The Digital Reader

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Yitoa Shows Off a $43 Android eReader Posted: 19 Oct 2014 11:47 AM PDT Charbax caught up with the Chinese OEM Yitoa at a trade show some time back and they showed him their latest ereaders. Yitoa has been developing tablets and ereaders for several years now (they designed the flexible Wexler FlexOne) and lately they have focused their attention only on ereaders, which they plan to license to third parties. They showed off several models, including a super cheap 6″ model which lacked a touchscreen or frontllight but had a retail cost of only $43. The unit on display, curiously enough, had a Bebook logo (I thought that company was out of the market). And as we can see in the background Yitoa has a number of different models in display. But more importantly, Charbax also caught a couple new 6″ models, one with a Rockchip CPU and the other with an Allwinner CPU. Both of those ereaders sport a frontlight and touchscreen, and they also run (or can run) Android 4.0. I can’t tell if they also come with Google Play, but I would not be surprised to find out that they do. But I can add that the one model is running on a 600MHz Rockchip RK2818 CPU with 4GB internal storage, a capacitive touchscreen, and a frontlight – but no page turn buttons, alas. I checked and neither of the new models is shown on the Yitoa website, so unfortunately I can’t provide more info. I have to admit that I was surprised when this video crossed my desk today; like everyone else I had thought that the ereader market was dying out, and yet here was a Chinese OEM investing in developing new models. Either development costs are lower than I expected, or the ereader market (even in its depressed state) is still large enough that sinking the development costs is worth the risk. The post Yitoa Shows Off a $43 Android eReader appeared first on The Digital Reader.

Appeals Court Overturns GSU Library Fair Use Case – But For Good Reasons Posted: 19 Oct 2014 09:35 AM PDT A key fair use ruling was overturned a couple days ago, but you won’t find me crying into my bran flakes this morning. Copyright Librarian and Techdirt reported on Friday that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has issued its ruling in Cambridge University Press et. al. v. Patton, the 2008 copyright infringement lawsuit which is otherwise known as “the Georgia State library case”. That case had been brought by a coterie of academic publishers (CUP, OUP, and Sage, and others) against the GSU Library over the use of excerpts and other fair use clippings from copyrighted books in online e-reserves and course websites. In 2012 the publishers lost the lawsuit when Judge Orinda Evans ruled that many of the examples of copying mentioned in the lawsuit qualified as fair use (some of the examples hadn’t been properly documented, and 5 were found to be infringement). And on Friday the publishers lost again. In a 129 page ruling, the appeals court reversed the lower court’s rulings, vacated some results of the ruling, and remanded the case back to the lower court for reconsideration in light of the corrections made in today’s ruling. While that might sound like the publishers won, as we read through the summary on Copyright Librarian it becomes clear that the appeals court overruled Judge Evans not because she reached the wrong decision but because of how she reached it. For example, the judges disagreed with the way Judge Evans weighted the four factors of fair use equally, and they also overturned Judge Evans’s blanket 10%-or-one-chapter rule. The appeals court also rejected the coursepack copying cases as binding authority, or apparently even as very persuasive. You can find a more detailed analysis over at  Copyright Librarian, but the short of it is this case has been handed back the the district court to review and reconsider. Copyright Librarian has a much more negative take on this story than I; while the lower court’s ruling was overturned, this decision is far from a ruling in favor of the publishers. image  by CCAC North Library The post Appeals Court Overturns GSU Library Fair Use Case – But For Good Reasons appeared first on The Digital Reader.

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