Amazon Should Open Source the Kindle Apps

Joe Wikert via O'Reilly Insights via Forbes: "Imagine how many great new features would be implemented in this model. Rather than being limited by the fixed (and apparently small) number of developers assigned to the internal Kindle apps dev team they’d suddenly have access to as many developers as they could recruit to the open source project. They could create a world class set of apps and quickly distance themselves from the competition."

Nook Color Hacked into a Cheap Tablet

Techtree: "... considering the open source origins of the underlying Android platform, the dormant power of Nook Color's hardware didn't lay unutilised for long. Users had already started rooting, that is gaining Super User privileges to override the Nook UI, their Nook Color to eke out full functionality. In a latest development, the e-reader has been hacked to run Android 2.2.1. What that means is your Nook Color now gets a home screen and the ability to launch Android applications right off the bat. It also gets the phone icon in the process, but that's moot considering it lacks the communication hardware to make and receive calls. ..."

Nicely Enhanced Open Source Calibre 0.7.21 Now Available for Download

Nate the Great, The Digital Reader: "Do you know what amazes me about Kovid? The way he adds support for obscure devices to calibre. Just this week he added support for the Jetbook Mini, and it hasn’t even shipped yet. The mind boggles. FYI: calibre is an open source tool designed to help you transfer ebooks to almost any e-reader. It has support for converting ebooks to and from a couple dozen formats, as well as I don’t know how many devices. You can download calibre for Windows, OSX, and Linux here."

Hack: Turn The Nook Into a Multifunctional Super Nook! - Gearlog

Gearlog: "For less than a third of the price of the cheapest iPad, you can buy Barnes and Noble's adorably-named, but often ignored e-reader: The Nook. One aspect of The Nook that is often overlooked is the fact that the little sucker is Android-powered. That's open-source Android-powered. Which, if you think about it, kind of makes The Nook the very first Android-based tablets (or tablet-like gizmos) that the nerdosphere has been buzz-buzzing about. Of course, The Nook's scope is a far cry from heavy-duty tablet territory--it's designed for basic e-reading first and foremost. However, with a few slight 'adjustments' you can pimp your Nook with additional functionality such as a Pandora and Twitter app. For free. ... "

Textbooks and the Open-Source Revolution

Those of us with a sense of history can't help but enjoy the irony of Scott McNealy now being a staunch advocate for open-source anything. Nevertheless, this initiative is pretty cool. The hurdle will evidently be curriculum bureaucrats in various governmental departments of education, but what else is new? NYTimes.com:

[Scott] McNealy, the fiery co-founder and former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, shuns basic math textbooks as bloated monstrosities: their price keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same.

“Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,” Mr. McNealy says.

Early this year, Oracle, the database software maker, acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, leaving Mr. McNealy without a job. He has since decided to aim his energy and some money at Curriki, an online hub for free [open-source] textbooks and other course material that he spearheaded six years ago.

“We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks” in the United States, Mr. McNealy says. “It seems to me we could put that all online for free.”...

The nonprofit Curriki fits into an ever-expanding list of organizations that seek to bring the blunt force of Internet economics to bear on the education market. ...