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With the release of iOS 4, Apple also updated the ibooks app for the ipad. I was looking forward to one app for dealing with epub and pdf’s. Unfortunately, ibooks is not very usable for reading pdf’s, at least for me.

The first problem is organizational. You have an epub bookshelf and a pdf bookshelf. I would prefer a unified bookshelf. It would make things easier to find when there are large numbers of documents and one doesn’t remember what the document type is.

The more important problem is that pdf support doesn’t have a way to crop margins that I can see. You can unpinch to zoom in but that’s a bit fiddly and to make matters worse, it zooms back to full page view when you change pages. I was hoping I could use ibooks as the One True ebook reader but it’s not there yet.

I don’t particularly like itunes but I use it because I don’t have any practical alternative. Getting things onto my iphone requires it and I haven’t used anything music management that I’ve liked better. Over the years, I’ve learned to limit my expectations and this has kept me from getting too annoyed. My biggest gripe with itunes is metadata management and codec support. Neither of those has changed but one itunes feature previously limited to the ipod shuffle has finally been added to other ipods including the iphone and presumably the ipad. That is the ability to downconvert high resolution music on the fly during sync to 128k bps aac.

This means I can finally stop keeping two itunes libraries, one with apple lossless for the home theater system and another at 128k bps for the iphone. I’m willing to trade the increase in sync time (because of the need to convert the files prior to sending them to the phone) for simpler file management. It only took three years of submitting this through itunes feedback for it to happen. Perhaps there is hope for my requests for flac support and for being able to have better support for multiple artists, composers and genres on a track.

I’ve been following the development of electronic book readers with some interest. I love to read and probably go through three books a month on average. My problem is that my bookshelves are overflowing and I’m running out of space. This is after donating several boxes of books. What is a space-challenged reader to do?

An electronic book is the obvious choice, but it’s hard to beat books at the optimal technology for reading. E-readers have been expensive and clunky and had a lack of content. At least until recently. Now there seem to be three major players, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony. I’ve read about each though I’ve only touch Amazon’s Kindle in person.

Kindle and B&N’s nook have the same price point and similar features. The nook seems to have software that isn’t quite there in terms of quality and performance but uses more open standards than Kindle.

I’d probably get a Kindle in a heartbeat if it weren’t for one thing. The Kindle’s DRM locks me into Amazon. I don’t want to buy books that lock me into a single hardware vendor. The Kindle has some great features but the DRM implementation is onerous and I don’t trust any single company to keep my best interests at heart. If we must have DRM then let’s have interoperable DRM and the EPUB standard seems the best bet for this. Unless Amazon switches to an open standard, I’m not very likely to buy a Kindle even though it’s arguably the best reader on the market with the largest library of material of likely interest to me.

The nook has the advantage of supporting EPUB but the performance is so sluggish that I’m not sure I could live with it. Hopefully that will improve. Yesterdays firmware update (v1.1) seems to help some, but it’s yet to be proven that the hardware platform is up to the task. I’m pretty sure that nook2 will be much improved but will this nook ever live up to it’s hype?

Sony’s readers look nice. They support EPUB. The UI looks good. The touchscreen models suffer from glare from the video’s I’ve seen and the low-end,  non-touchscreen model uses a screen that’s just too small.

Because B&N uses a DRM model that is different than Sony, the advantage of EPUB for interoperability is largely gone. A nook can read Sony’s DRM but, at least for now, a Sony can’t read nook’s DRM. That may change, but for now EPUB isn’t living up to it’s promise.

So, I sit back and wait and my bookshelves continue to overflow.

This interface has been sold. It is no longer available.

This is a two year old Alesis IO/26 firewire multichannel audio interface. I had 8 analog and 16 digital inputs and can run up to 192khx at 24 bits.

Included are the unit, power supply, firewire cable, driver cd, manual and original box.

It is in working order and in great shape. Works with both Mac and PC and would make a great addition to any audio enthusiast looking to record multichannel audio.

The monitor has been sold. It is no longer available.

This is a 19″ 4×3 monitor that runs at a native resolution of 1280×1024.

It has DVI and VGA inputs and is in working order.

Included are the monitor, power supply, DVI and VGA cables and original box. I do not have the original manual.

Asking $60.