If you love books–heck, if you even like ‘em–run, don’t walk, and read this magnificent, magisterial essay by Richard Nash on their past, present and future. It’s long. Don’t be frightened. But even if the Internet has shredded your attention span, at least scroll down to its epic final paragraph. Go on. I’ll wait.
It’s been a rotten decade for book publishers, newspapers, and anyone else… → Read More
Bookboard, a subscription service for children’s books, has launched its iPad app, which gives parents and children streaming access to its library of books. Like many kids apps startups, three former Adobe employees, Mike Fitzpatrick, Nigel Pegg, and Fang Chang, founded the company out of personal needs as parents. They came together to develop a service that encourages and develops a… → Read More
It seems the e-book market in Thailand has been quietly flourishing, at least according to a local provider of digital books and magazines, Ookbee. The company is the country’s biggest e-bookstore, with a claimed 88 percent market share. Its founder, Natavudh “Moo” Pungcharoenpong, said the local market is still very new and young, but added that it has amassed 3 million users so far, and is… → Read More
The race for online consumers continues to heat up in the UK, and local retail giant Tesco wants to make sure that it doesn’t blink and let Amazon get the upper hand. Tesco today announced the launch of an all-encompassing digital entertainment service rebranded under blinkbox — blinkboxmusic, blinkboxbooks and Clubcard TV will join the blinkbox video streaming service, which Tesco acquired back… → Read More
This won’t come as a surprise, but the publishing industry is in trouble. Digital technologies have transformed the publishing landscape — just as they did for music — from the way companies distribute content to how we consume it, and our reading habits are fundamentally changing as a result. Book publishers and traditional booksellers are struggling to stay afloat amidst the rising digital… → Read More
Amazon wants to sell your used ebooks. It recently won a patent to allow people to hock off their read ebooks on its marketplace. Of course, ebooks don’t suffer from wear and tear, but think of the resale process as more of a way to transfer your book licences. This is already in action in a way—users can currently “lend” out Kindle books, which then disappear from your device as your… → Read More
Since first emerging early last year, Boston-based startup Boundless has been on a mission to give students a free alternative to the financial and physical costs of bulky backpacks brimming with pricey hard-copy textbooks. Co-founders Ariel Diaz, Brian Balfour and Aaron White believe that the incumbents, the old-school textbook publishers (the top four of which still control the market) have been… → Read More
So this is awkward. Ownshelf is a new service that lets people store and share ebooks online. Pretty nifty, huh? They reached out to me in part because I’ve released several of my own books for free under a Creative Commons license. (For those of you new to this column, I write fiction when not writing code, and have had a bunch of novels published by HarperCollins, Hachette, etc., over the years… → Read More
New York- and Seoul-based Moglue (last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing finalist) has rolled out a few changes to make it easier to create and publish interactive ebooks on smartphones and tablets. Its ebook publishing platform now consists of two main elements, MoglueBuilder (used to create content-rich ebooks without programming skills) and MoglueViewer (used to preview ebooks on target… → Read More
Everyone’s favorite ebook bundle charity online sale thinger is back and you have 13 days to grab eight sci-fi books from folks like Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi, and the Craphound himself, Cory Doctorow. → Read More
Angry Birds has become such a mobile institution, and its maker, Rovio, has gone so far in its extension of that brand — toys, books, t-shirts, cereal, theme parks, films and more games – that this morning’s invitation to a launch of Rovio’s first ever book app came as something of a surprise. But it’s true: despite all the work Rovio (and others that Rovio seems to tolerate happily) has put… → Read More
Some development in the e-book price war being played out in Europe — and an indirect victory for Amazon and any other retailer not called Apple in the process: the European Commission has announced that Apple and the four big publishers Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster have offered to drop their agency pricing agreement for e-books sold in Europe — although the five… → Read More
Apparently, Amazon has been crunching its own internal data this week in order to tout the traction surrounding its various products. Only yesterday, the company was talking about numbers related to its Prime two-day delivery, and today it’s boasting about Kindle title downloads. The company now says that its Kindle-exclusive books have been downloaded over 100 million times, and the number of… → Read More
I keep a close and interested eye on the world of ebooks, and I’m pleased to report that it keeps getting weirder. British supermarket chain Sainsbury – who I worked for once, helping to program a new payroll system for a few months, until they scrapped the whole project – recently bought HMV’s share in ebook hub Anobii for a whopping, er, one pound. (Americans: that’s about $1.50.)… → 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
A sudden, but perhaps unsurprising, bit of e-book M&A today in the UK: the music and entertainment company HMV is selling its 64 percent stake in e-book retailer Anobii to the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, for the princely sum of £1 ($1.55).
The deal will give Sainsbury’s a jump start into the e-book market as part of its stated strategy of becoming a bigger player in the digital media… → Read More
Zola Books, a new social eBooks site to discover, buy and discuss books, just announced that it is launching its private beta today. The company also announced that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from prominent authors, including Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife), Josh Bazell, (Beat the Reaper) and Chandler Burr (The Emperor of Scent). Former Time, Inc. executive Bill… → Read More
I’m a full supporter of e-books, e-book devices, and agree (mostly) with this excellent WSJ assessment by Rob Reid of the the e-book business. In short, Reid points out that 10 years ago this month the music industry began prosecuting its users and implementing draconian DRM to stave off an impending piracy revolution. That was the year Napster closed shop and pirates, however briefly, lived in a… → Read More
There are still some big question marks over what Nokia plans to do in tablets — a market where it is now possibly the only major smartphone maker yet to make a device — but at least Nokia is moving ahead with the launch of tablet-friendly services. Today, it said it would begin the global roll-out of Nokia Reading, a Windows Phone app originally announced back in February for reading e-books on… → 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
E-books. Again. Amazon and the DOJ vs. Apple and “The Big Six.” The future of reading. A breathtakingly stupid David Carr piece in the New York Times, which thankfully someone else took down paragraph-by-paragraph, so I don’t have to. Elsewhere, an awesome quote which I want to cheer with the force of a million choirs of angels:
I am completely unmoved by the argument that if Amazon forces… → Read More
As we noted yesterday, cartoonist Bill Amend has released three sets of his popular Foxtrot comic strips as $1.99 downloads. This move, prompted by the creation of Apple’s iBooks Author software and, more important, the rise of the self-publisher, is probably one of the first times I’ve seen a “traditional” comic strip enter the e-book realm in this way.
I wanted to find out what Bill Amend was… → 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
Apple may be a big dog in music and movie sales and rentals, but it’s definitely not a big dog in ebooks. That’s what makes this note from Seth Godin particularly galling. In a post on PaidContent, Godin writes that Apple has refused to sell his new book Stop Stealing Dreams because it contains links to Amazon in the bibliography.
The reason cited is that there were “Multiple links to Amazon… → Read More
My Dad used to take me to Long’s Bookstore on the Ohio State University campus when I was young – I’d say this was during the 1980s and very early 1990s although in my mind these afternoons spent on campus are tinged with a 1970s wash out of color, as if I were remembering my time in Kansas before Oz. We’d rumble through the stacks, picking out used titles from the basement that were beaten and… → Read More
With this morning’s addition of 16,000 Italian-language ebooks, and 22,000 Spanish-language books, Amazon has updated the total number of digital books it claims to offer through its Kindle Store. The company says the new Kindle Store now offers over 900,000 titles in English and other languages, and indeed, the eBooks section actually turns up 950,000+ search results.
For the record: this is… → Read More
Yesterday’s “Everybody panic!” is today’s “Meh.” B&N, Amazon, and Google Books have all taken pains to make it abundantly clear that you can only buy their ebooks from the e-store “through the Safari browser on their device or any computer” (to quote B&N) and have removed direct links to those stores from their iPad apps. In this way, they bypass Apple’s 30% revenue request. Here are the… → Read More
I almost miss the bad old days. When I first started wandering around some of the more obscure nooks and crannies of this planet, lo these many years ago, Internet connections were rare and wonderful discoveries; now I just get annoyed when I can’t get online. The last decade-and-a-half of innovation has completely transformed the experience of travel. Right now I’m in the middle of a… → Read More
Has the pixel to print tipping point been reached? Last July we reported that Amazon’s Kindle eReader books had surpassed hardcover books in terms of sales, selling 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. Now that lead also holds for paperbacks with 115 Kindle books sold for every hundred paperbacks.
The statistic for hardcover books itself has doubled, with three times as many Kindle… → Read More
Are books better as standalone, pristine works or as social objects to be modified and commented on by those who read them? We are about to find out. Today, Rethink Books is launching its SocialBooks software which allows publishers to turn their books into iPad apps. The apps makes it possible for readers to share their highlighted text from a book on Twitter or Facebook, along with their… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
