Yesterday, perhaps hoping to stage a preemptive strike on Amazon, Barnes & Noble announced a new cooperative venture with self-publisher Lulu.com, which is supposed to make it easier for Lulu customers to get their books published as Nook e-books. However, given that B&N was already partnering with Lulu on self-publishing e-books, it is entirely unclear how it was harder before and how it will be easier now. And this bright bundle of glittering generalities does not seem to have helped in the end. Barnes & Noble’s stock was down by as much as 13% after Amazon’s Kindle announcement today,...

Found via a post on the E-Book Mailing List today, a fantastic blog post by writer Sarah A. Hoyt, that links to an equally fantastic blog post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (which is of related but not identical subject matter to the blog post by Rusch we covered back in March). Rusch’s post, made back in May, is intended to be an eye-opener, a clarion call to the publisher-bound writers that Michael Stackpole analogizes to Roman “house slaves”. Traditional book publishing, Rusch warns, is traveling down the same road that rock music has. She points to examples from music-industry...

Is the Kindle Fire an iPad Killer? After seeing two posts in quick succession from different sources, one saying it is and one saying it isn’t, I couldn’t resist the chance to compare the two points of view. For the “Yes, it is an iPad killer” side, we have Molly Wood, a CNet commentator, saying (in the headline no less), “Yes. It’s the price, stupid.” She admits that the Fire has “almost literally half the features” of the iPad—smaller screen, no camera, half the on-board memory, and so on. But compared to considerations of price, Wood posits, features aren’t...

Lest we forget, there’s one more e-reading-related company whose name starts with “A” that is about to make major product announcements in the next week or so. Apple’s iPhone and iPod show is coming up, and rumor has it that Apple will be killing off the iPod Classic and Shuffle lines altogether this year. Ars Technica looks at the rumor and finds the reasoning behind it sound. Thanks to the emergence of cloud-based services, there is no longer as much need to carry a 160GB hard drive full of music around in your pocket. ...

Engadget has a couple of first looks at the new Kindle and Kindle Touch, including a video of the Touch in action (that doesn’t seem to be working at the time of this writing). As expected, the loss of the keyboard handicaps the basic Kindle slightly, as now any letter-based interactions have to be entered through an on-screen virtual keyboard. But on the other hand, for a “pure” e-reader, typing is only something you do occasionally anyway, so it may not be that much of a handicap in the long run. Certainly Kobo and Sony don’t seem to have found...

Just as Amazon did last year when it introduced the new third-generation Kindle, it is renaming its existing models and putting them on sale. The “Kindle Keyboard” and ”Kindle Keyboard 3G” have been marked down $15 to $99/$139 for the wifi-only version and $139/$189 for the 3G version (prices are with/without “special offers”). The wifi keyboard version is priced exactly the same as the new Touch wifi version, and the 3G keyboard version is only $10 less than the 3G Touch (or the same without ads). Given that you can order a $79 ad-supported Kindle right now, it’s...

Amazon introduced three new e-ink Kindles: a $79 low-low end model, not touch-sensitive and with minimal physical controls (about akin to what the Kobo and other such non-Kindle readers have had up to this point), a $99 Touch WiFi model, and a $149 Touch 3G model (both of which have no physical controls at all). It also introduced the Kindle Fire tablet at the remarkable price point of $199. Amazon Moves Price Point Goal Posts Something that is important and worth mentioning, and that I haven’t seen in the other reports I’ve looked at, is that Amazon has...

From my order.  Full review of each shortly after arrival....

We posted about this electronic paper exhibition here. Now you can see some of the exhibits at the Galarno site....

  An unexpected phenomena begins to occur once a writer signs on to be a book reviewer. Not at first, mind you, but around the mark of one’s first year at reading and rendering of opinions on prose, something almost magical takes place wherever one posts on the hills and dales of the vastly diverse Internet. No matter the forum, platform, group or board that a reviewer happens to be visiting, the writers thereon seem to sense the presence of a willing Other Eye and seize upon the opportunity to get their work...

From Publishers Weekly.  This looks like an important contribution. With all eyes on Amazon's new tablet today, a quieter launch has happened for Bloomsbury, which is setting live its new digital imprint, Bloomsbury Reader. The digital publishing unit was announced in May--despite the name, it is not a device--and features digital and print-on-demand titles where English-language rights rest with an author or estate. Bloomsbury is working with a number of literary agencies, including The Rights House, to acquire books for the imprint, which debuts with 500 titles. According to an earlier Publishers Weekly article: Bloomsbury Reader...

This is something I never would have expected.  From The Chronicle of Higher Education comes an article by Doug Ward, who teaches courses in editing, reporting, history and innovation at the University of Kansas: News that all the graduate students in my Future of Media seminar would receive iPads for the semester generated a flurry of excitement. Some students replied with exclamation points in their email messages. Some stopped and asked when the iPads would be available. Others passed on word to classmates and seemed to enjoy the envious responses. Then something odd happened: The students, all in their...