Wired’s satirist Lore Sjöberg applies his trademark sarcasm to Apple’s in-app subscription requirement and the resulting uproar. Many publishers reacted to the announcement by saying the terms would force them out of the digital-content business and back into print publishing, which is extremely profitable and will never become obsolete. He explains that Apple is able to get away with this because its competition is essentially ridiculous, and compares Steve Jobs to an ancient god of wealth and the underworld. Definitely hilarious....

A promotional flyer is now available for those who'd like to help support Read an E-Book Week.  The flyer, a letter-sized JPEG that reads well in color or B/W, can be downloaded and either emailed to others, or printed out and posted at your favorite book-reading hangout... a library, a Starbucks, a bookstore, a bistro, anyplace with a bulletin board (this is a non-profit cause... some BBs don't allow commercial material). The flyer can be seen in full size, and downloaded, from my website.  (And while you're there, consider entering the contest for an E-Ink watch!)...

TeleRead's founder, David Rothman, has an article on today's front page of the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The article,  "It's Time for a National Digital-Library System," is familiar to most TeleRead visitors, describing his concept of a national digital library, as well as the support his idea has received from popular pundits: (William F.) Buckley loved my proposal ("inspiring") and came out in the 1990s with two syndicated columns backing the vision. As a harpsichord-playing Yalie famous for political and cultural conservatism and cherishing archaic words, Buckley was hardly a populist in most respects. But he fervently...

I know this is about a month old, but I only found it just now and the subject matter is really rather timeless. In January, the Technologizer had a great article looking at 15 inventions or ideas, mostly media-related, that were decades ahead of their time. The title of the piece, “Mr. Edison’s Kindle,” refers to Edison’s 1911 idea that books might one day be printed on hyper-thin, extremely durable sheets of nickel rather than paper. Today, of course, we have e-books that weigh even less per page. Other ideas include the 1928 “Telenewspaper and Electric Writer”...

eBookNewser reports based on a paywalled story on Nikkei that the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan has announced it will adopt EPUB 3 as its standard format. Expected to be finalized in May, EPUB version 3 will include support for displaying vertical text, which is commonly used in Japanese-language books. This will allow Japanese books to be read on overseas e-reader devices. (Though given the territorial restrictions that currently plague e-book sales, it’s anyone’s guess just how many overseas readers this will actually benefit.) The EBPAJ is expected to finalize its specification by the end of March. (We...

A completely subjective selection of the last week's posts. How you can sell your ebooks via mobile phones, by Piotr Kowalczyk How Apple may inadvertently boost ebook linking, by Eric Hellman Romance Bookstores on the map, by Sarah Wendell Fansubs and e-books: When pirates outcompete on quality, by Chris Meadows 100 French publishers say “Non” to Adobe DRM Creating Le Bé – a digital adaptation of a 16th century typeface Margin notes in ebooks, by Joe Wikert Authors, readers and discoverability in the new age of publishing, by Jane Litte Margaret Atwood’s TOC Keynote now live The Kindle, Amazon pricing policies and comics ...

The Borders post-mortems continue. Here’s a couple more of them that are particularly worthy of note. First, on Quora, another Borders ex-exec sets down his thoughts. Mark Evans, former Director of Merchandise Planning & Analysis, has a six-point analysis of why the store failed. Though he goes into detail for each one, his list comes down to the following reasons: Failure to adequately address the Internet sales channel and the subsequent e-book market. Poor real estate strategy. Over-investment in music. Over-reliance on assortment size to compete...

CNet picks up on another point brought up Barnes & Noble’s third quarter earnings report that I mentioned the other day. According to this report, the Nook now accounts for a 25% share of the e-book market in the US. Barnes & Noble did not cite any figures, so it is unclear whether it is counting by revenue or number of titles sold. But if the report can be taken at face value, Barnes & Noble is not in as much danger of becoming an e-book also-ran as some have feared in the past. 25% is a respectable...

Fortune reports Merril Lynch analysts believe that Apple’s new in-app purchase policy could cost Amazon $80 to $160 million per year in lost revenue from Kindle sales. However, on his blog “@chuckdude,” Chuck Toporek writes about why he thinks Amazon isn’t worried over the matter of Apple’s in-app purchasing fee changes. He notes that Amazon has been working on Kindle for the Web, which will soon bring the full text of Kindle e-books to web browsers. The point I’m trying to make here is that the reason we haven’t heard Jeff Bezos screaming about this recent...

Engadget reports that the Android Market has added a section for e-books, with music and movies apparently soon to come. Upon further research, the books turn out to be Google’s cloud-stored Google Books. The prices are, of course, set to agency standards and so not really anything to write home about. It’s not clear that iBooks is any great danger here, but it’s good to see that Android users have another way to buy titles if they want it. And since these books are readable cross-platform, perhaps it might be more apt to compare them to Amazon or Barnes...

A public-domain score site founded by a conservatory-turned-law student continues to be controversial in classical music circles, the New York Times reports. Much as Project Gutenberg does for books, the International Music Score Library Project makes scores written by classical composers that have long since passed into the public domain available for free download and inexpensive printing via a musician who runs a print-on-demand service. After a copyright challenge from European publisher Universal Edition in 2007, founder Edward Guo took the site down until it could exhaustively be checked for copyright violations. It returned owned by a company to...

From the Bookseller's FutureBook, by Sam Missingham: I'm delighted to say that we have had 93 entries to our first Digital Innovation Awards. Publishers, booksellers, authors and developers from UK, USA, Canada, France, Australia and Holland are all represented. Major players, niche companies and start-ups will all be competing for our first FutureBook awards. The entries reflect how positively the industry is responding to the potential of digital. Our judges are going to have a tough job. Judging day will be on 8th March (our judges are members of our advisory board) and the winners will be announced on the 17th March at...