Barnes & Noble is offering a coupon code that knocks $50 off the price of the Nook Color on eBay. It’s not clear how long this sale is going to last, but that discount makes a really budget-friendly full-featured Android tablet (with a very little hacking required) even better. Once you’ve Autonooted it, you can put the Kindle Reader Android app on it for crowning irony. Forget the cheap Chinese crackerjack-box tablets with resistive screens powered by hamster wheels—a sub-$200 full-featured Android tablet is here. And with the moves Apple is making toward its e-book competitors, this might be...

Back in November, I mentioned that Salon Magazine was seeking a buy-out or merger. The magazine was subsequently involved in talks with Michael Wolff of Newser.com, but the New York Times’s DealBook section reports that the talks have collapsed in the wake of the Huffington Post sale. Apparently the high $315 million selling price of the Post caused Salon’s board members to wonder whether they were pricing the magazine too low. Salon Magazine was one of the first magazines to recognize the potential of e-reading, strongly influencing me to take my first step into e-reading technology with the purchase...

Business Insider has a story about a 26-year-old writer who self-publishes on Amazon’s store and makes “millions”. Amanda Hocking is reportedly the best-selling independent author on Amazon (we mentioned her briefly in January and a commenter brought her up earlier this month). She reportedly sells 100,000 e-books per month at prices of $.99 to $2.99, and keeps 70% of the take. Previously one of the best selling Kindle writers was J.A. Konrath, but it was assumed he was popular because he previously had a publishing deal and so already had notoriety. That's not the case with...

When I finished the infographic and showed it to my wife, she said: “Forty years? No way. Four, maybe.” “Four, maybe” – it’s what most people think. Most people are still convinced that e-books are a fad. That’s why I was looking for a convenient, all-in-one way to challenge this myth. I hope it works. Every year shows not only the information about e-books, but also other facts and achievements. This builds a good, thought-provoking time reference. Share this infographic if you think it deserves it. I wanted to put it on the web before this year’s edition of Read an E-Book...

Got the following From Rita Toews, founder of Read and E-Book Week: As Read an E-Book Week draws nearer the list of participants grows. This year we have had great interest from Polish sites, thanks in part to an enthusiastic Teleread contributor, Piotr Kowalczyk. An Italian book publisher has queried, and a magazine in Milan did a piece about the week. Win a Nook! That's right, we'll be giving away a Nook during Read an E-Book Week. Visit the website for more details. Free content from this year’s participants includes a children's e-book from Syvlan Dell...

Here is the press release I received: “Random House, Inc. is adopting the agency model for e-book sales in the United States effective March 1, 2011. Going forward, Random House will set consumer prices for the e-books we publish, and we will provide retailers with a commission for each sale. There are no changes to our terms of sale for physical books. “The agency model guarantees a higher margin for retailers than did our previous sales terms. We are making this change both as an investment in the successful digital transition of our existing partners and in order to give us the...

From Information Today: Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy, the well-known and respected librarian bloggers who began ResourceShelf a decade ago and DocuTicker 2 years later, have announced that they are no longer affiliated with those sites. The two say it was time to move on and have more autonomy. So, they have started two new sites that will continue to scour the internet for interesting resources. INFOdocket is their new home for new or newly discovered web resources; reference material they find interesting (lists, rankings, infographics, and factbooks, and other materials); web search tips;...

Bloomsbury has released a financial report stating it anticipates 2011 to be the “year of the e-book,” The Bookseller reports. Currently its e-book sales come in at just less than 10% of trade print sales. CEO Nigel Newton said that e-books were experiencing “extraordinary” growth. Bloomsbury released 1,800 e-books in 2010. and saw sales increase considerably—Newton said that e-book owners were buying more e-books now than they had bought print books before they owned an e-reader. (Not too surprising; e-books are often less expensive than print now, so people can afford to buy more of them.) ...

From LISNews: Librarian News: www.BoycottHarperCollins.com New York, NY -- Library users, librarians, and libraries have begun to boycott publisher HarperCollins over changes to the terms of service that would limit the ability of library users to borrow ebooks from libraries. A new website, BoycottHarperCollins.com, is helping to organize their efforts to get HarperCollins to return to the previous terms of service. On February 24, Steve Potash, the Chief Executive Officer of OverDrive, sent an email to the company's customers -- primarily US libraries -- announcing that some of the ebooks they get from OverDrive would be disabled after they had circulated 26 times. Soon after, librarians learned that it was HarperCollins, a...

My first book, Artifacts, was published in 2003. I've spent the intervening years trying to figure out how books get sold. I've learned some things. Some things remain a mystery. I've learned that being on TV sells books. My marketing plan for the first three books included a lot of promotional travel, and I did my best to leverage those travel dollars by getting media coverage whenever I could. I turned out to be pretty good at that, getting TV interviews in Top 100 markets like Birmingham and radio...

On Galleycat, Jason Boog links to today’s edition (MP3) of his ten-minute podcast, the Morning Media Menu, in which he talks with the founder of a new social collaborative writing site called Neovella. Michael Siedlecki founded Neovella after noticing in college that his generation doing much of its reading on-line, and for the most part not actually reading books but instead reading social network stories about their friends. Siedlecki wanted to bring together the social aspects of social networking and collaborative aspects of writing together, so created Neovella in the hope of getting people writing stories together. The site...

In 1936, in the movie Poppy, W.C. Fields tells his daughter, “If we should ever separate, my little plum, I want to give you just one bit of fatherly advice: Never give a sucker an even break!” It appears that Apple has adopted it as its motto for the 21st century, at least in regards to ebooks and publishers. I’ve got to give credit where credit is due, and Apple deserves credit for great design. Apple’s approach is like wrapping a Volkswagen Beetle in a Lamborghini shell and proclaiming the new car to be a $100,000...