Here’s another article from an exec of a Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) publisher about “disintermediating Amazon,” this one on Publishers Weekly. John Oakes of OR Books puts Amazon’s success in an interesting perspective when he points out that, when you get right down to it, the main advantage Amazon really has is “a comfortingly familiar Web site” that didn’t even exist at all just a few years ago. What is it selling? Its ability to sell. What if publishers were to sell e-books and print books direct, straight to consumers—and consumers were to get used to the idea...

On FutureBook, blogger “Agent Orange” discusses the way manuscript consideration times have ballooned in recent years. Where it used to be a known standard that editors should take only one month to decide whether to offer or reject, now manuscripts can be held for a year or more without the authors hearing anything about them. While this might have flown in days before the Internet, now authors have social media and can communicate their anger with their publishers to other authors who might then be inclined not to do business with that publisher. And that’s not the worst of...

Ars Technica reports that Apple has made a 31-page filing (PDF) regarding the Department of Justice’s antitrust proceedings against it and publishers Macmillan and Penguin, the only two of the “agency five” not to settle. Apple’s filing is about what we might have expected from the corporation—it insists that Amazon was the monopolist, Apple negotiated the agreements with publishers separately and individually, and furthermore that agency pricing has not harmed consumers. Apple also insists that it didn’t have anything to do with Amazon’s decision to adopt agency pricing: "Apple is not privy to Amazon’s motivations when it adopted the...

Publishers Lunch reports that the three month standoff between Amazon and the Independent Publishers Group is over. Although IPG President Mark Suchomel declined to discuss the terms of the agreement Amazon and the IPG have reached, the fact that it took three months to reach it does suggest Amazon didn’t get everything its own way—but neither did the IPG. The Publishers Lunch piece suggests that the dispute came down to the larger chunk of co-op fees Amazon wanted that also made several Big Six publishers balk. IPG ceo Curt Matthews has written about the issues...

From the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Announcement: As part of its work on the 2011-2012 Key Initiatives, the IFLA Governing Board appointed a working group to draft a background paper on digital lending. At its April meeting the IFLA Governing Board endorsed this paper, and we are now pleased to present a version for download. The paper attempts to: Provide an overview of the issues relating to eBooks in libraries; Summarise the current positions of publishers in both the scholarly publishing and trade publishing sectors; Summarise the differences in the way that academic/research libraries and public libraries address the issue of digital collections; Address...

Published by Diversion Books and available on Amazon, B&N, iTunes and Kobo this is a new type of ebook.  From the website: “Unconventional and innovative, this is the future of e-publishing here and now—a thriller you not only read, but interact with. Pretty cool and completely fascinating. Attention everyone with an e-reader, don’t miss W. Craig Reed’sThe Eagle and the Snake.” —Steve Berry, bestselling author of The Columbus Affair In The Eagle and the Snake, NCIS agent Jon Shay is the half-Chinese illegitimate son of a politician. He’s also a former Navy SEAL working with operators from Team Six to track down an Iraqi...

New Features Kindle Touch/4 driver: Upload cover thumbnails when sending books to device by USB to workaround Amazon bug of not displaying covers for sync-enabled books Support for updating metadata in FB2 files Set a different background color when choosing formats to not delete as opposed to choosing format to delete. E-book viewer: Add an option to prevent the up and down arrow keys from scrolling past page breaks Get Books: Remove ebookshoppe.com at the website's request Bug Fixes PDF Input: Support image rotation commands in PDF files. Fixes the long standing problem of some images being flipped when converting from PDF in calibre. Fix a regression in...

From the press release: As hundreds of thousands of admirers of the Golden Gate Bridge begin to converge on the San Francisco Bay area to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the world-renowned icon, the California Historical Society is releasing its first multimedia eBook for iPads to capture the rich history and amazing story of the Bridge through a selection of rarely seen artwork, photographs, video, memorabilia, stories, images and much more. Published by The California Historical Society and produced by Sol Editions and Wild Blue Studios, the eBook was funded through a grant provided by UnitedHealthcare.The free iPad eBook, “A Wild Flight of...

From a ProQuest press release: London, 24 May 2012.   HM the Queen launches online resource of all Queen Victoria’s Journals Her Majesty The Queen today launched a unique online resource that makes available all the personal journals of Queen Victoria.  The Bodleian Libraries working in partnership with The Royal Archives and information company ProQuest, have for the first time ever, made the private records of one of the world’s most influential public figures available for the public to access at www.queenvictoriasjournals.org. The journals, which span Victoria’s lifetime and consist of 141 volumes numbering over 43,000 pages, have never been published in their entirety...

From the press release: - Louise Burke, Executive Vice President and Publisher, announced today that Pocket Books, America’s first paperback publisher, has re-launched its Pocket Star line as an eBook-only imprint. As it did in print, Pocket Star will continue to feature bestselling and debut authors in popular genres including women’s fiction, romance, thrillers, urban fantasy, and mystery. Louise Burke said, “Similar to how mass market has served as a platform to develop future hardcover authors, it is our mission to use Pocket Star’s new digital-only format to establish new voices in the marketplace. An eBook imprint is flexible, cost-effective, cutting-edge and makes sense in today’s marketplace. Under...

OverDrive APIs that were supposed to launch in April are now set to become available in July. From the OverDrive Digital Library Blog: OverDrive’s product and development teams have been hard at work developing a suite of APIs (application programming interfaces) that will enable approved vendors to deeply integrate OverDrive-hosted catalogs and nearly 1 million digital titles with their apps and platforms. In July, we’ll launch the OverDrive Developer Portal along with the first set of OverDrive APIs. As part of the development process, we’ve been working with a group of booksellers, publishers, school, library, discovery platform and mobile technology partners to collect...

The new version of the OverDrive library app, for e-books and audiobooks, has just appeared for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad III. Compared to past incarnations, 2.4.2 should delight many a patron. Users of Apple’s IOS operating system will enjoy ‘more control over text justification, line spacing, page margins, and font selection.’ And the just-released Android variant from OverDrive even offers double- and triple-column options in landscape mode, and serif, nonserif and typewriter-like monospaced styles in both regular and bold. Might such marvels from OverDrive on the way for my iPad soon? I’ve long begged OverDrive for all-text bolding, and I thank the company for responding...