Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Legacy Archives

Sony e-Reader Orders May Arrive After the Holidays

Add as a preferred source on Google

sony-readerSony Corp. says some customers who pre-order its newest e-reader may not get the gadget in time for the holidays.

The company said Wednesday it’s trying to ship the $399 Reader Daily Edition for the holidays. But because interest has exceeded expectations, the company can’t be sure that everyone who buys one will get it by Christmas.

Recommended Videos

Sony unveiled the Reader Daily Edition in August and planned to release it for the holidays. Like rival Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle, the Daily Edition will be able to download books wirelessly — a first for a Sony Reader.

Sony began pre-selling the product Wednesday through its Sony Style Web site, and the site says that these orders will ship Dec. 18 through Jan. 8, though “actual delivery date cannot be guaranteed.”

Dena Cassella
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Haole built. O'ahu grown
A new startup wants to fix the military’s working-dog shortage with cloning and gene editing
Promising pitch, plenty of unanswered questions about the dogs.
a new startup wants to fix the militarys working dog shortage with cloning and gene editing warhound featured image

Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.

Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).

Read more
AI can describe a picture, but it still struggles to understand blind users
A University of Maryland study finds that Be My AI often buries useful answers in lengthy descriptions, leaving blind users to work harder to get the information they need.
Blind Man using walking stick

AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.

The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.

Read more
Etsy cracks down on AI slop listings. Everyone else needs to take note.
Now every platform must decide what counts as handmade.
Etsy featured image

Platforms tend to shrug off AI clutter until it threatens what they sell. For Etsy, that thing is trust in the maker.

To protect that, Etsy has banned AI-generated how-to guides and listings made entirely by bots. Most sellers must show at least one unretouched photo of the item (via Etsy Seller Handbook).

Read more