Publishers who insisted on agency pricing are starting to be hoist by their own petards—but unfortunately, authors and agents are being hoisted right up there with them. This is the message that a Wall Street Journal article Paul mentioned a few days ago (from another publication) brings us, and it’s one worthy of revisiting. As most of the comments on Paul’s post point out, this article has a number of problems—most notably that literary fiction as a genre has already been in trouble for some time now, and the lower per-unit income from e-books may just be another...

Kobo has just announced a WiFi ereader for $139. This makes the current crop of Sony readers look more and more "fringe". Clearly, Amazon is setting the pace in the hardware/price game and the rest of the world, like Kobo, is going to follow. From the press release: Kobo, a global eReading service, today announced the new Kobo Wireless eReader, the newest addition to the Kobo family. The new Kobo Wireless eReader adds WiFi connectivity, upgraded hardware with faster performance, longer battery life, and a sharper eInk screen. ... The Kobo Wireless eReader will be available for $139.99 USD...

I mentioned earlier this month that On Demand Books’s COO said it was poised to expand placement of its Espresso Book Machines to more locations. Now we see how: Engadget reports that Xerox is starting to get behind the Espresso Book Machine in a major way, planning to resell, lease, and service the devices. It seems like a match made in heaven, given that two Xerox printers plus some automation is all an EBM really is. Xerox’s press release reports that Espresso is going to have two booths at Graph Expo 2010 in Chicago October 3-6, and that the...

An important article from the Library Journal for anyone interested in people with disabilities. Here's a snippet: If digital literacy is exploding, the visually disabled are taking the shrapnel. I would wager that most librarians consider ourselves committed to accessibility and make individual and organizational efforts to comply with (and often exceed) the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in our buildings and the Rehabilitation Act Section 508 standards on our websites. We may not, however, have had the sobering experience of trying to access an ebook or e-journal using screen-reading software or other assistive technology. Despite our best intentions,...

From the NLM Announcement: The National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health, has launched a new digital repository, Digital Collections, at http://collections.nlm.nih.gov. This new resource is complementary to the PubMed Central digital archive of electronic journal articles (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/). The repository allows rich searching, browsing and retrieval of monographs and films from NLM's History of Medicine Division. Additional content and other format types will be added over time. Users can perform full-text and keyword searching within each collection or across the entire repository. [Clip] Accessing...

  We posted about the BISG meeting on ResourceShelf last week. Today, presentations from the meeting became available on Slideshare. The first presentation from Kelly Gallagher from Bowker is loaded with e-book/e-reader statistics. The fourth presentation by David Jolliffe from Pearson about educational publishing might be of special interest. Access All of the Presentations on Slideshare Via Resource Shelf  ...

Future of Libraries 2010 The Consumer and Library E-book Markets: Implications and Challenges for Libraries Paul Sims, Ann Awakuni, and Henry Bankhead Paul Sims began by saying that he characterizes himself as a doomsayer. He believes that eBooks have the potential to disrupt our ability to provide access to collections. He quoted the ALA Core Value about Access: “All information resources that are provided directly or indirectly by the library, regardless of technology, format, or methods of delivery, should be readily, equally, and equitably accessible to all library users.” eBooks are preventing us from meeting this core value. Technology is changing user expectations....

From MIT's Technology Review: Tech pundits recently moved up the date for the death of the book, to sometime around 2015, inspired largely by the rapid adoption of the iPad and the success of Amazon's Kindle e-reader. But in their rush to christen a new era of media consumption, have the pundits overreached? I'm calling the peak of inflated expectations now. Get ready for the next phase of the hype cycle - the trough of disillusionment. The signs of a hype bubble are all around us. Mostly in the form of irrational exuberance. Thanks to Marilynn Byerly for the link....

The following is from Sony's press release. Unfortunately, it seems that Sony hasn't gone far enough. I see nothing mentioned about providing ereaders to cash-strapped libraries, or any other form of Sony Reader loan program. If Sony expects all the libraries' customers to have their own readers I think they sadly mistaken. Reaffirming its commitment to work with libraries in expanding their eBook collections and digital reading programs, Sony today announced the inaugural list of 30 participating libraries in the Reader Library Program. The participating libraries, from across 17 states, include the Brooklyn Public Library,...

From the site: Letters of Note is a blog-based archive of fascinating correspondence, complete with scans and transcripts of the original missives. For a little more background, I suggest reading this interview. I have a seemingly endless supply of correspondence to plough through, but your input is always welcome. Get in touch via shaun@lettersofnote.com. If you wish to send images, please forward high quality versions where possible, don't attempt to compress them to the point of illegibility and don't crop them to death. If you happen to have an original you wish to post to me using regular mail, let me know...

From the Archives website (bold added): Internet Archive just scanned its millionth book. A milestone for Internet Archive. yay! A lot of great work by a lot of great people. ...

From the Threepress Consulting blog: Apple’s iBookstore requirement that all files in the .epub must be listed in the OPF manifest has caused a lot of headaches for content producers. There’s no such requirement in the actual EPUB 2.0 specification, and therefore no test for this condition has been in epubcheck. However, the vast majority of cases where this occurs are unwanted accidents: publishers including backup files, unused images, or operating system cruft like “.DS_Store.” It’s surprisingly easy to generate very large .epub files due to multiple backups, so while it’s not a formal requirement of...