dedicated gadget

There’s a new ebook reader app for the Apple iPad called Marvin. What’s unique about Marvin is its Artificial Intelligence engine that analyses the book you are reading and then provides additional information about the characters and places mentioned in the book, and more.Basically it’s kind of like the X-Ray feature found on newer Kindles, except there’s more to it than that. It references Wikipedia for additional info on the characters and places in a book, and you can look-up information about the author, read reviews, and you can even pin these articles to the book so they are easily accessible later on.

Another cool feature is you can quickly look-up names of characters that appear in the book to get a popup that brings up the first time the name appears in the book so you can get a description of the character to remind you who they are.There’s also a feature with Marvin that creates summaries of a book, which then creates a separate ebook for that summary.

Aside from the Artificial Intelligence engine, Marvin is a typical ebook reader app. It has a bunch font adjusting options, themes, and custom gestures. Not to mention notes, highlights, dictionary look-up, sharing, bookmarks, etc. Marvin also integrates with Dropbox.There are some limitations with the app, however. First and foremost it is only available on the Apple iPad. Secondly, Marvin only works with DRM-free ePub ebooks. It also costs $2.99, which I feel is too high given the DRM limitations. But right now Marvin is free for a limited time so it’s definitely worth checking out. Here’s a video tour that shows most of the features in action.

It’s the busiest time of year for holiday shopping, and once again ebook readers and tablets are on many people’s lists. But which ones are the most coveted? Both Barnes and Noble and Amazon claim they’ve sold more than double their ereaders and tablets during Black Friday and Cyber Monday than last year (although nobody seems to notice they both have more than twice as many models to choose from this year).readers as gifts this holiday season.

But with all the choices, deciding on the right one can be a difficult decision. It’s not always about getting the best deal on a gadget, it’s about getting the best one for the person you are giving it to. Sometimes getting the cheapest one or the one that’s “on sale” isn’t going to be the best option in the long run.Sometimes it’s better to think about it from a different perspective. One way is to get ideas from other people making the same choice. I’ve already laid out my top picks for ebook readers and tablets for 2012 in previous posts this past week. If I had to narrow it down even further I’d choose the Kobo Glo and Kindle Paperwhite for ebook readers, and the Nexus 10 and Kindle Fire HD for tablets (I’d choose the Nook HD+ over the Kindle Fire HD if custom firmware or sideloading apps was available, though). But what about you? If you had the choice, which ebook reader or tablet would you choose if you could take your pick of any of the devices out there this year?

Sony has released firmware updates for their latest ebook reader, the Sony PRS-T2, as well as last year’s model, the Sony PRS-T1.With the PRS-T2 it will notify you that the update is available after connecting to Wi-Fi and then ask to download and install it. I’m not sure if the PRS-T1 has automatic updates or not (it didn’t used to) so its package may need to be downloaded and installed from a computer.

Regardless, here are the links to the Sony support pages with the firmware downloads and the descriptions of the changes:

Sony PRS-T1
Sony PRS-T2
Note that those links lead to the US versions. If you live outside the US you’ll have to track down the support page from one of Sony’s regional websites.Both updates are dated today, 11/27/2012. The new firmware version for the PRS-T2 is 1.0.04.11081, and the new firmware version for the PRS-T1 is 1.0.05.11130.

The update for the PRS-T1 basically removes the Google Books feature since that is no longer integrated into the Sony’s Reader Store, and it also supposedly fixes an issue for those unable to login to the Reader Store.The update for the PRS-T2 addresses an issue with error messages displaying when going into collections, and login issues with Facebook and the Reader Store.So basically the new updates include some much-needed bug fixes but no new features.