It appears the feud is over, with the publisher winning this time. Turns out Amazon’s pulling Macmillan titles was just a token gesture. Amazon has posted the following announcement to its Kindle Community forum: Dear Customers: Macmillan, one of the "big six" publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases. We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement...

Found via Wired: NASA has added a free e-book section to its website, and posted its first title—a history of the X-15 rocket plane test program which was an important part of space research in the 1960s. The book is available in DRM-free “Kindle” and “Sony Reader” formats—though mousing over the links reveals they are really MobiPocket .PRC and PDF formats respectively—and NASA promises a Nook (eReader?) version soon. The .PRC version opens just fine in the MobiPocket Reader desktop app on my PC, but it may be a little much for handheld Mobi-compatible readers to...

Editor's Note: this is reprinted, with permission, from Scriviner's Error blog of C. E. Petit. As a lawyer I'll just say that I agree with this conclusions. Numbers in brackets refer to footnotes at the end of the article. PB Depending on how one counts, this is either the second or third major AmazonFail arising from egotistical — and ultimately stupid and self-defeating — mass delistings of material by Amazon. A pox on all their houses; although Amazon bears the most blame for this, Macmillan is hardly blame-free. Let's get the Macmillan problem out of the way first, because understanding...

Earlier I complained of the botch that Amazon had made of the listings for The Solomon Scandals---news of interest to others with small press books in E or P. Just how helpful is it when the most conspicuous listing in the Amazon catalog says your novel isn’t available in the United States? Well, I’m delighted to report that Amazon not only has zapped the DRMed version of Scandals at my request, but also has deleted the listing for this phantom edition. Big thanks to Sarah B and her team. She reports that the delay in the removal of...

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has an overview article on Epub - what it is, how to publish in it, what it's problems are. The short article, written by Steven Sande, is a good overview and has some hints for Mac people that are hard to find elsewhere. ...

The Times of India is reporting that 21 volumes of The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi will be digitized. These volumes are part of the 100 volumes printed by Navjivan Publications, but these have fallen out of print and are now unavailable, unlike the rest of the collection. The works comprise 50,000 pages and it will take 3 years to complete the work. Eventually all the remaining volumes will be digitized as well. (via Resource Shelf)...

The National Library of Medicine, an arm of the National Institutes of Health, has received a grant to digitize items from its historical medical collections. Digital versions of thousands of medical materials will be done, some of the items dating back to the 17th century. The 30,000 digitized volumes will be made publicly available and there are plans to allow web access to the collection. For more info see this Resource Shelf article....

No Shelf Required has a "lovely conversation" with author Rita Toews who is the founder of Read an Ebook Week. Sue Polanka runs a wonderful site and you should go and check it out....

The Canadian Writers Against Google Settlement (CWAG) has filed a series of objections to the proposed Revised Settlement. I found two of them especially interesting. You can find their full filing here. ... With respect to the problem of licensing the work of unlocatable copyright holders, we prefer the existing Canadian approach to a Google-run monopoly. An oft-repeated claim about the Amended Settlement is that it will allow the legal dissemination of copyrighted material for which an author cannot be found. The dissemination of these “orphan works” is indeed an important issue. However, Canadian copyright law already contains...

CEO John Sargent of Macmillan has posted an open letter to Macmillan authors, illustrators, and literary agents giving Macmillan’s side of the dispute with Amazon. He talks about wanting to create “a level playing field” on which all device manufacturers can compete. He provides the details of what Macmillan wants to accomplish: Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will...

For those of you following the iPad release, Gizmodo just published a roundup of tablets (they call them slates) with specs and a comparison chart. Included are the iPad, HP Slate, JooJoo Aotion Ink Adam, Dell Mini 5, Archos 7 Android, Lenovo U1 and Archos 9. From the website: A quick word about "slates" vs. "tablets": These are tablets, and it's a word we prefer. The sad fact is, it's overused. There's no way to say "tablet" without including every godawful stylus-based convertible laptop built since 2002. (Thank you, Bill Gates!) And even the new touchscreen tablets come in...

SB Sarah is reporting that AllRomanceeBooks and OmniLit are offering 50% off on every title in their stores. The sale ends at 11:59 PM Mountain Standard Time. To get the discount you must enter the code SBTBARe1. SmartBitches says that they don't get a commission on the sales....