CNET's Ina Fried takes a look at Blio. In short, Blio has reached the market, but I'm not sure that the market opportunity it outlined still exists. On the positive side, the company has managed to land a new partner in the intervening months--PC maker Toshiba, which plans to use Blio as the basis to turn its PCs into e-reading devices. I've been playing around with the Windows version of Blio for the past few days. And while it does a nice job with color books that wouldn't look great on my Kindle, I'm not sure it has a clear...

Kobo with BBM from Kobo on Vimeo....

Speaking of Joe Konrath, he made a blog post a few days ago stating that as of 9/21/10, his overall e-book sales had topped the 100,000 mark. He is selling over 7,000 e-books per month via Amazon alone, and Amazon represents almost 3/4 of his total e-book sales. He also notes that the poorest-performing e-books are the ones sold through Hyperion, the publisher who still controls the first six books in his Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels mystery series. Averaging out the sales, he estimates he has earned $34 per month per title from these books, compared to the...

The last few months have seen the importance of backlist e-book titles grow significantly, most notably with Philip Wylie’s abortive Amazon publishing deal that caused a 15-minute uproar in the publishing industry. Yesterday, I posted a piece about backlist e-publisher E-Reads, and in an hour I’ve got another piece about Joe Konrath’s backlist titles scheduled. But we may not have seen anything yet. A post in E-Reads’s blog from Sunday warns about a “copyright asteroid hurtling toward earth”—the 35-year copyright termination clause embedded in 1978’s copyright law. Untouched by the Sonny Bono copyright term extension, this clause gives...

Self-publishing author Joe Konrath has interviewed David Morrell, the author of First Blood and the novelization of its film sequel Rambo, about Morrell’s recent decision to offer nine backlist titles (including First Blood) and one never-before-published novel exclusively as Amazon Kindle e-books. Morrell notes that a lot of publishers these days are interested in committing to backlist title publications mainly so that they can lock up the e-book rights. Publishing through Amazon let him keep the rights while also taking advantage of Amazon’s marketing muscle. Konrath also asked Morrell about the decision to include color photographs in...

From a Ghent University Library Announcement: Ghent University Library today became the first in Europe to contribute public domain works scanned by Google to Europeana, Europe’s culture heritage. Readers using Europeana can now enjoy more than 30 million newly-added pages of historical, scientific, anthropological and literary works, from over 100,000 volumes, spanning four centuries, in French, Dutch, German and other languages. Joke Schauvliege, Flemish Minister of Environment, Nature and Culture and chair of the European Council of Environment is pleased that the unique and large collection of Ghent University leads the way....

From the press release: San Diego based toy company DANO2 TM has started developing educational apps for the iPad that take advantage of the device’s interactive touchscreen. Their first game, Little Sky Writers TM, teaches kids the correct way to write the letters of the alphabet by having them guide a small airplane through a series of flight paths with their finger. As the game is played, Roger the control tower (voiced by comedian and NickelodeonTM star, Stephen Kramer Glickman) provides amusing and educational commentary. The game is so intuitive and fun that it reaches children long before a...

From the press release (blockquotes omitted): Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) today introduced the beta version of “Kindle for the Web,” making it even easier for customers to discover new books and authors by sampling Kindle books directly through web browsers—no installation or downloading required. Amazon is also inviting bloggers and website owners who are participants in the Amazon Associates Program to be part of Kindle for the Web by embedding samples of Kindle books on their websites. These website owners will earn referral fees from Amazon when customers complete book purchases using the links on their websites. More information...

We’ve previously mentioned startup Kno’s plans to create a dual 14”-screened tablet device for viewing college textbooks in their original page size. However, now Kno has also announced plans for a less-expensive single-screened 14” slate. Like the double-screened model, the Kno tablet will be powered by a nVidia Tegra processor. It will have a touchscreen and a stylus for notetaking. Both the dual- and single-screen tablets are expected to ship by the end of the year. Kno has not announced pricing, save to say that the tablet will be “absolutely cheaper than the dual screen version,” and the...

It's called "Jisui", and it means "cooking your own meals." As the digital age grows more and more complicated, in terms of copyright law and copyright theft, some Japanese companies are "cooking their own meals" in a way that some book publishers can't quite digest. A few enterprising firms are setting up shop to digitize selected paper books into e-books for individual customers. But lawyers for the Japan Book Publishers Association (JBPA) say the practice violates Japanese Copyright Law. Oops.This is how it happens, according to a recent report in the Japanese-langauge Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. The firms remove the spines...

On his blog, Aaron Pressman comments on a recent post by John Gruber comparing the Kindle to an iPod. Pressman wrote a Businessweek blog post several years ago predicting that “the Kindle would be the iPod of books.” Gruber specifically compares the Kindle to the iPod Nano, a comparison with which Pressman heartily agrees: To me, both devices share some of the same strengths and weaknesses. Most notably, both have an excellent focus on doing one thing perfectly (music playing/reading) while doing other things poorly or not at all. There’s also the attractively low...

In a blog post on its own website, backlist e-publisher E-Reads points out that it is now paying advances for e-book rights (and actually has been for several months). It notes that in a Publishers Weekly article looking at e-book publisher royalties, of all the publishers surveyed only E-Reads was paying advances. The PW article notes that E-Reads founder Richard Curtis found a lot of agents were reluctant to offer rights to backlist titles without any money offered up front—it simply wasn’t a publishing model they were familiar with. Most of Curtis’s advances are fairly small, just in the...