Why are e-books still presented as an either/or argument?
My colleague Chris wrote the other day about e-books and the 'generational shift.' He notes that one article on this subject even used the phrase 'young people today' non-ironically when talking...
What causes the ‘smell of books’?
A few days ago I mentioned the “smell of books” in the context of scents that various perfume and other scented-product manufacturers are trying to produce. The aroma is caused by...
A Look Back at BEA: BookBub, innovations in children’s books, The Onion’s bold bet...
When Katie Donelan four years ago became BookBub's third employee and the first one who was not a co-founder, the bargain e-books email list reached fewer than 100,000 members. At BookExpo America...
Amazon fraud-fighting efforts sweep up innocent ‘prawny’ authors in their net
As I’ve mentioned before, Amazon is a victim of rampant click-fraud attempts, as scammers out there think they’ve found some new way of banging on the Amazon piñata until some money...
Vonnegut Library in Indianapolis launches Kickstarter to help fund facilities move
Here’s a quick update on a story I did in April about the Indianapolis Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library raising funds to move to new facilities. The Vonnegut Library has launched a...
Supreme Court tells lower court to reconsider denying Kirtsaeng legal fees
The Supreme Court has produced an interesting post-script to the landmark Kirtsaeng v. Wiley case, in which it had previously ruled permitted importation and resale of less-expensive textbooks from other parts...
Facebook’s death of the word prediction could be greatly exaggerated
In a widely quoted statement during a conference in London recently, Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook's Vice President for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, advocated the abandonment of the written word for video. "The...
Is pleasure reading becoming ‘short attention span theater’?
Daniel Berkowitz, senior editor of Digital Book World, has a blog post discussing what he sees as a decline in reader attention spans. Although his evidence is strictly anecdotal, it’s possible...
Web content publishers seek ways to circumvent ad-blockers
The Wall Street Journal has a report on companies like Admiral, PageFair, and so on who are working on technologies to circumvent customer-run ad blockers in order to show ads to...
At rights management conference for digital era, publishing industry is still stuck in the...
Rights are more important than ever in the digital publishing world of today. In that respect, it’s not surprising there would be a conference devoted entirely to managing rights to digital...