I've long felt, and written, that Epub is much ado about nothing, especially since its creators don't license the trademark and enforce standards. Without enforceable standards what good is it? Now comes an interesting article, with the above title, from the Amazon Kindle Blog.  Here's a snippet: My own change of opinion regarding the importance of the eBook format conflict stems from purely practical matters.  We have reached a point where there is literally nothing you can’t do with a Kindle that can be done on another device.  Library books are plentiful, no author or publisher is likely to boycott the Kindle platform...

From Campus Technology: CourseSmart has released a new app that allows users access to e-textbooks from mobile devices including the Kindle Fire, iPad, and Android devices. The app, which requires no downloading, provides students and staff with a catalog of more than 20,000 e-textbooks created by CourseSmart, as well as other digital education materials. Current users of CourseSmart will sign into their e-textbook accounts and be asked to sign into the Web app when they start reading their e-textbooks. Features of CourseSmart include: A bookshelf, for users to easily find the e-textbooks they're looking for; Search tools, which allow users to find material by topic...

From the press release: Holiday shoppers made Kindle Fire the bestselling product across all of Amazon.com on Black Friday Kindle Fire now the bestselling product across Amazon for 8 weeks running – ever since its introduction on September 28 SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–(NASDAQ: AMZN) Amazon.com, Inc. today announced that this Black Friday was the best ever for the Kindle family and the popular Kindle Fire remained the bestselling product across all of Amazon since its introduction 8 weeks ago. The bestselling Kindle family – the $79 Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch, $149 Kindle Touch 3G and the $199 Kindle Fire – are available now at www.amazon.com/kindle and at...

From Publishing Perspectives comes an article by Mark Coker: COPENHAGEN: Approximately 90 Scandinavian publishing executives gathered earlier this month in Copenhagen at the historic Carlsberg brewery for the annual invitation-only Scandinavian Publishing Executive Meeting. Schilling, a strategic consultancy for Scandinavian publishers, organizes this annual confab. For the first time, Schilling held the conference entirely in English. Also for the first time, the conference took on a decidedly international theme by importing speakers from Spain, the U.K and United States, including yours truly representing Smashwords. What follows are some of my personal notes and observations from the conference. I invite other attendees to share their notes...

The Smashwords Style Guide is now available in an Italian translation, Guida allo Stile Smashwords. The Italian translation is thanks to the generous volunteer effort of Giuseppe Meligrana, an Italian publisher at Smashwords. Giuseppe is also planning to translate the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide. The new Style Guide will make ebook publishing and distribution more accessible to thousands of Italian-language authors. As one of a handful of authorized global Apple aggregators, we're pleased to distribute Italian authors not only to their home country's Apple iBookstore, but worldwide as well. As we announced October 24, Italy is among the 26 new iBookstore countries now...

I've had the Kindle Fire since the day it was released and here are my thoughts after giving it a pretty fair bit of use: It's a neat machine:  No question about it, it's fun to use and makes a wonderful enhanced ereader.  The menu system is intuitive and easy to use.  The combination of an ereader and a media device, in a pocketable format, is a definite winner.  Everyone who came over at Thanksgiving, both techie and non-techie, loved it and had no trouble figuring it out.  It is an ideal unit for the non-techies among us.  Several of my...

Could we be getting closer to a free Kindle—but not one provided by Amazon? The rapid price drop of the Kindle led some to speculate that, if prices kept falling at the same rate, it would be free by the end of this year. It doesn’t look like that is going to happen, but the prices sure have fallen, haven’t they? Rumors have long been with us about free Kindles. In 2010, Mike Arrington heard from someone claiming Jeff Bezos was considering giving free Kindles to all Amazon Prime subscribers. More recently, Amazon reps told an AllThingsD reporter...

On the Daggle blog, Danny Sullivan asks the question, “Why do Amazon & Apple hate families?” He points out that a number of the products services the companies offer are not exactly family-friendly—not in terms of inappropriate content, but because they make it harder for families to share devices. For example, lots of children like to play games on their parents’ iPhones or iPads—but since those children can’t have iTunes accounts of their own (due to child-protection laws that place limits on what information Internet sites can collect from children under the age of 13), that leads to...

Mike Shatzkin has another fascinating essay in which he goes into detail about how e-books are priced by various actors in the e-book publishing industry. He explains that the break between agency pricing and non-agency pricing creates two separate standards—the “digital retail price” (of which agency vendors take 30% and are not allowed to change), and the “suggested retail price” (which is usually close to the cost of the lowest print version, and agency vendors pay half of to the publisher but can then choose to mark down for their own sales). The non-agency publishers who sell to Apple are obliged...

Here’s another story of Amazon malfeasance, from the Consumerist. Writer Laura Northrup tells the story of a Kindle owner named Ryan who discovered in October that he could not log onto his account, containing over $1,000 worth of e-content for his Kindle. He contacted Amazon representatives, and they explained that his account was “on hold” but they could not tell him why. Now it’s the end of November, and he still can’t access the content he paid for. Ryan writes: I have filed a complaint with the BBB, emailed everyone I could at Amazon, called...

On Elezea.com, blogger Rian van der Merwe shares some thoughts about the unsightly clutter that has been showing up on webpages for some time now. He cites as examples a Harvard Business Review article that has not one but two overlapping ads in front of it that must be clicked to be removed, and Cracked.com “where in my unscientific estimation about 15% of the page above the fold is devoted to the actual text of the article.” And there’s other clutter, too: a multitude of social network “like” buttons and follow-this-site social network and RSS feed links, There are...

The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing has a piece by an indie publisher, looking at Amazon’s 99-cent e-book pricing, and explaining to writers who price their e-books that way how far from universally available that pricing actually is. It starts by reminding readers that the Kindle Fire is only available in the US (as with every Nook B&N sells), and outside of North America even the old black and white Kindle is only available in Britain, France, and Germany. In many parts of the world that don’t have hardware Kindles yet, the Kindle app is still available—but that 99 cent...