Many of the children’s e-book applications for iPad today use a combination of animations, video or even games to make books more “interactive” for their young readers. Me Books, a London-based digital e-book app and retailer launching today in the U.S., has a slightly different take. Instead of animation, the app uses audio to add an additional element to stories. The e-books are narrated, and… → Read More
Is there room for another social network for book lovers, now that the biggest, Goodreads, has been snatched up by the largest online retailer (and Kindle maker) Amazon? Slice thinks so. Today, the mobile receipt tracking service backed by Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Lightspeed, Floodgate and others is expanding into a new vertical, with the debut of its second application, Slice… → Read More
One of the amazing things about technology is that it opens the doors to things for less fortunate folks that many of us take for granted. Being able to sit down and read a good book is something that we do on a daily basis, but never think about all of the people out there who don’t have that luxury. With sites like Amazon, we have a seemingly infinite number of choices on what we’d like to read… → Read More
We’re still waiting to hear from specific companies like Amazon with their latest (non-)numbers on how well their Kindle line of devices has sold over this holiday period, and from the various analysts that track overall device sales and shipments. In the meantime, some research out today from the Pew on e-reading sheds some light on how the U.S. market is moving: specifically, ownership of… → Read More
Good news for Amazon, and for consumers on the lookout for bargain prices for e-books in Europe. Apple, along with the publishers Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, Hachette and Holtzbrinck (Macmillan), have reached a settlement over e-book pricing in Europe. That deal had become the subject of an antitrust probe initiated in December 2011: the European Commission believed it gave Apple and… → Read More
Take that, Rakuten! Amazon continues to extend its reach into new markets and increase its focus in Asia: today it announced pre-orders for its first Japanese-language Kindle, the Paperwhite, and, in another first, it has now extended its Kindle Store into Japan, opening with 50,000 titles in the library. It also today kicked off sales of the Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire in the country. → Read More
Blurb has had a good amount of success as a disruptive player in the “traditional” publishing space. The San Francisco-based company, which lets anyone write and publish a physical book at relatively affordable prices, has built a profitable business with more than 100 staff and more than a million paying customers since it launched to the public six years ago. But according to founder and CEO … → Read More
The United States Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit filed yesterday against Apple and five major book publishers for allegedly colluding and price-fixing e-books is still reverbing throughout the tech industry — after all, pretty much anything having to do with Apple these days is going to attract attention, and a major antitrust lawsuit is never something to be taken lightly. With the… → Read More
The American Booksellers Association sent a letter to its members today announcing that Google was putting an end to its reseller program, which allowed independent bookstores to operate an e-book storefront using Google as the wholesaler. The news was confirmed shortly afterwards by a post on the Inside Google Books blog, saying “it’s clear that the reseller program has not met the needs of… → Read More
A milestone today in the world of publishing, as Pottermore.com, the site dedicated to all digital things Harry Potter, opened for business as the exclusive distributor of Harry Potter e-books and audiobooks. This marks the first time that a major author has ventured forth to offer e-books directly to the public, bypassing publishers’ sites and online bookstores in the process, to allow readers to… → Read More
France has developed something of a reputation in trying to tax larger companies on the Internet to use the funds to help out smaller players. The latest development in that scheme: a proposal to tax large booksellers to help French independent bookstores impacted by the rise of online giants like Amazon.
This is a development on a model that has seen proposals to tax online ads from the likes… → Read More
This just in… As we reported it would do yesterday, PayPal has today issued a significant update to its acceptable use policy regarding payments for certain erotica-themed e-books.
Now the eBay-owned payments company says that it will only prohibit using its payment system for specific books — not entire classes of books — and that it will only apply to those publications that contain… → Read More
A development in the ongoing story about PayPal and requirements it made on e-book distributors to remove certain kinds of erotica from their catalogs: there are signs the eBay-owned company could be preparing to reverse its position as early as this week, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The digital rights group has been among those meeting with the payments company in recent… → Read More
Apple was surely riding high after the announcement of their new iPad yesterday, but that doesn’t mean that everything is OK in CA if a Wall Street Journal report published today holds true.
According to “people familiar with the matter,” Apple along with HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Group, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan are on the verge of being slapped with a… → Read More
Random House, the world’s largest publisher of the kinds of books you and I read, has made some adjustments to the way it sells e-books to libraries. Notably, they have tripled the price of many titles. Librarians across the country are expressing their discontent.
The changes were telegraphed by an announcement a month ago that suggested prices would be going up soon, and most expected… → Read More
Adult content has long been a big draw, and one of the most profitable, in the world of digital media, but a recent move by PayPal is a sign of how one part of that business might be facing some problems up ahead.
Smashwords, an e-book distributor that competes with Amazon, has sent out a letter to the authors, publishers and literary agents that it works with to tell them that PayPal is… → Read More
Last spring I wrote about Nature Publishing Group’s plan for a $49 electronic textbook packed with interactivity and unlimited content updates for life. The original publication date was scheduled for September 1, 2011, but for a variety of reasons the release was pushed back. Today marks the official launch of “Principles of Biology”.
This book is “born digital”, according to Vikram Savkar… → Read More
Barnes & Noble may be challenging Amazon’s dominance of the e-book world, but the Kindle sales are still growing faster than the Nook’s — at least if you connect the dots between some of the numbers included in a recently-published article by The New York Times. → Read More
Ownership of tablets and e-book readers saw a big spike over the holidays — in fact, it nearly doubled in the United States, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.
The study was based on telephone surveys conducted in mid-December and January, which found that ownership of both device types nearly doubled in just a month. Now a total of 29… → Read More
Nobody wants to be told that their business model is obsolete. Ask Kodak. Or Hollywood. And the publishing industry is slower on its feet than most. Bookstores don’t want to believe that they’ll ultimately lose 75% of their pre-e-book business to that scourge plus Amazon delivery. (I’m assuming e-book market share will eventually plateau somewhere north of 50%.) Meanwhile, publishers cling to the… → Read More
Right now, most e-books look an awful lot like their print counterparts, but startups like just-launched Coliloquy want to change that. In the past few months, other companies like Findings, Readmill, and Subtext have experimented with adding annotations and other social features to e-books. Coliloquy co-founder Lisa Rutherford said she wants to go further. → Read More
Microsoft is officially putting their MS Reader system to bed. First made available in 2000, before e-ink readers were more than a twinkle in some materials researcher’s eye, the application was intended for the consumption of e-books on LCD screens, using Microsoft’s ClearType font smoothing and a relatively compact, familiar format.
The .lit filetype and Reader application have only been… → Read More
Panasonic is prepping an Android 2.2-powered e-book reader/tablet hybrid [JP] that’s specifically designed for the Japanese market. The device will offer e-books through a store set up by Rakuten, the country’s biggest e-commerce company, with the initial line-up including a total of at least 10,000 titles. → Read More
Nature, the folks who brought you the free life sciences learning community Scitable, are today announcing “Principles of Biology”, a college level electronic textbook. Building upon the cross-platform success of Scitable, the new textbook offers a variety of fully interactive features, including quizzes and assessments, an online gradebook for instructors, and more. Perhaps most notable in this… → Read More
A report from the Association of American Publishers reveals that e-books sales experienced “powerful continuing growth” as they colorfully put it, and paper books of all types dipped, compared to the same period (January-February) from last year. This isn’t surprising news, mainly because it isn’t news — and even if it were, it’s just history repeating itself; we’ve seen the same thing… → Read More
You can now find the Kobo Wireless e-reader on walmart.com. You can also find it in brick-and-mortar Wal-Mart stores, so it all works out. → Read More
When Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007, Fujitsu started showcasing the first version of its own e-book reader, the so-called FLEPia. Back then, Fujitsu marketed the FLEPia as the world’s first such device displaying pages in color. We covered the device a few times until it actually went on sale in Japan with a $1,200 price tag [JP] last year. → 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
How prescient! I just wrote that the dead-tree book is dying and a tipster sent us in this charming little site dedicated to the joy of paper – funded by a paper manufacturer, one of the biggest in the world. Domtar is the “largest integrated producer of uncoated freesheet paper in North America and the second largest in the world based on production capacity” and business, thus… → Read More
While this blog post over at Tomorrow’s Book has more than a little bitterness to it, it’s also informative. More and more people are choosing to self-publish these days, and even if it’s a hassle, you’d think a new e-book store like Kobo would want to embrace this nascent business model. After all, if you cut out the middle men, you can get right to the chiseling. → Read More
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