Look guys and gals in publishing, sit down. You can bring in your Coco Water. Totally. Yeah. We have some gluten-free sandwiches coming in and I promise this won’t affect summer hours. You can still not come in on Friday. Yeah, you can take off your loafers. Whatever.
Ok. I know you’re confused and hurting. Revenues are falling and ebooks are killing your old surefire model of shipping books in… → Read More
If you couldn’t tell from the massive e-sales of a tale about a young lady who loves to love the wrong man, ebooks are massively popular, doubling in 2011 to completely surpass sales of hardcover adult fiction.
The Book Industry Study Group released their poll of 2,000 publishers yesterday, announcing that book sales declined 2.5 percent in 2011, down to $27.2 billion from $27.9 in 2010. Ebooks… → Read More
MeMeTales, a super-cute (and guilt-free!) children’s books application arrives on Android today, following its iOS release and public debut at 500 Startups’ demo day last October. Originally from Seattle, now a San Francisco-based operation, the company was founded by husband and wife team Maya Bisineer and Pree Kolari, and offers a library of picture books designed for preschool and… → Read More
The Association of American Publishers released a report today that shows that ebooks have beaten hardcover revenues for the first time. Ebook revenues topped out at $282.3 million YTD while hardcovers hit $229.6. Almost exactly a year ago the tables were turned with ebooks hitting $220 million and hardcovers brushing past $335 million.
The only growth in hardcovers is in the young… → Read More
When you run some of the biggest and best presses in town, it’s hard to imagine them ever going silent. Brian Kibby of McGraw-Hill, well known textbook publisher, would be happy to shut them down tomorrow if the need arose. He doesn’t want to pay the costs of printing, paper, and distribution. He just wants to push the ebook industry into the future. → Read More
Lane Becker has been a familiar figure in the Silicon Valley tech scene for years, as the co-founder of startups such as Adaptive Path and Get Satisfaction, and an advisor at early-stage venture capital firm Freestyle Capital.
Becker recently added “New York Times Bestselling Author” to his list of descriptors, when the book “Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your… → Read More
In what I suspect will be an increasing trend, cartoonist Bill Amend has released three “packs” of his popular FoxTrot comics for the iPad. He built the books by himself using iBooks Author and proceeds go to the Help Bill Amend Eat Food Fund (I suspect).
He’s selling three titles including a special issue — number 3.14 — featuring geek strips. Each book contains 100 strips and is optimized… → Read More
Nicholas Sparks, the bestselling novelist and screenwriter known for hits such as The Notebook and A Walk To Remember, is currently on a nationwide tour to promote The Lucky One, the latest movie to be adapted from one of his books. Right now he is making the rounds in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and we were really pleased when he agreed to swing by TechCrunch TV for an interview this… → Read More
“Grumpy Cat! Grumpy Cat! More Grumpy Cat, please!” – That’s basically my two-year-old’s review of FarFaria, a new subscription-based children’s storybook app for the iPad. (To translate: she loves it, and especially that story about the grumpy cat.) The app, to be clear, doesn’t just offer the one story – not that my kid seems to care right now – it’s a collection of nearly one hundred stories… → Read More
Oh crap, it’s Valentine’s Day. Did you just remember, too, courtesy of that clever Google Doodle? The blogosphere will be filled today with last-minute gift ideas and other such ephemera related to this mushy holiday, and while I’m refusing the V-Day pitches as a general rule, there is a startup announcing its launch today that’s actually kind of fun. The company is called Walnuts, and it’s a… → Read More
Say you, like me, wrote a book about the two Lithuanian lovers who find themselves trapped in a basement and have to solve mysteries and learn magic to escape the traps set by them by an evil wizard robot using their brawn, brains, and a little sultry lovemaking. How would you publish and sell it?
Presumably you would visit the Kindle, B&N, and Apple book stores and upload it, making it… → Read More
While we’re on the subject of publishing, Sarah Lacy found a great monologue on the current state of publishing and how, in short, Amazon is tearing old publishing houses a new one.
Publishers, like music producers, don’t make money piddling around with 50 mid-list books. They make money buying (for millions) and selling (a few) books by human black holes like Snooki and the Kardashians. They… → Read More
Two bits of news crossed the wire this morning, neither of them good for traditional publishing. First, Barnes&Noble has reportedly put their publishing arm, Sterling Publishing, up for sale, a company it bought in 2009 for $115 million. Sterling produces puzzle, game, and crafts books for kids and adults. Not as big a deal as it sounds, but it still points to a reduced interest in paper-based… → Read More
Are you a big fan of Life Of Pi? Well don’t go and get the Story Of O just because they sound similar. Instead, put your query to BookLamp, a free service/project aimed at creating a database of “like” books. Similar to Pandora, the service is based on the Book Genome Project and attempts to find books that are similar based on measurable criteria. The project, founded in 2003, is trying to figure… → Read More
91-year-old Ray Bradbury has finally agreed to make his books, most notably Fahrenheit 451, available in digital format after Simon & Schuster released his body of work back into his name. Bradbury has complained that the Internet is a distraction, at best, and has thus far refused to allow his books to appear on ereaders.
The e-edition costs $9.99 and is available on the Kindle and Nook. → Read More
Our own John Biggs and his former Gizmodo co-worker, Charlie White, have just released a book about blogging called Bloggers Boot Camp . These gents produced tens of thousands of posts between them, written for some of the biggest names in blogging, and are generally good blokes. Their goal in this to teach how to write for blogs. This isn’t a book on starting a Tumblr or a Wordpress.com. It’s… → Read More
One of the exhibitors at TC Disrupt was BookLikes.com, a Polish start-up dedicated to letting you know which book you should read next – among other things. The site is essentially a bookstore melded with a recommendation engine melded with a social network. It allows you to follow your friends reading lists, prepare reading groups, and see what you should read next based on your reading history… → Read More
If you needed any more proof that the age of dead-tree books is over take a look at these alarming style changes at Ikea: the furniture manufacturer’s iconic BILLY bookcase – the bookcase that everyone put together when they got their first apartment and, inevitably, pounded the nails wrong into – is becoming deeper and more of a curio cabinet. Why? Because Ikea is noticing that customers no… → Read More
If you can’t wait for the official Steve Jobs biography, why not pick up a fake one for $8? “Translated” by someone apparently named “John Cage” (presumably there are 4.33 pages blank near the middle), the book has sold 4,000 copies at $10 a pop. → Read More
Got an “old” ereader you want to “upgrade?” Get yourself a Nook and B&N will throw in $315 worth of free books, 30 titles in all, including “Glory in the Fall: The Greatest Moments in World Series History, 21st Century Crossword Puzzle Dictionary, My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me” along with some public domain titles. There are some cook books in there and a few other interesting titles but… → Read More
Valentine’s Day is this coming Monday, and the odds are that you still haven’t bought your significant other a gift. Shame on you, because nothing says “I love you” like buying something for your partner on the same day that everyone else is told to buy something for their partner. Funny how that works. But let’s play along, let’s keep this positive. Let’s say your partner is a bit of a… → Read More
Hey, man, what’s your problem? You drink kombucha and ride a fixie, but what the heck are you doing with that capitalist corporate DRM-laden Kindle? Head down to Microcosm Publishing in Portland, man, and they’ll give you like a hundred books for your Kindle.
I mean dude Noam Chomsky is like $6 at the store, so for your Kindle you can get like 37 Noam Chomskys. Same goes for fix it, make it, grow… → Read More
Right about now, as college students across the country start to go back to school for the Spring semester, things are starting to pick up at Chegg’s 600,000 square foot warehouse in Shepherdsville, Kentucky. The warehouse sits right next to the main UPS shipping hub and across from a Zappos warehouse.
The textbook rental company sees its busiest times peak twice a year at the beginning of each… → Read More
By potatochipscience.com You can learn how to make all of these things and more in Allen Kurzweil’s new book, Potato Chip Science. Frito-Lay’s recent decision to curtail production of its deafeningly crinkly biocompostable Sun Chips bag is a blow to environmentalists, who estimate that more than a trillion square inches of snack packaging (enough for the Christos to wrap all of Singapore)… → Read More
Parker: The Outfit by Darwyn Cooke MSRP: $25 Product Page Good For: People who love thoughtful graphic novels like 100 Bullets and American Splendor Could Be Good For: Mystery and thriller fans. Not for: Anime fans The Outfit by Darwyn Cooke is based on Richard Stark’s Parker novels. Set in the roaring ’50s, Parker is a career criminal who only hurts the folks who deserve it. The… → Read More
If you were alive in 1978 you’ll probably remember you couldn’t do much with a computer. The Altair had just hit the scene and BASIC was taking off but there was very little a kid of a certain age and predilection could do with this information. Luckily there were guys like David Ahl. Best of all? George Beker and David Ahl are offering a nice discount on the book. He wrote to us! → Read More
Buying a digital book for your iPad is a very odd experience. If you fire up iTunes, you can find music, movies, apps, even audiobooks, but there is no category for digital books. You need to first download the iBooks app, and then buy books within that app. So it is like a marketplace within a marketplace that also happens to be a reader. The Kindle app also works that way. It is… → Read More
The second author to reach 1 million Kindle books sold is…? Any guesses? Of course not; I gave it away in the headline. It’s James Patterson, author of such books as the Alex Cross series and Women’s Murder Club. That Morgan Freeman movie, Along Came a Spider, was based on an Alex Cross novel. → Read More
First, to begin, let’s remind the reader that Leatherbound.me is not what it sounds like. The site is safe for work and completely tame. Trust me. I found out the hard way.
That said, Leatherbound.me is actually a book comparator site. You type in the name of a book or an author (any keyword, really) and you get a list of titles back. Click on one of the titles and you see that book’s… → Read More
Do you like potatoes? Do you like science? Well Allen Kurzweil has the book for you. Kurzweil, author of the Grand Complication, was in the historical thriller genre back when Dan Brown was still in short pants. His latest book, however, written with his son Max, is explores science and history from a different angle. It’s all about potatoes, potato chips, and all things tuber. The 82 page… → Read More
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