Smashwords yesterday released a new ebook gifting feature. Because Smashwords books are available in multiple ebook formats, our books are readable on any e-reading device.Simply click to the book you want to gift, and click the "give as gift" button. The shopping cart will ask you for their name and email address. The lucky recipient will receive an email with a hyperlink that allows them to claim their gift. If they're already logged in to their Smashwords account, the book will appear in their Smashwords Library. If they don't have a Smashwords account, they'll be prompted to register.Prior to this...

From the BBC News: The Queen's Christmas speech is to be released as a free download for Amazon's Kindle e-book reader following its broadcast. The retailer secured access to the transcript after approaching the Royal Household with the proposal. The arrangement is an e-book exclusive although the text will also be made available at Facebook and the Royal Household's official website. Book industry watchers described the move as a "coup" for Amazon. In addition to this year's speech Kindle owners will be able to download the Queen's previous Christmas messages dating back to 1952, the year of her accession to the throne. More in the article....

Our founder David Rothman wrote an interesting column on how to use e-books as part of an educational strategy for encouraging children to read. He suggests that parents should aim for a mix of electronic and paper books, using paper books as “gateway drugs” to get kids interested and e-books for times when paper books are not available or appropriate. He also suggests that developers should look into different ways of using e-book content to make it more effective for learning. The effectiveness of the actual books for children is just one issue. As part of...

Dan Gillmor, who we’ve mentioned here a number of times, has an article in the UK paper The Guardian about high American e-book prices, and how they have helped him rediscover his local library and used bookstores. When new ebooks were $10, I was buying them all the time. In almost all cases, book purchases are impulse buys – something you want to have, right now. I was buying new best-sellers at a rapid rate, and happy to do so. (The books I bought this way tended to be mysteries and thrillers – the kind...

This past week, the Kindle iOS app received an update. We did mention it when it happened, but I think a couple of the features in that update are important enough to go into in detail. First of all, the software can now read PDF files. I tried it out with a TV manual downloaded from the website of manufacturer I support in my day job, and it worked pretty well, including drop-down access to the table of contents. Of course, there are many other ways to read PDFs on iOS by now, including GoodReader, iBooks, Stanza, and Safari...

There are plenty of read-it-later style applications that save web documents to a special application on your tablet or smartphone, but what if you want to load them onto your e-reader instead? There’s a Google Chrome extension for that. DotEPUB will allow one-click saving of web content into EPUB files that you can load into your EPUB-compatible reader. (Kindle owners are out of luck.) Of course, it’s been possible to do the same thing with Instapaper plus Calibre for a while now, but that does add an intermediate step. (We did mention this a year ago, but it’s...

One of the benefits of electronic media is that e-book stores are never closed for the holidays—at least for purchasers. But in some cases, for publishers, it’s another story. EbookNewser reports Apple’s iBookstore team sent an email to iBookstore sellers letting them know that the iTunes Connect app and e-book publishing platform is down from now until Thursday, December 29th for the holidays. It will not be taking any new updates during this time, and scheduled releases and pricing changes will be delayed. The iBookstore team wrote in an email to iTunes Connect users: “ We...

I’m sure everyone who went to college has had the experience of having to buy a whole book when their professor only turned out to need a few chapters from it. One of the obvious benefits of digital media is that it is more easily segmented than a printed and bound book; in theory, students ought to be able to buy just the parts they need. That’s the idea behind e-textbook site Bookstep.com. This startup allows students to buy just the portions of books and materials their professors need for their classes. Founder Mike Basaraba tells Publishing Perspectives: ...

Ars Technica has a look at the current filings and legal strategies in the Google Books case. There are three current cases against Google—two 2005 cases involving publishers and authors, which are the ones involved in the settlement that failed after four years of work, and one in 2010 from photographers and illustrators. Google appears close to a separate settlement in the publishers’ case. But Google is likely to carry on its battle with the authors, photographers, and other individual copyright holders. Some authors consider the fight a matter of principle. And even if Google convinced...

After the matter came up in Parliament last week, the UK has once again declined to lower the value-added tax on e-books, which currently stands at 20%. The Bookseller reports David Gauke, the UK’s exchequer secretary, said the UK could not do this and remain in compliance with European Union law, which classes electronic media as services rather than goods and requires they be taxed at the higher rate. Other European countries, including France and Luxembourg, have reduced their own VATs on e-books significantly. France has told its publishers it will pay any fines the EU imposes on them for flouting...

Amazon may be stirring up controversy for its actions against independent bookstores (or other brick-and-mortar e-tailers), but at the same time it is creating new opportunities for authors. That’s the focus of a post by Mathew Ingram on GigaOm, in which he profiles a few journalists who have seen a remarkable degree of success with their Kindle Singles—e-books which could not have been easily published in print form. Journalist Marc Herman’s Kindle Single on the aftermath of the Libyan revolution sold enough copies at $1.99 each to begin to recoup costs for the trip to Libya in the first...

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