With the first shipments of its e-reader tablet, the Kindle Fire, Amazon announced its new “Lending Library”—a free service available to “Prime” subscribers that allows them free access to more the 5,000 e-books. This $79.99/year membership also offers free 2-day shipping on all orders and free streaming video and music on the Kindle Fire. Sounds →
Open Book Systems has been innovating from within the publishing industry since 1982. “OBS” originally stood for “Online BookStore,” the first online book store on the internet in 1992, and now, we are revisiting what it means to publish online. The new Online BookStore will provide publishers with a secure “sandbox” environment for experimenting with →
Apple is standing alongside five major publishing houses at the defendant’s table for allegedly conspiring to raise e-book prices. HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster are on the stand defending themselves against allegations that Apple aided them in pushing Amazon away from their standard $9.99 price point for newly released and bestselling Kindle →
A new buzz-term is flying around the publishing community: Social Reading. New websites have been popping up over the past year and a half, from Copia to Shelfari, bringing together ebook clubs from readers all over the world and connecting them with other book-lovers with similar interests. From these sites one can read, buy, comment, →
I caught a glimpse of the new “book futures” market on Day – 1 of the London Book Fair last Sunday. The pre-show Digital Conference was my “jet lag day,” that first day after an all-night Boston-to-London flight. Warm room, low lighting, comfortable chairs, it was tempting sometimes to try and listen to the presenters →
We recently spoke to a potential distributor for a series of paper and e-books we are publishing. He said that if we supply printer-ready PDFs and give his company exclusive global rights to distribute our book, they would “push it out” (sounds like sausage!) to 48 leading e-tailers and e-wholesalers, most of whom will take a 50% →
I found this fascinating quote today: I’ve given a few talks on why these new tools are failing to catch on — here’s an early one given at a publishers meeting, and a later one given to an audience of scientists. The short answer, if you don’t want to read my lengthy posts, is that very few, →
My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite. —Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet Back when books were things, it was easier to measure success or failure based on quantifiable metrics like print runs, sales, years in print, citations. Paper books →
Considering Amazon’s new “front door,” its e-reader Kindle, as a stocking stuffer, I think about the $400 price tag and ask “What is it?” and “Is it worth it?” and “Why does it matter?” In fact, it is not just another proprietary e-reader. And unlike the BlackBerry, it is not a handheld device trying to →
Just as Amazon is positioning its new $400 e-reader as a tempting stocking stuffer, news arrives about a drop in the U.S. literacy rate. The Boston Globe reports this morning that U.S. fourth graders are losing ground in literacy, for the first time lagging behind Russia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, according to an international study recently completed →