Samsung tie-up signals a Nook on our shores

IF you’re an Aussie owning a dedicated e-book reader, it’s almost certainly either an Amazon Kindle or a Kobo.

IF you’re an Aussie owning a dedicated e-book reader, it’s almost certainly either an Amazon Kindle or a Kobo, the latter made by a company headquartered in Canada, but owned by Japan’s Rakuten.

They’ve got the market cornered.

One of the top e-readers, the Nook — marketed in the US by the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain — has never been sold in Australia, but that could change in coming months.

Late last week in the US, Barnes & Noble revealed it had done a deal with Samsung Electronics that will see Samsung produce a completely new version of the Nook. Based on one of Samsung’s tablet computers, it’s to be called the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook.

It will come with custom software from Barnes & Noble claimed to give users quick access to its “expansive digital collection of more than three million books, leading magazines and newspapers”.

Not a lot of information has been released by either company, but industry observers are guessing that buyers can expect the new electronic book reader to have a seven-inch touchscreen, up to 32GB of expandable internal storage and a quad-core processor.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook will be available in the US from early August. So far there’s no official word from Samsung Australia in whether it plans to launch the tablet-reader Down Under — but DoubleClick has a hunch that it will indeed happen.

If they can get the price right, they might have a good little seller on their hands.

The Galaxy Tab 4 has a colour display, so we might well see an offering of coloured e-books, rather than just Kindle-style black-and-white.

Nobody needs colour to read a David Baldacci thriller or a Tim Winton epic, but think what it can do for digitised children’s, recipe, gardening or art books.

Kobo already produces a colour e-book reader, the Kobo Arc, which sells in Australia for about $200. It operates as a tablet as well as an e-reader, but it has not been as hot an item as some black-and-white Kobo models such as the dinky little $59 five-inch Mini or the more standard-sized six-inch Touch, which sells for about $129.

Amazon’s best-selling Kindle reader, the six-inch Kindle Wi-Fi, can be found at several Australian retail chains, including Dick Smith, Target and Bid W, for just under $100.

Or you can order it direct from Amazon and have it on your doorstep a few days later for just a few dollars more.

If you already have a tablet or a smartphone with a good-sized screen, there is no real need to buy an e-reader at all: apps are available to turn your current mobile device into an excellent book reader.

Computing history

LAST week’s 70-year re-enactment of the June 6 D-Day landings in Normandy by Allied forces ­brought forth memories of one of the most important days in modern history — one that led just over a year later to the collapse of Nazi Germany, the end of the war and the death of Hitler. For some observers, it also triggered memories of the birth of modern information technology.

On June 5, 1944, a day before the invasion, commander in chief Ike Eisenhower sat in his British HQ, mulling over whether to let the invasion go ahead across the English Channel in what was shaping as extremely stormy weather.

He was sitting on two vital pieces of information: one, predictions by British meteorologists that there just might be a short break in the weather on June 6; and two, that his opposite number, Germany’s commander in chief on the Western Front, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, had decided the weather was so bad that an invasion was unlikely and he had left Normandy for a few days back home in Germany with his family — leaving his troops without a commander.

How did Eisenhower know this vital information? A computer told him.

A computer? In 1944? You betcha — the world’s first electronic programmable computer, a mighty giant dubbed Colossus using state-of-the-art vacuum tubes, had only recently been switched on at the famed top-secret code-breaking Bletchley Park establishment in Buckinghamshire.

It had been designed by a British Post Office worker, Tommy Flowers, with help from the famed Alan Turing, to decode ciphered messages sent between the German High Command and commanders in the field, including Rommel.

And Rommel’s fateful request to leave the field would have been known in Eisenhower’s HQ within hours, if not minutes.

And so, not long after, Ike offered three of the most famous words of World War II: “OK, we’ll go.” D-Day went ahead, and Germany’s fate was sealed

Colossus, alas, was destroyed after the war, along with Flower’s blueprints, but many of its principles were used in the first commercial — and equally massive — mainframe computers that sprang up in the 1950s and 60s.

A fully working replica was built in 2007: it’s on show ­at the National Museum of Computing, in Bletchley Park.

Also on view is a truly wonderful paean to its workings by the cryptographers who worked on it: “It is regretted that it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the fascination of a Colossus at work; its sheer bulk and apparent complexity; the fantastic speed of thin paper tape round the glittering pulleys … the wizardry of purely mechanical decoding letter by letter; the uncanny action of the typewriter in printing the correct scores without and beyond human aid … and the strange rhythms characterising every type of run.”