Social reading site Goodreads is changing the API it uses for pulling book metadata to the site, PaidContent reports. It had been using Amazon’s public Product Advertising API which allowed it to import title, author, page count, and so on. However, Goodreads finds the terms of use for the API have become too restrictive for the site to continue to use it. In particular, Amazon will not allow sites using the API to link to the book on any other on-line retailer except Amazon, but Goodreader provides links to titles on multiple retailers. Also, Amazon will not allow content...

The Consumerist has a cautionary tale today. An Amazon customer bought a Kindle, but the package went astray in shipment.  Amazon immediately sent another one, however: My suspicions were confirmed. Someone else had gotten their hands on the first Kindle lost in shipment and because the Kindle came preloaded with my name, email, address and credit card information, this person(s) was able to make purchases on this Kindle. I spoke with the customer service agents who after understanding did their best to help me. They refunded all the purchases that were made. By the time I discovered this, the fraudulent user had...

Apple’s recent publishing event raised many complaints about restrictive publishing rules for books created with iBooks Author application. In my opinion people don’t complain about iBooks Author or iBooks 2. The weak part is somewhere else – it’s the iBookstore. I’m sure that if Amazon launched something similar to iBooks Author, not that many people would have complained about that. Kindle Store is closed (though not as closed as iBookstore), but it’s the largest and most advanced ereading ecosystem, available to users of the largest possible number of devices. For now on, the iBookstore is the average store with overpriced books and...

Check out Woot! This is a great price for a full-sized tablet - if you are willing to tackle webOS.  It's refurbished.  HP has announced that webOS will be made open source later this year, so this might be a good bet for the more technically inclined among us....

New Features Allow calibre to be run simultaneously in two different user accounts on windows. Driver for Motorola Photon and Point of View PlayTab Add a checkbox to preferences->plugins to show only user installed plugins Add a restart calibre button to the warning dialog that pops up after changing some preference that requires a restart Bug Fixes Fix regression in 0.8.36 that caused the remove format from book function to only delete the entry from the database and not delete the actual file from the disk Fix regression in 0.8.36 that caused the calibredb command to not properly refresh the format information in the GUI E-book viewer: Preserve...

Presented at Digital Book World, Verso Advertising has posted the 46 slides from its 2011 Survey of Book Buying Behavior.  Note that Verso is an advertising agency, not a polling firm and we don't have any information about the competence of the company to conduct such surveys.  However, it is still probably worth reviewing. The ereaders/ebooks portion starts at slide 24 and here are some of the points made on their "Implications" slides, beginning at slide number 41: E-reader owners reaching Early Majority with 15.8% penetration, double that of the 2010 Survey ... However resistance remains high and seems to be intensifying at...

Last week while roaming the exhibit hall at the ALAMW conference in Dallas, Texas, I discovered Mediasurfer.  Mediasurfer offers self-checkout machines for iPads (and other tablet devices in the near future).  Users swipe a library card to borrow the iPad.  Upon return, the devices are returned to original settings. If you’d like to know more about Mediasurfer, listen to the interview with Gary Kirk, President of Mediasurfer, and Jim Nelson, COO of Mediasurfer.  They provide many more details on the software, hardware, and services offered. [Via No Shelf Required] ...

CNet has an article about Google’s stripped-down Chromebook laptops, and their placement in schools. In a speech at the Florida Educational Technology Converence yesterday, Rajen Sheth, Google’s leader of Chromebook work for business and education, announced that hundreds of schools across 41 states have outfitted at least one classroom with Chromebooks. Three schools in Illinois, Iowa, and South Carolina will be outfitting all their students with the devices—over 27,000 in all. The schools appreciate the advantages the device offers of constant updates, cloud storage, and “invisibility” in terms of booting and use—teachers can focus on instruction rather than technical...

E-textbook company Kno has popped out a press release saying that it found 95% of college students who used its e-textbook application “found it very useful and plan to use it again”. The company conducted a study with four California community colleges, on 400 students and faculty in 27 classes using an open-source statistics textbook. "It is exciting to see the book brought to life through digital enhancements by Kno," said Barbara Illowsky, a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, De Anza College [and co-author of the statistics textbook]. "The student feedback reinforces the need for...

EBookNewser and GalleyCat have posted an infographic from e-book sales tracking company Booklr which compares the average e-book price of the Top 100 e-books for the Kindle and Nook platforms. Based on information collected over the week of January 12th through 19th, the chart shows that the average price of an Amazon Kindle e-book is $6.48, whereas the average price of a B&N e-book is $8.94. The difference seems to be caused by fully 35% of Amazon’s titles being $1.99 or less, whereas none of B&N’s were. I wonder, though, whether this might be caused by Amazon counting...

Remember that report about how rife with plagiarized and duplicate books Amazon’s self-published titles are? Its author, Adam Penenberg, has written a follow-up article for Fast Company in which he tracked down one of the plagiarists to find out more about how and why he had published the title. The plagiarist is a Kuwaiti national who used the pseudonym “Luke Ethan”. Luke explains that he had gotten a lead on an Internet marketing forum to a private black-hat forum (with a $500 entrance fee), where he paid $100 for what he was told was a collection of material with...

Jeremy Greenfield reports on the Digital Book World site that Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of social e-tailer Anobii, is urging publishers to drop DRM restrictions on their e-books as a way to fight Amazon. In a DBW slideshow presentation, Berlucchi argues that the big e-vendors use device choice to lock in consumers, licensing rather than selling e-books and offering inferior functionality to that of paper books. Berlucchi calls attention to the actions of the music industry in recent years, eliminating DRM and permitting ownership of music—you can now even import songs bought on one platform into a competitor’s via cloud...