I just received the following email from Laura McDonald of Girlebooks about Amazon blocking one of her public domain books.  It seems to me to be another example of Amazon inexperience in the ebook area and a case of making a foolish marketing decision without thinking the facts through.  The correspondence is below and it has been reprinted with Laura’s permission. Hi Paul, I've recently encountered an interesting situation when selling my ebooks through the Amazon Kindle Store. I thought you might find it interesting too. The ebooks I sell are 99% public domain....

Is this a lot or a little?  According to Publishing Perspectives nobody really knows: The GfK (Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung), a market research and consumer insight agency, recently announced that 65,000 e-books were sold in Germany in the first half of 2009. Boersenblatt editor Michael Roesler-Graichen analyzes the significance of this figure, stating that most industry insiders are agnostic as to whether this should be seen as a success or a failure.  The Google translation of the article is after the break. The first GfK statistics of e-books for sale in the retail market has provoked a zweispältiges echo. 65,000 e-books in the...

One of my favorite sites on the web,  bookofjoe, has a series of pictures of beautiful libraries that will just take  your breath away.  Go over and take a look.  I’d happily read my Kindle in any of them.  The one pictured here is the Suzzallo Librare in Seattle, Washington, USA....

Baen author Dave Freer and his family are emigrating from South Africa to Australia. However, they have run into a slight problem: shifts in the exchange rate have decimated the funds they had budgeted for paying for the necessary quarantine of their pets. So Freer is putting out the Storyteller’s Bowl (which TeleRead previously discussed here), and serializing his latest novel, Save the Dragons, in return for donations. He has posted the first chapter free. For each $400 he receives in donations, he will post a new chapter, until all 25 chapters + epilogue have been posted. ...

From a Europa press release.  For an earlier article on the copyright disagreements in the European Commission going on in see our article linked here. 4.6 million digitised books, maps, photographs, film clips and newspapers can now be accessed by internet users on Europeana, Europe's multilingual digital library ( www.europeana.eu ). The collection of Europeana has more than doubled since it was launched in November 2008 ( IP/08/1747 ). Today the European Commission, in a policy document declared as its target to bring the number of digitised objects to 10 million by 2010. The Commission also opened a public debate...

So says an article in the Financial Times (registration required). Hardback books could be killed off if Amazon’s e-books and Google’s digital library force publishers to slash prices, Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette, has warned. Mr Nourry said unilateral pricing by Google, Amazon and other e-book retailers such as Barnes & Noble could destroy publishers’ profits. He said publishers were “very hostile” to Amazon’s pricing strategy – over which the online retailer failed to consult publishers – to charge $9.99 for all its e-books in the US. He also pointed to plans by Google to put millions of out-of-copyright...

Will children fare better as readers if they can pick their own books?  Yes, say Nancie Atwell and some other reading gurus. The New York Times has the details. The key, as I see it as an ex-child, is balance---between the compulsory assignments and the joy-of-it books that can build the reading habit. A little Jules Verne to go along with Jane Austen, please. I know: Austen books may be more “literary.” But Verne himself excels as a story-teller. Good teachers can introduce students to both kinds of writing and try to point out the difference. Some sprawling major literary classics---masterpieces by...

Links of interest this morning: Lost or stolen Kindle? Amazon says you’re out of luck---from Ars Technica. When the Apple tablet comes out, are you in?---from CNET News. Tablets computers are coming soon, says Nvidia---from the New York Times. Google’s plan for world’s  biggest library: Philanthropy or act of piracy---from the Guardian. All a cub reporter needs is a scoop and an iPhone---from the New York Times. OK, the hot one here is the Kindle item. What...

What are e-book buyers thinking when they shop? I can’t speak for all buyers, but if you want to know why I buy or don’t buy from various sites---well, here’s the lowdown. No ESP needed. I hope this is useful to retailers and aspiring self-publishers of e-books, although most of the sites named here don’t accept titles from the latter group. Self-publishers face a daunting learning curve these days. So many stores, so many formats, what to do? Many novices begin with Amazon---Amazon makes it easy, and enjoys a large market share. But the company’s Kindle...

The recent post about book scanners that can process 3,000 pages per minute reminded me (and at least one other person) of the Vernor Vinge novel Rainbows End. Since it had been a while since I had read that novel, I decided to take another look. For a while, the novel was posted free in its entirety on Vernor Vinge’s website. It has since been taken down; however, the Internet Archive still has it available in its entirety in the Wayback Machine’s archive of the page. I’m actually surprised nobody reviewed it here back when it was newly published, but I...

The $199 Sony Pocket Edition, aka the PRS-300 e-reader, gets a big knock from Mike Cane, who briefly tested one at a New York store. From the page-changing speed to the “nauseating, vulgar pink” of the unit he tried, Mike wasn’t happy, at least not for the most part. Sampled a PRS-300 yourself---whatever the color? Share your thoughts. No, the photo to the left isn’t of the reader that Mike tested and hated. Related: Mike’s observations on borrowing e-books from the New York Public Library, which, like many, uses the OverDrive service. Agree or...

Reminder: These are Court’s personal opinions. Furlong fans are welcome to speak up in the comments area. – D.R. Today’s entry on the future of literature comes from Nicola Furlong, self-identified “shameless self-promoter” and Canadian writer of mysteries. Furlong has produced a multimedia novel entitled Unnatural States.  It is certainly multimedia.  Whether it is a novel is debatable.  More on that later.  Navigating the simple site, you are immediately confronted with a “Trailer / Intro”, which features an buzzcut older woman in sunglasses performing YouTube-esque antics in lieu of of a book jacket.  It had me...