you will have a broadband connection, either before hand to “pre-walk” your trip and download tiles, or a mobile data connection. More than likely though, you won’t have a data connection everywhere, and it would really be unfortunate to be missing maps just as you get to an area without data - I would assume that will be just when you need the map.

There is a very nice program called WinMapper that you can use to download specified areas and store the tiles in proper cache directory that Maemo Mapper can use. One thing to be aware of, for zoom levels of 0,2,4 (street-level) there will be thousands of files for relatively small areas, which will take quite a long time to transfer to the memory card. It’s probably useful to grab levels 10,8,6 of most of the area you’ll be traveling, and then 2,4 for very specific small regions.

Alternatively, Maemo Mapper now has the ability itself to download large regions of tiles. In “Manage Maps…” you can grab all the tiles for various zoom levels on the currently viewed region. This way you can download the tiles directly to your memory card cache.

Maemo Mapper is available via a repository, so open the “Tools” -> “Application Manager”, and add the following repository to your list:

Web location: http://repository.maemo.org/contrib/
Distribution: 2.0
Components: free

update your list, and then install Maemo Mapper.

After you open the app for the first time, bring up the menu, and choose “Maps” -> “Manage Repositories”. I created a “New” profile for GoogleMaps, and used the following URI:

http://mt.google.com/mt?n=404&v=w2.29&x=%d&y=%d&zoom=%d

You can also put the same URL in WinMapper. Select the extents that you want (use GoogleEarth, or Mapufacture), and the zoom levels (0 is zoomed in, 16 is world view) - 6, 8, 10 is probably a good start. Select “Region” and “Street” and press “Download”. It will take awhile, depending on the area you are downloading, so let it go on its way.

If you want satellite imagery, the URL string is:
http://kh.google.com/kh?n=404&v=10&t=%s

It’s useful to make at least 2 caches, one for street and one for satellite imagery. You can then navigate and zoom on the street view - then switch to the satellite imagery at the same location.

Also, Niko Kotilainen has instructions and a python server for making a Hybrid Map service. It would also be great to cache OpenStreetMap tiles for that extra-special open-goodness taste.

My POI

Maemo Mapper stores all of it’s data in GPX format, so you can save tracks for easy output and storage. Also, you can load sets of waypoints on your own for various POI.

Alas fair Pacific

Maemo Mapper doesn’t want to cross the International Dateline. This makes it annoying for getting down to New Zealand since you have to push up against the side of the Dateline, zoom, pan back over, zoom, and keep doing this. A small usability shortcoming that isn’t apparent until you’re in NZ, or trying to cross the Bering Straight.

Resources

For more information on Maemo Mapper add-ons and utilities check out the
Maemo-mapper related stuff on Internet Tablet Talk