Joseph Esposito of Scholarly Kitchen has a post looking at the demise of Borders and what it means for the publishing industry. Yes, I know, we’ve posted plenty of those looks before, closer to the time the demise actually happened, but this one brings a perspective I hadn’t thought so much about before. When we think of Borders going away, a lot of people tend just to think of 10% of the print book market evaporating, as if the number of books sold is all that matters. But Esposito points out that the closure points to a matter...

Laudable ideals.  Let's wish them luck.  I see that they currently have four books available and at least one is available on Amazon. To my fellow authors: the revolution starts now Technology changes at breathtaking speed these days, but the traditional publishing model hasn’t kept pace. I’ve been talking with publishers for years about changing the way they do business. So has my agent. But every time we suggested a faster way of working or a fairer way to slice the pie, they said the time wasn’t right. No matter how much the world around us changes, they always seem to have a reason to keep doing...

PaidContent writes about a holiday campaign launched by digital publisher Open Road Integrated Media. Called “The Gift of E”, the campaign centers on giving e-books for Christmas as an alternative to shopping in crowded stores. The site feature instructional videos on how to give e-books as presents. After Christmas, the campaign will focus on e-book “starter packs” for new e-reader owners. As PaidContent points out, only Kindle and Kobo so far have set up a way that individual e-books can be given as gifts; other e-tailers will allow buying gift certificates but not specific titles. That could give them...

The Canadian Press reports that Montreal’s largest library, the Grande Bibliotheque, is thriving, and Canadian library usage in general is up 45% over the last ten years, largely due to electronic media. The article states that use of electronic databases “more than doubled” and Internet use of library websites and catalogs quintupled over that period. The key to a library's success, said Guy Berthiaume, director of the Grande Bibliotheque, is to adapt with the times. The Montreal library now has 200,000 ebook titles available with plans for more on the way. ...

In an article prompted by the House Judiciary Committee's discussion of the Stop Online Piracy Act, The Hill carries a piece by two professors from Carnegie Melon University.  They conducted research into the windowed release of movie DVDs: … our research suggests that Hollywood is leaving money on the table — and is in turn failing to address a root cause of piracy — by preserving its separate release windows. Based on our analysis of seven large nations, we find that in most countries, every week customers have to wait before they can buy a DVD translates into, on average, 1.8...

Andriod Community points out that Foxit has a mobile PDF reader for Android.  They like it: Unlike the desktop version, only a $2.99 paid app is available, but that’s comparable to the other 3rd-party PDF viewers on the Market. The standard zoom and reflow features are present, as well as bookmarks. Foxit seems to be focusing on its reader experience with a set of noted additions: the app will automatically load the last document and page you used, and it can adjust the brightness for its own use, like the Kindle and Nook apps. There’s also a set of annotation tools,...

One of the hottest new computer games is the latest entry in the Elder Scrolls franchise, Skyrim. Although I haven’t played the game myself, it seems that one element of the game is that it includes a bunch of in-game books, some of them quite long, that go into the backstory of the game world and various things in it. As Jeremy Hill notes on our sister blog Gamertell, there are so many of them that there just isn’t time to read them while in the game (where there are, obviously, better things to do, like killing dragons). ...

President Obama has issued a 3-page memo directing government agencies to start using electronic record management. Digitizing records will provide better archives for future generations to study, and will also help reduce costs. Another goal is to give the general public better digital access to the workings of their government. The directive gives agencies one month to designate the official who will be in charge of the effort, and four months to come up with plans to do it. Computerworld notes that the government does not have a good track record with digitization, pointing to the failed ten-year effort...

Great article in Publishing Perspectives about ebooks in New Zealand. As we race towards 2012, 2008 seems like a long time ago, but that was the year when the Board of New Zealand’s print copyright agency — Copyright Licensing Ltd (CLL) — first thought about what they needed to do to ensure the company remained relevant to publishing in New Zealand in the digital era. Time has passed and a lot of activity and investment has been undertaken to bring New Zealand’s own collection of e-books together under the brand Great NZ Ebooks. New Zealand is a country of 4.1 million people,...

From paidContent: Science fiction/fantasy publisher Orbit, which is part of Hachette Book Group, is expanding its short fiction e-offerings from the U.S. to the UK and other countries where Orbit titles are sold. The program, which includes original fiction from Orbit authors, launched in the U.S. in April. “The digital short fiction market is clearly gaining momentum…The success of the program in the US has been very encouraging,” said Anne Clarke, the editorial director of Orbit UK, in a statement. More in the article. (Via paidContent.)...

Ignorant U.S. electorate? Absolutely. Read libertarian professor’s study. Could digital libraries help fix this and reduce political polarization?: " Maybe one person—excluding me—entirely read the Digital libraries vs. our national dumb-down: Could ‘civic dashboards’ and other innovations help America break out of an endless loop? That person, however, was Peter Levine, director of the Center for Civic Engagement and Community Engagement at Tufts University, who, besides supplying me with an essential citation, which I’ve happily incorporated in the Web version, said he liked my essay. "Your piece takes this general idea in important new directions that I hadn’t considered," he said. Now...

Not long ago, I posted about how paper books are now the deprecated choice in my household. Recently, as my daughter began crawling and pulling up, she wreaked havoc on our CD rack, throwing disks all over the place. Cleaning them up and moving them to somewhere safe, I was struck with how many of them I couldn’t remember playing in the last decade. I was even more struck with the desire to get a number of these out of my house. I am forming a new three-tiered approach on how to deal with goods that I could just as easily...