Got an email from Neil Levin about his new site - EverPub. It is initially aimed at indie and self-publishers, it could be applicable to major publishers as well. For an initial fee of $295 for two years, the author gets an optimized book/author website page that brings together all the sales, marketing and social media information about his book. There is also an experts forum which contains postings by recognized experts in the publishing field. More and more tools are being developed for self-publishing and this looks like one that might be useful to those who are not technically...

Updates: See end of story. Though Rupert Murdoch’s decision to move newspaper content behind a paywall is the most publicized decision of its kind, it is not the only one. In an Op Ed in British paper The Guardian, journalism professor Tim Luckhurst (left) writes that “Johnston Press, Britain's most prolific newspaper publisher with 286 titles, will place the online content of six of its local titles behind paywalls.” “Shoddy, Propagandist Ranting” Luckhurst, to put it mildly, looks unfavorably on Internet journalism. He thinks that putting news content free on-line was a mistake brought...

TechCrunch is reporting that their highly anticipated Crunchpad will not be released. Evidently a business dispute between the various partners caused development and sale to be stopped and it looks as if a number of lawsuits will be filed. There is too much detail to go into here, and the TechCrunch post is certainly interesting reading, so I would suggest you go over there and check it out. It's a shame as it looked like a great concept. On the other hand it will save me some money....

According to an article in eSchool News, academics have a "wait and see" attitude towards the Google Book Settlement. They feel that Google Book Search won't be of much use to undergraduate studies, especially during the first two years of college. The corpus of book will be primarily of use to researchers. They also express disappointment that foreign books have been removed from the settlement, and won't set policies for campus libraries until all the legal challenges are over. One library head said that this resource will only be a book if Google can keep down and cost...

B&N’s Nook and Sony’s new wireless e-reader have yet to make it to the stores. But guess what is available, got a recent software upgrade and probably would be doing well anyway because of the number of books available for it and the growth of e-books in general. Surprise of surprise, Amazon says this month has been the best one ever for Kindle sales. Amid the hype, Amazon didn’t share a trifling little detail, the actual unit sales numbers, but it did say the K-machine is “the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon.”...

Earlier this month, when I called into the Barnes & Noble here in Springfield and when I stepped into one in the St. Louis metro area to check, I had been told that there should be Nooks in the Barnes & Noble stores by the end of the month, and I was hoping to get my hands on one to investigate. However, it appears that will not be the case after all. Reuters reports that Barnes & Noble is delaying shipments of the Nook to stores in order to fill more holiday pre-orders. "We expect to have them in our highest-volume...

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette quotes an Amazon spokesperson as saying: “For every 100 books we sell in physical, we sell 48 Kindle books,” said Cinthia Portugal, a spokeswoman for Amazon.com. “This is up from 35 books for every 100 in May. Our customers tell us they read more with Kindle because they never have to worry about running out of books." ________________ How much does Overdrive cost?  Well for one library it costs $21,000 a year, in addition to a $3,500 monthly fee. In addition the library spends $1,500 per month to buy additional titles, which are less expensive then the hard...

The On the Media public radio show looks this week at the “past, present and future of books”---a full update of an earlier show from a year ago. Among the points made: “too many books, not enough profits.” Half a million books, by one estimate, are appearing on the U.S. annually. Fueled by new technology such as the Espresso Book Machine, the self-publishing revolution will help multiply the current number of books. Same for initiatives such as Google’s digitization drive. So if you’re an overwhelmed reader-shopper, don’t expect relief---just the opposite. The good news is that e-books...

The Rotunda Founders Early Access project now makes available thounsand of documents from such figures as James Madison, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others. All documents have undergone at least one initial proofreading. These documents are available here at no cost to the public. Thanks to Resource Shelf for the link. There is an article about the Project you can read here....

Lisa Daly of the Threepress Consulting blog has updated her list of DRM-free publishers. She includes publishers of technology, and fiction in three categories, as well as DRM-free ebook stores. This list now shows which publishers make books available in Epub format....

Could Google’s book-digitization drive be up against a Great Wall of copyright in China---a rather porous one through which local rivals can easily slip? The Chinese say Google didn’t seek proper authorization. Still, isn’t it interesting that just after Google ran up against opposition to scanning some 18,000 books, a Chinese company is about to crank up its own digitization efforts with the largest digital library in the country? Has Google tried to run roughshod over local laws---I won’t reach a conclusion one way or another---or are the Chinese playing dirty? Here are more details on the...

ScrollMotion will be releasing 30 titles in their new Iceberg Reader Kids formats. The new reader will include image exploration, audio book recording and interactive controls. All the books will be separate apps and will be activities for the kids, as well as books. It certainly looks as if the new reader will have a number of cutting edge features, including the ability for parents to record themselves reading the book to their children. For full details see this Publishers Weekly story here....