"Books cost too much." That was one of the slogans of Crown Books, an aggressive price-combatant, which, however, went bankrupt in the end despite some glowing press reports. Was the real problem that its books didn’t cost enough? Or was Crown—the setting for the Jimmy Carter book signing shown in this photo—on the right path? Former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget might have disagreed with Crown on hardback prices—he thinks such p-books "should cost $25"—but these days he’s calling for a cost of "$4.99 for a first-run bestseller, downloadable to your Kindle, PC, or iPod–or simply readable on the...

Tech-hip people in the book business are looking forward to OLPC's XO-2, which, as you can tell from this photo, could be a promising p-book replacement. But the current e-reading software supplied with the XO-1 is pathetic. OLPC should have risen above "Not invented here" and have adapted the existing FBReader---simplifying it for young users. Unlike the current PDFcentric mess FBReader can read the IDPF's new ePub standard. OLPC News writer's complaints Now I see that I'm not the only one grumpy about the software's failing. In the independent OLPC News, Hilaire Fernandes notes: ...

Upvise Mobile Wikipedia lets you "type in any word on your mobile and download instantly the entire Wikipedia article specially formatted for your mobile device. You can also bookmark any article to a create a list of favorites in your account." Among the features are search, four languages besides English, adjustable fonts and the ability to follow even links outside Wikipedia. UMW, now in beta, is downloadable in versions for Java and Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and---get this---Android. Related: Offline Wikipedia for the iRex iLiad, in MobileRead, and Uh-oh! No e-book apps among 'Top 50' for...

Moderator: Damien G. Walter, a much-published U.K. writer of "weird and speculative fiction," is our latest contributor. Welcome, Damien! - D.R. The other day my self discipline failed, and after weeks of craving I bought a video game. Addictions are never broken; they are only tamed. Eventually they will escape the leash and savage a passing pedestrian. For weeks I've been browsing the game shops, debating the for and against of giving in to temptation. This time the for side won, but for a very simple reason: giving in to the addiction was also the best way of...

Two years ago TeleRead ran Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti's post on Why a distinguished small press isn't publishing e-books yet: Godine designer speaks out. A small literary house, heavy on poetry collections like the one shown here, Godine did not feel that it was ready for the technology or vice versa. How about today? Are traditional independent publishers, not the born-digital variety, going for e-books in a major way? Based on my experiences at PMA Publishing University, which piggybacked on BookExpo America in Los Angeles, I would say that the indies still have a long way to go. E just...

Simon and Schuster will be offering 5,000+ titles in the Kindle format---more than double the current number. Bottom line? The titles bringing in the majority of S&S revenue will now be Kindle-available. Wise move. Publishers mustn't neglect the here and now. At the same time, however, S&S and other publishers need to persuade Amazon to prepare to offer books in the IDPF's new ePub format, too, and make the Kindle able to read it natively. More details: Press release, The Bookseller and Google News. Ahead I'll repro the release in full. S&S, by the way, has an e-book...

Is it time for the Brits to re-colonize the United States? Absoutely! Bring 'em back, Redcoats and all. Some of the wisest utterances on topics like DRM and colliding e-book formats are coming from the British publishing community. A gutsy PW equivalent in the U.K.---far braver and smarter than the wimpy Yankee variety, which zapped my anti-DRM, anti-eBabel blog---has just published a memorable article on the very problems that so many American book people are sweeping under the carpet. In eBabel on and on, The Bookseller explains the mess in terms that even the...

Microsoft's killing Live Search Books. But could its book search have been hurting publishers? And what about online freebies of books---complete or excepts? The help-or-hurt question was among the topics of a panel at BookExpo America, where, by the way, Jeff Bezos will be speaking (ugh, about those K-numbers, Jeff?). PW mentions cases from Harlequin and HarperCollins. At HC Barbara Lilly warns not to extrapolate too much, but says 1,177 people out of 83,000 visitors decided to buy a Neil Gaiman book after seeing it online. What do you think of that ratio, gang? The book---not offered as...

Penguin's e-book sales for the first third of '08 exceeded the total for last year. The increase was "more than five times the overall growth in sales, year-on-year, through April 2008" and linked partly to new e-book hardware. Hmm. The Kindle, the Sony Reader or both? My guess is, mostly the Kindle---along with the publicity it stirred up. Penguin, by the way, has started offering "enhanced"  versions of such classics as Pride and Prejudice, in E, complete with such extras as recipes and etiquette notes. I keep dreaming: Will the publishers themselves see the wisdom of killing...

My MacBook is off to see the doctor and probably won't be back for at least a week. It developed a faulty fan and started to sound like a playing card rattling against the spokes of a bicycle. Luckily I invested in the AppleCare plan, so the repair will be free. But I'm still left without my main machine. That leaves my Eee PC. How to make it usable in the interim? The first thing I did was hook it up to my 23" LG display and it is running just fine at 1280x1024. Using the trackpad isn't much...

"Asustek computer has stopped taking orders for its Eee PC 900, launched just one month ago, in order to prepare for the upcoming launch of the Intel Atom-based Eee PC 901, according to industry sources." - Digitimes (link added). The TeleRead take: The 900 apparently was more or less a placeholder---to keep Asustek competitive while it awaited deliveries of the Atom CPU from Intel. The Atom could be a big boost for small, portable devices that can do justice to e-books, including the multimedia variety of the future. More on the Eee PC 900: Trusted Reviews. ...

"eMusic, the world's largest retailer of independent music and the second-largest music service after iTunes, announces today that it has added nine new publishers---Simon & Schuster Audio, BBC Audiobooks UK, Reagent Press, Hay House, L.A. Theatre Works, Tantor Media, Phoenix Books, Inc., Listen and Live, Brainsync and Audio Evolution--to its rapidly expanding audio books roster." - News release on the continuing success of eMusic's DRMless approach. Other delicious details: We're not talking minor players here. Philip Roth, shown above, is among the authors whose audio books eMusic is handling. The news release goes on: "Following...