More details are coming out about Sony’s latest entry into the e-reader market, the T1. At 168g (5.9 oz), the device is touted as the lightest e-reader ever, with a 6” touchscreen display, stylus, and built-in wi-fi access. The wi-fi will allow purchases from Sony’s on-line bookstore, and also borrowing e-books wirelessly from libraries that support it. The US cost of the device will be $149. Available in red, white, and black colors, the black version (but not the other two) will include a coupon for a free download of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone “while supplies last”....

  Javier Celaya, vice president of the Spanish Digital Magazines Association, has an editorial in Publishing Perspectives that is well worth reading.  Here's a snippet:: A dramatic shift is happening in the Spanish-language publishing sector. In the last few months, the three largest publishing houses — Random House Mondadori, Grupo Planeta and Santillana — have taken a series of decisions (i.e competitive e-book pricing offers, launch of digital first collections, greater investments in e-marketing campaigns, etc.) that, when viewed collectively, signal the end of the first stage of the digital era in Spanish-language publishing. Following an initial...

CNN has announced it is purchasing Zite, the personalized news-reading app for the iPad, for at least $20 million. I have used this app from time to time myself and found it rather useful in picking up stories that my RSS trawls miss. CNN has said it plans to run Zite as an independent business, and promote it on its website and television programs. The free app will not contain advertisements “at first”, and will be developed for other OSes though iOS will remain its primary platform. The app’s real strength might be in being able to provide demographic...

From the MPS blog: While most people were enjoying a well-deserved break, our EPUB 3 team has been busy working on a sample for the iPad.  The first cut is below.  We’ve tried to show almost all of the EPUB 3 features currently supported by the iPad which can be seen (remember a lot of EPUB 3′s magic happens at the backend) including: Multimedia: audio and video; animations; slide shows Complex and fixed layouts: print-replica layouts, structured and hyperlinked indexes, embedded fonts, support for high-design content like textbooks Non-Roman scripts: font support, vertical layouts, right-to-left text and page progression Accessibility and early learning: support for accessibility standards,...

From the press release: Paris, September the First, 2011 Digital publishers gather for: A different literary season This is a premiere in the publishing world, in France and in the world as well. At the beginning of the new literary season, a bunch of publishers and digital providers have decided to gather around an unprecedented event, through a website www.larentreelitteraire.org. A place fully dedicated to their books and news during this so special period of emulation. An event that can’t be missed At the initiative of Walrus, a digital book creative studio, digital publishers will meet around this very special place...

From Publishers Weekly: Gains at Barnes & Noble.com offset declines at B&N’s retail and trade stores in the first quarter ended July 30, resulting in a 2% increase in total revenue, to $1.42 billion. The net loss in the period declined to $56.6 million from $62.5 million in the comparable period in fiscal 2011. Comparable store sales for the retail trade outlets fell 1.6% in the quarter and were down a total of 3%, falling to $1.0 billion. B&N said that while traditional physical book sales declined during the quarter, the stores...

According to The Bookseller: E-book sales now account for over 10% of Random House Group UK sales, as worldwide earnings for parent company Random House surged despite a dip in sales. ... [CEO Gail] Rebuck called for e-book sales to be included in BookScan figures, as e-book sales now account for over 10% of RHG UK sales. She said the company now has lifetime sales of three million e-books and has 7,000 titles available digitally. In the US, Bertelsmann said digital sales now account for more than 20% of all revenues, with all Random House imprints...

If someone with a visible gold tooth approached you in a McDonald’s Parking Lot explaining that he’d bought some iPads in bulk and wants to pass the savings on to you for $300 (but is willing to take $180 if that’s all you have), what would you do? Would you turn the other direction and run as fast as you could? 22-year-old Ashley McDowell wasn’t that wise. She paid this gold-toothed stranger $180 for a sealed FedEx box that she was told contained an iPad, and didn’t open it until she got home. As you might expect, she didn’t...

When most manufacturers fire-sale price a discontinued item, the intention is to sell out of that item so they do not have to carry further inventory of it and pay for storage costs on that inventory. Which is why it’s a bit puzzling that, just a week or so after discontinuing and fire-selling the TouchPad, HP has announced it is actually making more of them to meet consumer demand. Although the $99 fire sale pricing is not guaranteed, there’s no indication of how large this run will actually be, and there will be strict per-customer limits to prevent mass...

On PaidContent, Charles Arthur brings up one of the important facets of Steve Jobs’s legacy that tends to get overshadowed by Jobs’s hardware successes. Quite apart from all the gadgets Jobs designed, he also designed a new business model for the music industry: the 99-cent song. The headline of Arthur’s article suggests that Jobs’s great success was “persuading the world to pay for content,” but the article itself seems to take the opposite tack: the world was ready to pay for content, but Jobs’s success was in persuading the content-owners to sell it digitally. Arthur explains that...

FutureBook ran a piece today by Philip Jones intended as an antidote to all the gloom and doom about the future of the publishing industry that has been going around of late. It seems that a lot of journalists have been reporting on the book’s impending demise, when in fact the book is not dying but rather evolving. One theory the piece brings up is that journalists are looking for an outlet for all the gloom they feel about the decline of the newspapers that employ them, but it also points out that the impending doom of the publishing...

CNet reports on an OLED prototype display that is stretchable by up to 45% of its length. It’s just a proof of concept, a simple light-emitting panel rather than a changeable display screen, but it shows promise in that it proves all the elements that go into such a display would work. Given further development, this could lead to the holy grail of bendable, foldable, or rollable display screens that could make for less fragile, more portable tablet and e-reader devices....