Form the news release: The latest update for Kobo iOS Application is now ready for you to download and enjoy. 4.5.2 Kobo application update for your iPad, iPhone and iPod contains new and exciting features, as well as improvements to overall performance of the application. New features and improvements include: • Faces and Places Reading Life Feature: Kobo iOS app users gain access to exclusive and enhanced book content, and experience unique and entertaining way of sharing their reading progress with friends. • Multitasking Feature: While downloading books to your Kobo library, you can read your books, surf the net...

Kindle devices are available in over 170 countries, but it doesn’t mean users from those countries can easily find publications in their own language. Only Germany is in a good situation, where Kindle Store was launched this spring. Two new stores, localized in Italy and Spain, are on the way. But how to find non-English titles at the biggest Kindle Store, available at the main site, Amazon.com, from where most users buy Kindle devices? There are a couple of ways to do it. However, as Amazon is not providing an option to search by language, we...

Seemingly relegated to the also-ran position by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and possibly even Kobo, Sony is still not giving up the e-reader fight just yet. Engadget reports on finding a new wi-fi-equipped Sony PRS-T1 e-reader for sale on a Dutch webpage. The device hews to the standard black, angular Sony style, and Engadget speculates that it might be Android-powered just based on what its control buttons look like. The device costs €165 (equivalent to $240 US) on that website, and will probably be a bit cheaper when and if it’s introduced here—but can it be cheap...

Mike Shatzkin’s latest post suggests that writers, even those who don’t write for major publishers, should be grateful that the publishers implemented agency pricing, and should be rooting for it to continue out of sheer self-interest. He casts the publishers as being analogous to unions that improve working conditions for everyone, even non-union workers. Shatzkin suggests that there’s no guarantee the current conditions that allow self-publishers to publish cheaply and keep a large chunk of royalties will continue. He says that the higher prices are prolonging the lifespan of printed books, which will reduce revenues as well as...

That's the title of an article on TorrentFreak about how the big news media will sue little sites for copyright infringement, but will happily infringe, themselves, knowing that the little guy can't sue them.  Here's part of the article: When it comes to copyright, we’re constantly hearing how the big companies are spending untold amount of money to ‘create’ content, only for it to be ‘stolen’ by people downloading it. Less often we hear of the reverse; big companies infringing the copyright of regular people. But it’s more common than you might think. Let’s take a look at...

Picked this up from a tweet by Richard Nash.  Twocation is a service that will locate your followers geographically.  Here is a breakdown of those places that represent 1% or over of followers of @paulkbiba (despite the name this account is only used for TeleRead, not for any personal stuff of mine): France 2.2% India 2.2% New Zealand 1.1% Spain 1.3% United States 50% South Africa 1.3% Netherlands 1.6% Jersey 1.1% Italy 2.7% Canada 6.5% Australia 3% Brazil 1.6% United Kingdom 12.4% We also have followers in 33 other countries, each of which accounts for less than 1%...

Letizia Sechi, who works for 40kbooks, an italian digital publishing house, told me about this post on their site.  I thought it was interesting to see what the Italians think. Trends we see in publishing Publishing is going social, so there is plenty of intelligent dialogue out there. Authors, editors, readers, even publishers, are sharing their experiences and their views. When we link an interesting source (mostly on Twitter), people often ask us for our point of view. But the scenario is too complex to be successfully analyzed in 140 characters. So, let's try to summarize some trends. PAPER BOOKS "We’re in...

From the press release: Adding the 'S' Our BeBook 'Club' has been our bestseller for the past year. It has built a reputation of a no-nonsense true E-Ink eReader. It's appreciated for best value for money and has won numerous awards. But as technology evolves, we kept improving the BeBook Club accordingly, to make sure it keeps on meeting today's standards and expectations. Our proud result is the BeBook Club 'S'. The BeBook Club 'S' still has the elegant and trendy look and feel as the original BeBook Club, but here's where the 'S' comes from. - 'S' for 'Sports', due to a new controller,...

Here's an email I got from Susan Glinert.  I found it a fascinating look behind the scenes of the publishing industry: I was laid off from a publishing house several years ago, where I had worked as a senior compositor for twelve years. In the time since, I've gotten a few freelance jobs, but for the most part, I literally am tending to my knitting. At one point, I snagged a freelance layout project by lying, telling the publisher I lived in Azerbaijan and would be delighted to work for the munificent sum of fifty cents...

Received the following email from Paul Durrant of Durrant Publishing in the UK: Along with Kindle for Mac 1.7 and Kindle for PC 1.7, release a few days ago, Amazon have introduced a new ebook format for their Kindle ebook store. Called "Print Replica", it is Amazon's solution for books with a page layout that is too complex to reproduce using their usual Mobipocket-derived ebook format. A "print replica" ebook resembles a PDF version of the book. The page layout is fixed, and the only viewing options are to zoom and to pan. There's...

Last year, we reported on Brazil’s copyright law forbidding the use of DRM to block fair use. It appeared at the time that Brazil was developing a very progressive and open stance on copyright reform, even licensing the contents of its state website under Creative Commons. There was even a movement to legalize file sharing. However, after a new administration was elected, Brazil’s stance on copyright seems to have gone through a screeching U-turn. Mike Masnick at Techdirt reports that the country’s new Culture Minister ordered the removal of the CC license from the website shortly after taking office,...

At the Nieman Journalism Lab, Maria Popova writes about how the meaning of “rare” is changing in the digital age. The physical possession that is a work of art might be “rare”—but once it has been scanned or photographed, anyone can see it. (This put me in mind of the matter of a rediscovered lost work by Shelley that was purchased by a private collector and not released into the public domain.) She touches on an issue of motivation, as well: it’s human nature that if something is hard to obtain, it is going to be more attractive—but if...