TidBITS compares Kindle and iPad
I’m a little late noticing this, but on January 31st TidBITS posted a detailed head-to-head comparison of the Kindle versus the iPad as e-book reading platforms. There is also some discussion of the Amazon/Macmillan dispute, though the outcome was unknown at that point.
TidBITS‘s Glenn Fleishman concludes:
In the end, Amazon is a bookseller, and its foray into hardware shows that it’s better at moving media than making machines. The Kindle has evolved into a nice piece of hardware that gets great reviews from those who keep it.
But, put bluntly, the Kindle DX just doesn’t compare favorably with the iPad in ...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 8, 2010 Author: Chris Meadows Tags: Amazon Amazon Kindle Chris Meadows E-books and all that Kindle DX Kindle for iPhone Macmillan e-book economics e-book ergonomics e-book pricing e-book technology e-books and other digipubs e-ink e-reader e-readers ebook ebo
Coming soon to the Kindle: Color, wi-fi, more applications?
Last week, Amazon bought a touchscreen start-up whose technology would work with color LCD screens. Today, the New York Times’s “Bits” blog has some interesting new glimpses at possible changes to the next model of Kindle.
Robert Brunner, founder of the design company Ammunition, worked with Barnes & Noble to create the Nook e-reader and says he believes that the Kindle will actually become two Kindles. “I think they are going to have to split their line. They can’t abandon E Ink screens, but they will need to create a color device too,” said Mr. Brunner. “Where it gets interesting is, do they just do a d...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 8, 2010 Author: Chris Meadows Tags: Amazon Amazon Kindle Chris Meadows display technology e-book ergonomics e-book technology e-ink e-reader e-readers ebook readers ereaders iPad color jobs LCD New York Times wi-fi
From the Frontlines of the E-book Wars, A Beyond the Book Special Report
This Wednesday, Feb. 10th from 2PM – 3PM EST, Copyright Clearance
Center’s Chris Kenneally will be hosting a special Beyond the Book live
podcast (http://beyondthebookcast.com/live-webcast/) examining the ebook Wars, which are taking shape with MacMillan challenging Amazon and the rise of eReaders and the iPad. During the podcast, Chris and his panelists will look at all sides of the e-book story and what future battles may bring to the print and digital marketplace. The podcast will air live on BlogTalkRadio: http://bit.ly/drJipN
Joining Chris are:
• Andrew Albanese, features editor at Publishers Weekly;
• ...
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LISNews.org - February 8, 2010 Author: Blake Tags: ebooks
British Library to offer free Ebook downloads
Times Online – “MORE than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring. Owners of the Amazon Kindle, an ebook reader device, will be able to view well known works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thousands of less famous authors.”
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Library Stuff - February 8, 2010 Author: Steven Tags: British Library
Nook now available in stores and online
Received a press release from B&N saying that the Nook is in stock online and will be at the majority of stores by mid-week.
Along with the ereader, B&N will be launching new in-store content which will be updated weekly and be available for a four week period. This month the content will be themed for Valentine’s day.
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 8, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Barnes & Noble Nook Paul Biba e-book ebook e-reader ebooks eReader
Beyond the Book podcast on the Ebook wars
Beyond the Book always does an excellent job with interviews. I received an email from them about their latest live podcast to be held from 2pm to 3pm EST this Wednesday, February 10. During the podcast, Copyright Clearance Center’s Chris Kenneally will be examining the ebook Wars, which are taking shape with MacMillan challenging Amazon and the rise of eReaders and the iPad. Chris and his panelists will look at all sides of the e-book story and what future battles may bring to the print and digital marketplace. The podcast will air live on BlogTalkRadio: http://bit.ly/drJipN
Joining Chris are:
· Andrew Alban...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 8, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Paul Biba e-book ebook publishing
Rich Adin starts Ebook “Hall of Shame”
Rich Adin has started his Hall of Shame, to highlight the poor state of editing of so many ebooks.
He asks that you email to him the book title, author, problem, and samples of errors, among other information. Please email these at Rich’s site, not TeleRead. He asks that you send info to hallofshame[at]anamericaneditor.com
As Rich says: By spreading the word about poor editing and formatting, readers will become knowledgable consumers and speak with their wallets, declining to purchase inferior quality books, thereby shaming publishers into fixing them. Should a publisher undertake to fix a book’s problems, that...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 8, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Paul Biba Rich Adin e-book ebook
Solving the Ebook problem: a call to arms!
I am blown away by the responses to the articles Chris Meadows and I posted over the past week. I am dismayed that in some reader’s minds, I came off as anti-author—if that were do, I would be downloading off the darknet right now instead of blogging to you—but I am delighted that the issues which have left me, and many other loyal ebook buyers, so frustrated are finally getting notice.
Readers like me want to buy books and support authors. But we want to be treated like more than a nuisance or afterthought too. We deserve books which look nice and are free from errors. We deserve to pay a fair price̵...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 8, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Ficbot Paul Biba e-book e-books ebook ebooks publishing
Divided we stand, united we fall
In thinking about ebooks and the future of publishers, I, as have most commentators, have reflected the thinking of publishers that the solution is singular in the sense that one solution will fit all parts of a publishing business. The reality is quite to the contrary; because publishing is a pluralistic endeavor, the solutions must be as well.
Publishing has it great divides, like fiction, nonfiction, and academic, but there are even finer divides. For example, nonfiction can be biography, self-help, technical, cooking, current history, 20th century history, and on and on. When commenters talk about pricing and value, th...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 8, 2010 Author: Rich Adin Tags: Paul Biba Rich Adin e-book ebook publishing publishing industry
Author Henry Porter fears for the future of publishing
In an article in The Guardian author Henry Porter bemoans the future of publishing. Here are two quotes of interest:
To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales, that the book is shortly to be replaced by the ebook and electronic readers sold by, among others,...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 8, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Paul Biba e-book ebook publishing publishing industry
For the Kindle: British Library Will Begin Providing Free Digital Access to 65,000 Rare First Editions of 19th Century Fiction
From the Article:
Owners of the Amazon Kindle e-book device will be able to view the books, including their original typeface and illustrations, of famous works by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as thousands of more obscure authors.
Printed paperback copies of the first editions, including Dickens’s Bleak House and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, will also be available for the public to order from Amazon for around £15.
Original copies of works by Austen and Dickens typically cost at least £250.
Most of the books that are currently available to download on the Kindle are by contemporary autho...
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ResourceShelf - February 8, 2010 Author: resourceshelf Tags: Digitization Projects E-books Libraries and Librarianship
JavaScript Epub readers discussed
Threepress Consulting discusses several new JavaScript Epub readers. Why JavaScript?
* JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world and it might be the best way to get more developers interested in creating and tweaking ePub readers.
* JavaScript ePub readers start challenging publishers, developers, and book readers to start thinking about what’s most important in delivering a compelling reading experience in a browser. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these choices while developing Ibis Reader, which will launch later this month, so I’m eager to see more opinions.
* Building ...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 8, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Paul Biba e-book ePub ebook
Dan Poynter and Mark Coker to speak at SF Writers Conference
Coker and Poynter will be on a panel entitled “The ebook Revolution” on Saturday, February 13. It will be moderated by literary agent Ted Weinstein.
Coker is founder of Smashwords and Poynter is author of Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual. You can find more details here.
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 8, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Mark Coker Paul Biba Smashwords e-book ebook
Designing Ebooks to be Learning Tools at Tuesday’s BostonCHI Meeting
Tuesday’s (2/9) BostonCHI, the New England area chapter of the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, meeting might interest some of you because it deals with the design of ebooks.
“This talk will cover the basics of Universal Design for Learning and show how applying principles of UDL to the design of electronic books can transform plain text documents into learning tools. We will show … examples from CAST’s digital learning environments and compare to current trends in ebook interface design.”
Dr. Boris Goldowsky & Lisa Spitz will prese...
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J's Scratchpad - February 8, 2010 Author: j Tags: Professional Development
The DOJ and ADA Mandate Ebook Readers Be Accessible to All
The DOJ and ADA Mandate ebook Readers Be Accessible to All: "The DOJ and ADA Mandate ebook Readers Be Accessible to All by Nancy Herther Posted On January 25, 2010 ebook reader makers received a major reality check earlier this month when, after investigating charges of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) violations, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced settlements with four major
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North Texas Regional Library System - February 8, 2010 Author: Carolyn
The Rebirth of Print: Time for the New Aggregation Plays to Take Off
Somewhere in the world today a printing press operation is preparing to go dark. Mind you, it's not a universal phenomenon; in markets such as India, where a burgeoning middle class is hungry for news and not yet equipped with an abundance of electronic media sources, print media is actually growing. Scholarly publishers are still doing well their premium journals and custom print for B2B and consumer markets is thriving. But in many developed media markets print operations are struggling to stay alive, with 2010 expected to be a year in which newsstands begin to display significantly fewer titles. Barnes and Noble, with i...
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ContentBlogger - February 8, 2010 Author: John Blossom
British Library to offer 19th Century first editions for free download on Amazon Kindle
The Library’s ebook project will make more than 65,000 first-editions available this spring for the first time. It is funded by Microsoft. Microsoft and the Library have been scanning books for the past three years. The article in the Telegraph about the project goes on to say:
As well as classic titles by famous 19th Century authors, many of the downmarket books known as “penny dreadfuls” will also be made available to the public, including Black Bess by Edward Viles and The Dark Woman by J M Rymer.
In addition, paperback copies of the first editions will be available from Amazon for about £15. Unfortunatel...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 7, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Britain British Library Paul Biba e-book ebook libraries England kindle
Richard Herley on White’s Selborne – a pioneering natural history book
Richard Herley, an English author whose books are great, has a wonderful blog in which he often discusses the natural history of the English countryside. I follow him with relish.
Now he discusses Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, and he says:
While not going so far as one author, who declared that no one who does not own and appreciate a copy of White’s Selborne has no claim to call himself an English naturalist, I would nonetheless hold it up as indispensable to the library of anyone who loves our countryside, or who loves our language properly used, or both. … There have been nearly three hundr...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 7, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: England Paul Biba Richard Herley e-book ebook
Is this what Macmillan et al. are “really” afraid of? Amazon as a publisher
USA Today has a story about how self-published novelist Zetta Elliott was picked up by Amazon and published by AmazonEncore in paperback, ebook and audio.
Now get this, according to the story an Amazon editor contacted Elliott directly and offered to publish the book. Evidently her book was praised on blogs and used in some schools and this got Amazon’s notice. The Amazon VP won’t discuss contract details but says that they don’t pay advances, though they do pay competitive royalties based on sales. He says that editors use customer reviews and sales data to find promising books.
Now, given the irration...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 7, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Uncategorized or off-topic Amazon Macmillan Paul Biba publishing
New Kindle owners: alternative Ebook sources “download how to”
Actually this is for other ereader owners as well. Carly Z has a “how to” for those Kindle owners who want to look at other options than Amazon.
She covers Smashwords, Manybooks, Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg, and tells you how to get books from these sources from your computer onto your ereader.
For those looking for more free ebooks, take a look at our own free ebook guide, which includes some sources that Carly left out. The downloading principles are the same, however.
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 7, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Amazon Kindle Paul Biba e-book e-reader ebook ereaders
Retailing Pressure and Emergence of the Ebook are Threatening the Future of Authors and Their Work
Political espionage author and journalist Henry Porter solemnly points out: "To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly.
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pligg - all - February 7, 2010 Tags: Current Events
Retailing Pressure and Emergence of the Ebook are Threatening the Future of Authors and Their Work
Political espionage author and journalist Henry Porter solemnly points out: "To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales, that the book is shortly to be replaced by the ebook and electronic readers sold by, among others, Amazon, which seems bent on reducing pu...
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LISNews.org - February 6, 2010 Author: birdie Tags: Authors Books International Publishing
Amazon/Macmillan: The post-game analysis
Now that the Macmillan books are back on Amazon, a number of sites are coming out with analyses of what Amazon gained or lost over the week-long incident. I’m going over them as I prepare for my panel show podcast on the matter this afternoon.
There is some good discussion going on in recent Making Light threads about the Amazon/Macmillan dispute, particularly this one about the agency pricing model.
Gizmodo has a good piece on how Apple played the same game with the publishers to put pressure on Amazon’s price structure that Amazon played with the record labels to put pressure on Apple to go DRM-free. Matt Buchanan po...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 6, 2010 Author: Chris Meadows Tags: Amazon Amazon Kindle Chris Meadows DRM E-books and all that Fictionwise Macmillan e-book economics e-book ergonomics e-book pricing e-book technology e-books and other digipubs e-ink e-reader e-readers eReader ebook ebook
Wow!! New volume of Gormenghast discovered! Bummer! No Ebook versions of the trilogy
This is great news! According to this article Vintage has acquired a fourth volume which continues the famous Gormenghast trilogy. It was written by Peake’s widow, Maeve Gilmore, and is entitled Titus Awakes.
The volume was round in the attic of Peake’s granddaughter. It will be released in 2011, along with a luxury hardback edition of the trilogy.
Unfortunately, I cannot seem to find an ebook version of the trilogy anywhere.
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 6, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Paul Biba publishing Gormenghast Mervyn Peake
Macmillan books back on Amazon
The New York Times is reporting that Macmillan books are now back on the Amazon site. No details of the agreement between Amazon and Macmillan have been released.
The Times does speculate, however, that the agreement between Amazon and Macmillan would assure that no other ebook vendors, such as Apple, get preferential prices and that perhaps users of Kindles could lend books to each other.
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 6, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Amazon Macmillan Paul Biba e-book e-books ebook ebooks kindle
The Amazon/Macmillan blow-up: An e-book lover’s appeal for understanding
Over the last few days, the angry Amazon/Macmillan rhetoric has been flying fast and furious from several positions. Recently, we posted an impassioned piece by Ficbot with the attention-grabbing headline, “Maybe we should be hurting the authors,” which was linked in a post on author Tobias Buckell’s blog and has brought us a great deal of traffic today (not to mention the liveliest comment thread we’ve seen in some time).
There seems to be a perceptual disconnect, or maybe several perceptual disconnects, between the authors/publishers on one side and the e-book readers on the other. There are many voices on both s...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 6, 2010 Author: Chris Meadows Tags: Amazon Chris Meadows E-books and all that Ficbot Fictionwise Macmillan crappy customer service e-book economics e-book pricing e-book technology e-books and other digipubs e-reader e-readers eReader ebook ebook pricing eboo
Say goodbye to those violent intimacies
The arrival of the ebook will overturn existing models of economics and productionAnyone who has ever attended a literary festival will know the form. First the reading by one author or a discussion among several authors; then 15 minutes of questions from the audience; finally a few closing remarks from the moderator, ending with the important fact that Poet X or Historian Y, whom we've just had the great pleasure of hearing, will be signing books at the adjacent stall. For an author, this next stage can be either gladdening or humbling. There might be a queue of people with newly bought books in their hands or there might...
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Guardian Unlimited Books - February 5, 2010 Author: Ian Jack Tags: ebooks Technology The Guardian Features Comment Comment is free
Amazon/Macmillan: Economics, the agency model, an interesting rumor, and who’s moving buy buttons
David Pakman brings an economics perspective to the Amazon/Macmillan dispute, complete with a “price elasticity of demand” chart right out of a textbook.
He explains the idea of finding the profit-maximizing price—the price at which the amount of profit times number of units sold is highest—and emphasizes that Amazon has access to the economic data from its millions upon millions of transactions to let them do just that, while publishers do not.
So, why would publishers NOT want Amazon to find the optimal profit-maximizing price? Because, like many entrenched media companies, they have massive legacy cost structure...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 5, 2010 Author: Chris Meadows Tags: Amazon Amazon Kindle Authors Guild Chris Meadows E-books and all that Macmillan e-book economics e-book pricing e-book technology e-books and other digipubs e-reader e-readers ebook ebook pricing ebook promotion ebook publish
FBI director Robert Mueller wants ISPs to log visited web sites
Especially since 9/11, the FBI has long been interested in being able to check up on the reading habits of ordinary people. In 2002, we covered a librarian’s concern about a provision of the Patriot Act that would allow the FBI to request information from libraries. In 2005, we covered an actual use of that provision.
In 2008, David Rothman discussed FBI director Robert Mueller suggesting “that the bureau should have a broad ‘omnibus’ authority to conduct monitoring and surveillance of private-sector networks.” Since the Kindle uses wireless networks, David was concerned that it meant the FBI might take an i...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - February 5, 2010 Author: Chris Meadows Tags: Chris Meadows David Rothman E-books and all that ebook ebooks law legal librarian librarians libraries library privacy browsing FBI ISPs Robert Mueller web sites
Publishing and Books in 10 years
From the Kindle Review blog:
Publishing and Books in 10 years
Answering the following questions…
Will there be more readers?
Will there be more people reading books or less?
Will these people be reading more books per person?
What share of the market will ebooks have?
How many eReaders will be in circulation?
Will eReaders be a niche market or not?
Will multi-purpose devices kill eReaders?
Will one company dominate eReader sales?
Will one company dominate ebook sales?
Will there be any monopolies?
Will we have closed, walled gardens or free and open systems?
Will readers still pay for books?
What prices will books be...
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Stephen's Lighthouse - February 5, 2010 Author: admin Tags: Uncategorized
