Review of Kindle Touch on Świat Czytników - the most popular Polish blog about ebooks, with over 450,000 pageviews a month Two extremely helpful and comprehensive articles about ebook market in Brazil were just published at Futurebook. First one, written by Stella Dauer, describes in detail the state of the ebook technology. Eduardo Melo shares information about the current number of titles offered by Brazilian ebookstores, as well as predictions for 2012. So far, based on news coverage from top ebook sites (check posts in Publishing Perspectives), I was convinced Brazil is far more advanced than any other international ebook market. It makes perfect...

Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Kindle Store, iBookstore and almost any ereader - and it all can be done within minutes. This slick video is the introduction to Booktype. You can create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface. You can also build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences. [Via EbookFriendly]...

The simple list of quick links to most popular sections of Kindle Store is one of the most visited pages on our site. Here is a new directory, intended to make the life of ebook lovers a bit easier. This time it’s for Barnes & Noble’s Nook Store. When it comes to navigation, Nook Store is essentially different from Kindle. In Amazon’s site it’s hard to find content, as it’s overloaded with departments, pages, and special sections. In Nook Store, which isn’t that content-rich, it’s on the other hand, very easy to get lost. The reason is that the left sidebar displays links dynamically....

  Recently, I discussed a few of the issues facing fiction book publishers. My prediction is that their biggest competition will come from authors who bypass publishers and distribute through electronic channels (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and even their personal web sites). Where does this leave the publisher in a post-printing world?   Publishers are mastering the defensive moves. It appears their goal is to protect their current markets. However, this doesn’t look like a successful long term strategy. Even small losses in market share will add up over time, and as electronic book readers become more common, publishers will be easier and easier...

There are huge debates going on in the eBook world about the appropriate price points for online books, and the opinions differ, so it gets a bit messy given that books now range from free and up, with 99 cents and $2.99 becoming very common both for fiction and nonfiction, but if you check the top 100 of both categories you will see that pricing is all over the map with some very strange price points, like $7.40. There’s a lot of experimenting going on with some authors thinking 99 cents is the Holy Grail toward profit while others pick...

Many ebook distributors use Adobe DRM – not only popular ebookstores like Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google, and Sony, but also a lot local level vendors. We have to live with the fact that Adobe DRM-ed ebooks can be used on a limited number of devices. In the worst case scenario, if you don’t authorize the device with Adobe ID, you will be able to read the book only on that device. It’s because the downloaded file can’t be associated with any ID, therefore it can’t be opened on devices with: (1) no ID, (2) different ID. If you want to have more control and flexibility,...

PHOTO: TRAWICKIMAGES / INSTAGRAM Publishers calculate how much they’ll lose or earn. Industry experts write about taking over the world. But what readers think of ebooks? It surely gets more emotional. People either love or hate ebooks, and there are countless reasons on both sides. When you look at pictures shared on Instagram, it suddenly becomes all amazingly positive. Users share what they are proud of and what they identify with. My English skills are not good enough to describe in a perfectly tailored way how readers are tied to reading the books, which don’t have the smell of a real paper and don’t...

Every time Amazon makes the news for predatory business practices or just downright meanness, independent booksellers call on the general public to rebuke them. It’s about time we held publishers’ feet to the fire, too. Here are a few things publishers have been screwing up recently, whether through incompetence or greed. Publishers are hanging indie bookstores out to dry. They control the prices of every book they print, and they allow Amazon to sell books for up to 50% off the cover price. Retail bookstores buy their books, wholesale, for more than that. Remember when the Big Six banded together to renegotiate the...

I’m a mobile freak, spending a lot of time on enhancing my daily life with the smartphone in every possible way. I also share tips on how to better experience ebook-reading with mobile phones. Many users own smartphones, but they are not aware how good their devices are for reading-related tasks. A phone is extremely well-suited to shop for ebooks on the go. You don’t need to have a tablet or ereader with 3G for that. Shopping in Kindle Store is very easy, as it is optimized for small screens. It’s obvious that the major Kindle Store, the one which is a part of Amazon.com...

Last week, in a post entitled “The Book Industry’s Moneyball,” I blogged about the origins of my interest in algorithmic culture — the use of computational processes to sort, classify, and hierarchize people, places, objects, and ideas.  There I discussed a study published in 1932, the so-called “Cheney Report,” which imagined a highly networked book industry whose decisions were driven exclusively by “facts,” or in contemporary terms, “information.” It occurred to me, in thinking through the matter more this week, that the Cheney Report wasn’t the only way in which I stumbled on to the topic of algorithmic culture.  Something else...

Reading Kills from Beto Gomez on Vimeo. This gorgeous animation was created by Beto Gomez as a graduation film for the Vancouver Film School Classical Animation Program. Imagine a world where once you start reading (not only books, but literally anything), you immediately get killed. It may sound like a good excuse for those who try to avoid reading, but actually it works the other way round. Reading becomes risky, and therefore, exciting. What this animation does is that it gives an unexpected and strong context. But even without that context, reading is exciting. [Via Ebook Friendly]...

he international policy of Amazon is mysterious. They ship Kindle Touch to over 170 countries, but they don’t want to sell it to their major markets. They also sell Kindle books to 170 countries, but they successfully prevent authors from those countries to publish in their own language. I self-published via Amazon’s KDP a few books. Two of them in Polish. Tonight an email arrived from KDP, saying that one of the books has been removed: As part of our efforts to provide the best experience possible for customers in the Kindle store, we are taking this opportunity to notify you that your...