The first article in this series of musings, In the Era of eBooks, What Is a Book Worth? (I), brought a lot of comment, particularly on blogs that reprinted it. Most commenters disagreed with me, and several of the commenters compared an author’s uniqueness and a book’s worth to a painting. Collecting original paintings is one of my hobbies. I was somewhat pressed into collecting by my wife, who is a professional painter as well as a collector. (For those of you interested, some of my wife’s paintings can be seen at her website, www.carolynedlund.com, and in an earlier An Art Interlude: Portraits.) But paintings...

This 10 page (PDF) article was written Heather Christenson, Project Manager-Mass Digitization at the California Digital Library in Oakland. This is a wonderful intro/review about all things HathiTrust. From the Abstract: Research libraries have a mission to build collections that will meet the research needs of their user communities over time, to curate these collections to ensure perpetual access, and to facilitate intellectual and physical access to these collections as effectively as possible. Recent mass digitization projects as well as financial pressures and limited space to store print collections have created a new environment and new challenges for large research libraries. This paper will...

Ebooks have come a long way since 2009. Ebook readers are substantially less expensive. There are purportedly 40 million digital readers out in the wild not counting the apps that are downloaded to iThing and Android devices constantly. Amazon and Barnes and Noble are selling more digital books than paper books. The rise of self published books priced at $.99 are causing some in publishing to believe that the low priced entrants are causing downward pressure on prices. Because of piracy concerns, many publishers are locking down their books with DRM and only licensing the books to readers for a...

That's the title of an article in the Irish Publishing News today.  Here's a snippet: Adrian White, bookseller and author, discusses why he’s pricing his novel at $9.99 in digital form. Pricing my ebook at $9.99? Am I crazy? Maybe so, but here’s why:I have three novels published as ebooks. Two have been published previously by Penguin Books but the third is published exclusively as an ebook. When I came to set the prices, I took the opportunity to try out the three different price points of €2.99, $4.99 and $9.99. I’m well aware of the power of $0.99 as an attention-grabbing...

According to The Bookseller the Kindle 3G was Amazon UK's best selling product of the quarter. As to books: ... five books featured in its top 10 bestsellers, but only one was physical and the other four were e-books. Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals by Jamie Oliver was Amazon.co.uk’s third highest selling product for quarter one, with e-books The Hanging Shed by Gordon Ferris, The Basement by Stephen Leather, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and Leather's Hard Landing holding the fourth, fifth, ninth and tenth spots in the bestsellers table. ...

Publishers Weekly takes a long, interesting look at the question of library e-books and what they mean for both the publishing and library industries. To some librarians’ surprise, library e-books are proving extremely popular with patrons. "It's amazing," says Diane Eidelman, administrator for member services at the Suffolk Cooperative Library System, a consortium of over 50 libraries on New York's Long Island. "We just can't keep up with the e-book demand. We'll purchase an enormous amount of content, and within 24 hours it's all checked out." Indeed, the numbers tell the story....

I’ve touched on the possible beneficial aspects of piracy before. But here’s a column by Dan Misener on CBC News’s Arts & Entertainment section in which he draws some of the same conclusions. Misener spoke to publishing consultant Brian O’Leary, who reports that DRM-cracked pirated e-books are becoming increasingly more common—but that doesn’t necessarily mean piracy is having a bigger impact. O'Leary makes the distinction between the instances of e-book piracy (the number of pirated e-book files available for download) and the impact of e-book piracy (the actual effect on the business of publishing). For...

How expensive should it be to publish an iPad magazine app? If you said it should cost at least £7003 ($11,537) per year, then you’ll like the deal Adobe is offering with the latest version of its Digital Publishing Suite, the iPad magazine InDesign plugin. Designer Elliot Jay Stocks blogs about Adobe’s pricing scheme, which involves a £3636 platform fee plus a minimum of £3367 set toward the .16 per issue Distribution Service Fee Adobe charges.This is in addition to the cost of the software itself, which doesn’t exactly come cheap, and the 30% fee Apple charges for...

UTILITIES FOR PUTTING PHOTOS (not Screensavers) ON A KINDLE, USING THE RIGHT FORMAT (Windows utilities, though the first one can be done via a website.) As Kindle owners learn quickly, Kindle screensavers (really, screensleepers) are not officially replaceable by our own images (unless one uses a 'hack' and that can be problematical in a few ways although some find it worth doing...and re-doing with each Kindle software upgrade). I don't recommend it, and only the computer savvy should tackle it; even then, there are disclaimers by the utility makers that your warranty can be voided if a problem occurs during installation.  It's not...

From BookofJoe.  More info at the site: ...

This isn't directly ebook related, but I think it's important and a major reason (which analysts have ignored) why the iPad is doing so well.  The title, above, is from an article in ReadWriteWeb by Sarah Perez: There's an interesting trend happening in mobile these days. Companies - major companies like Samsung, Motorola, Kyocera, RIM and Microsoft - are launching unfinished, unpolished products and then asking us, the consumers, to buy them based on their "potential." Despite the fact that the new BlackBerry tablet computer has no email client or wide selection of apps, or that Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 can't...

Even though this is an e-book blog, from time to time I poke my nose over into the world of computer gaming to point out some parallels. You could say that Internet game distribution is a sort of first cousin of the e-book, as they share a lot of commonalities. They’re both about telling stories—in books, you read the stories, but in games you experience them. More importantly, both started out as strictly physical means of media distribution—dead trees for books, dead dinosaur discs for games—but have moved into the digital forum where they’re more vulnerable to bit-copying...