While printed books may be in decline, the market for e-books is growing rapidly. Since Christmas, Nielsen Bookscan has recorded a phenomenal increase of e-books sales, with sales rising by 355%.  The market research company, YouGov, also reported that 1.3 million e-book readers were sold over the Christmas period, making them one of the most popular gifts of 2011.

Publishers such as Bloomsbury have increased their e-book sales by offering out of print books such as crime writer HRF Keating and the politician Alan Clark. The e-book revolution is reviving publishing houses’ fortunes; Bloomsbury reported a healthy £9.1million profit in 2011 after seeing a 38% increase in e-book revenue. Pearson, the educational publishing powerhouse, is also keen to profit from e-books and has launched a new partnership with Apple’s iPad.

Talking of education, one of the world’s highest achieving educational systems, South Korea, is already putting plans in place to make its entire curriculum available online by 2015.  The USA, keen to keep pace with countries such as Korea, has also invested heavily in digital learning. Barack Obama launched the USA’s new national centre to advance digital and learning facilities last month.

Apple hopes that its new e-textbook resource will fulfil this growing demand from counties such as the USA and South Korea. The new Apple e-textbook resource will take on Amazon’s popular Kindle device and the Barnes and Nook ‘e-reader’. Apple will aid publishers to create interactive titles and resources by enabling authors to have free access to its free iBooks author programme.

iTunes U, designed for university students, has also been expanded to attract university students to download its resources. Moreover, teachers and lecturers can use the App as a learning management system to upload seminar and tutorial notes.

Pearson is extremely happy with the results so far and see this as a real area of growth.  Genevieve Shore, Pearson’s director of digital strategy, said, “We’re delighted with the results and we hope that readers, students, teachers and parents are too. We see enormous potential to create these kinds of programmes for more students, more stages of learning and more geographic markets.”

The growth predicted by Shore for Pearson is also likely to safeguard jobs in the publishing house, as well as boost the numbers of IT jobs in the UK; timely and welcome news for the British economy. In particular, the benefits are most likely to be felt by candidates searching for IT jobs in London, due to the capital’s concentration of digital and high tech industries, as well as being the home of Pearson.

The Sony Ericsson Windows Phone prototype, which was leaked online recently, features a sticker on the bottom which states, “Prototype-Not For Sale”. This suggests that, whilst the leaked images might be relatively old, there’s a chance that this might be a follow-up phone to the Xperia S.

There are no specifications for the mystery smartphone, all we know is that it’s definitely a Windows Phone due to the Windows logo home button at the bottom of the device.

Is a new Sony Ericsson smartphone enough to tempt you from your current device? Let us know in the comments below.

Although Steve states that his primary phone of choice is actually an iPhone 4S, the voice recognition software available on Android works a lot better for him due to Siri, more often than none, not connecting to the Apple servers.

“My primary phone is the iPhone, I love the beauty of it but I wish it did all the things my Android does, I really do,” Wozniak announced in a recent interview.

“With the iPhone 4 I could press a button and [say] call my wife. Now on the 4S I can only do that when Siri can connect over the Internet. But many times it can’t connect. I’ve never had Android come back and say, ‘I can’t connect over the Internet.’”

Whilst this will probably annoy Apple fans, we have to agree that whilst Siri does work brilliantly, due to its Beta form, it’s less complete than Google’s own offering.

What are your thoughts on Apple’s Siri and Google’s voice recognition software? Which one do you favour? Let us know in the comments below.

One of the larger websites that will be going offline will be the English Language version of Wikipedia, according to Wikimedia’s Executive Director Sue Gardner.

A statement was released on the site, which read:

“Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18″

“This will be the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it’s a decision that wasn’t lightly made.”

As well as Wikipedia, websites such as the Cheezburger network, which includes such sites as FailBlog, Failbook and many more will be joining the protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protest Intellectual Property Act.

What do you make of the online blackout? Let us know in the comments section below.

The Transformer Prime is an ultra-slim and ultra-slight tablet from Asus, which features the world’s first quad-core mobile processor NVIDIA Tegra 3. The Tegra 3 can apparently bring up to 18 hours of battery life to the hugely powerful Transformer Prime tablet.

Asus have recently confirmed that there are a few issues regarding stock in the UK and consequently wehave no idea how long this delay will carry on for.

Asus released this statement on their Facebook page:

“ASUS have been working all day with our retailers to try and fulfill back orders. Unfortunately due to high demand this has not been possible. However we are shipping more stock over the coming weeks. Please contact your retailer for dates. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

The “coming weeks” could, however, be quite a while for many because quite a few sites have pre-order commitments to upkeep.

Have you pre-ordered the Asus Transformer Prime? Or are thinking about purchasing it once available? Let us know in the comments below.

The new 120Mb fibre-optic broadband connection, which will affect around four million homes across the UK, will let users see speeds that, in the UK, have not been seen before in consumer services.

A slight twist in this announcement is that Virgin Media customers won’t be paying anything at all for their speed increase. The different Virgin Media broadband packages will be doubled, in a situation where 10Mb customers will receive 20Mb speeds, 20Mb and 30Mb customers will receive 60Mb speeds and for those who opted for the 50Mb service, they’ll soon be seeing a connection of 100Mb.

For the few that have chosen, and can receive, the 100Mb service from Virgin Media, they’ll receive a 20Mb boost, which will mean that they’ll have the fastest consumer Internet connections in the whole of the UK.

It’s been reported that the speed boosts will be beginning in February and will be continuing in to 2013.

Who is your current broadband provider? Let us know in the comments below.

The Orange Tahiti is a budget tablet costing just £69.99. However, don’t be fooled by this insanely low price. After you’ve paid this one-off fee, you’ll have to pay £25 per month for 24-months, which means you’ll paying a whopping £669.99 overall.

You do get some relatively decent specs in return for your hard-earned cash though, with the Tahiti boasting a 7-inch TFT screen, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and 5-megapixel camera.

With regards to connectivity, you’ll be able to use bluetooth, WiFi and 3G.

The Orange Tahiti isn’t the smallest of devices though measuring in a 10.5mm thick.

What do you make of the Orange Tahiti? Is it worth the overall price you’d have paid over two years?

This 3D enabled smartphone is reportedly supposed to be being unveiled at MWC 2012 next month, and we could also see a slight re-branding strategy from Samsung.

IBTimes, who appear to have started the rumours, suggested that the 3D display will be a glasses-free 3D display, much like previous 3D smartphones such as the LG Optimus 3D. The device did not manage to take off too well though. Samsung seem to think that they’re 3D smartphone will take the world by storm.

We say that if it’s anything like the Samsung Galaxy S2 (review) that we reviewed earlier this year, then this will be one hell of a powerful device!

The Samsung Galaxy S3 is said to sport a 2GHz dual-core processor, with 2GB of RAM and a crazy 4.6-inch Super AMOLED Plus HD display.

On the camera side of things, we’ll most likely see a 12-megapixel camera with Full HD Video recording and amazing picture snapping quality.

Has the Samsung Galaxy 3D got your mouth watering yet? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

The Koala Mount for iPad is an improved and perfected variation on the, already very successful and popular, Dockem. The Koala Mount features a much sleeker design, better fit for tablets and can also accomodate the Apple Smart Cover or your slim case of choice.

The Koala Mount not only works with the iPad, but with other tablets as well, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Motorola Xoom.

Chris and Colby have set up a Kickstarter project, much like they did with the Dockem earlier last year, and are looking for $5000 to get the ball rolling.

The project has a been a great success so far, with over $2000 raised and still nearly a month to go before the deadline.

You can visit the Koala Mount Kickstarter page by clicking here.

Going green has been popular with quite a few companies over the past few years, namely companies in the automotive industry, but being environmentally friendly has been at the top of Apple’s to-do list also.

If the tech giant can implement hydrogen fuel cells in to future products successfully, without pushing costs higher, then devices could be lighter, smaller, have bigger batteries and be much more friendly to the environment.

The official Apple patent says, “This fuel cell system includes a fuel cell stack which converts fuel into electrical power. It also includes a controller which controls operation of the fuel cell system. This eliminates the need for a bulky and heavy battery within the fuel cell system, which can significantly reduce the size, weight and cost of the fuel cell system.”

The document also outlines the benefits of a fuel-powered Mac, “Hydrogen fuel cells have a number of advantages. Such fuel cells and associated fuels can potentially achieve high volumetric and gravimetric energy densities, which can potentially enable continued operation of portable electronic devices for days or even weeks without refueling.”

“However, it is extremely challenging to design hydrogen fuel cell systems which are sufficiently portable and cost-effective to be used with portable electronic devices.”

Here at Tech-Reviews, we believe that whilst this would be an amazing feature for future Apple devices, it’s most certainly quite a few years away, at least until the tech can be created at a much more efficient price.

What are your thoughts on this particular Apple patent? Can you see this becoming a reality? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.