Well, they sell pbooks, but they also use digital printing methods to reprint out of print books, a real service to the book community, so I thought I should mention this new development. Here are a couple of things from their "About" page. Their US home page is here: Currently, The Book Depository is able to ship 1.8 million unique titles, within 48 hours, from our fulfillment centre in Gloucester, United Kingdom. This figure is increasing everyday. Apart from publishers, distributors and wholesalers, we even list and supply books from other retailers! Amazingly, we are also able to arrange...

No, Wall Street won’t say that explicitly or directly. What’s more, as a Yahoo chart shows, the stock has seen worse days and has even rebounded some. But some Motley Fool members have lost faith in B&N stock. A leading indicator? As I see it, B&N urgently needs to differentiate itself from Amazon if it’s to make a successful transition to e-books. Encouraging publishers to drop DRM would be good first step. Here’s rooting for B&N to do the right---and most profitable---thing! Related: B&N bookstore gets clueful pan from Washington Post---including criticism of DRM....

“Now, thanks to ebooks and the Kindle and Whispernet, the rights of authors---and their reward for spending their lives creating ideas and entertainment that benefit the world---can be protected and actively enforced.” – Paul Carr, blogging for the Telegraph in the U.K....

Thanks to Ebouquin for letting me know that the Cybook Opus is now available for purchase. According to Cybook's site the Opus, which has a 5" screen, costs $280. It has 1GB of internal memory for book storage. Unfortunately, it can only read “HTML, Txt, PDF and secured and non-secured Adobe EPUB/PDF” (talk about confusing language---does someone actually mean Adobe DRMed ePub and nonDRMed ePub and PDF?). The last time I tried this kludgy Adobe software, I found it to be consumer unfriendly, to say the least. You have to be a geek to use it. Further, the specs page says: Note:...

I started TeleRead in the 1990s to fight for well-stocked national digital library systems in the U.S. and elsewhere---a cause that I still love. Most librarians even years later aren’t ready for the TeleRead idea. But I can tell you what does count as an e-book issue for our well-educated readers from a variety of occupations: digital rights management. So does the Tower of eBabel, all those clashing e-book formats, some of which may fade away, leaving book-owners stranded when they move on to new hardware or when their existing devices break. What’s more, for months, on and off, the...

Became aware of Electric Literature. It's a new site devoted to short stories. It publishes original works in paper and many ebook formats, including Kindle and iPhone. You can download other formats from Smashwords. Paperbacks are $9.95 and ebooks are $4.95. They nave a pretty neat website which is worth looking at, and also have a new video animation for one of their latest stories. Here it is: Electric Literature presents Jim Shepard's "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You" (trailer) from Editors Electric Literature on Vimeo....

“Apple is working with the four largest record labels to stimulate digital sales of albums by bundling a new interactive booklet, sleeve notes and other interactive features with music downloads, in a move it hopes will change buying trends on its online iTunes store.” – FT.com, via Mike Cane. The TeleRead take: Mightn’t this and the rumored tablet (artist’s concept shown) be reasons for Amazon to change strategies and root for ePub and the death of DRM, which makes every format proprietary? I don’t want to see either Amazon or Apple bossing the e-book industry around. We need...

Note: Also see Robert Nagle’s different view of Baker. By the way, unlike Robert, I agree with Baker on the issue of the many books missing from E. This is a major flaw of e-books. TeleRead as a corrective step, anyone? – D.R. Most of Nicholson Baker’s piece in the August 3 New Yorker is on the Amazon Kindle. But the real news shows up far inside. Although a long-time skeptic toward e-text, Baker open-mindedly recognizes the merits of the iPhone and iPod Touch as e-book readers: “Forty million iPod Touches and iPhones are in circulation,” writes Baker, author of fiction and...

Nicholson Baker is one of my fave authors. The Mezzanine is one of my all time favorite works (along with U & I). He’s also written a lot of articles about the lore of libraries and card catalogs. He’s a professed Luddite – nothing wrong with that. In the current New Yorker issue, he points out the alleged flaws of the Kindle and Sony. But I get tired of the same old  irrelevant criticisms that have nothing to do with ebooks and ebook readers.  To wit: “No Amazon Kindle version of …....

The New York Times has an article looking at the controversy caused by Amazon’s recent removal and refund of an illicit copy of 1984. The removal sparked an angry backlash and a number of discussions in e-book forums across the Internet that still continue even now. On one side are people who hold that, since the book was sold by a publisher who did not have the right to do so, Amazon had every right to remove it. “Because copyright infringement was poor and lax in the offline world, it should also be that...

According to Crunchgear, Samsung has developed a 5" screen ebook reader for initial sale in Korea. It will sell for about $250 and they've cut a deal with a Korean bookstore to supply books. I wonder if it will ever make the US. ________________________________ Got this press release from Diesel: Diesel eBooks (www.diesel-ebooks.com) is the first eBookstore to take part in the in the Google Books Preview program, which is an endeavor by Google Books to facilitate discovery of a wide variety of book content on the Internet. "We are delighted that Diesel eBooks is working with us by taking advantage of...

Now this is interesting. Any of our UK readers have any further insights? From Bookseller.com: Random House UK has come under fire from literary agents for offering e-book royalty rates below other publishers. Negotiations with some literary agents have reached what was described by one as an "impasse", though RH said it was "working hard to establish an economically viable model which rewards both authors and publishers fairly". Carole Blake of Blake Friedmann said that Random House had signed no new contracts with the agency since November 2008. "I find it completely ludicrous that one branch of an international publisher...