New LRG study- 74% of libraries report increased demand for electronic offerings: “Close to three-fourths of respondents, 74%, report that demand for their libraries’ electronic offerings have increased over the past year” A new report from Library Resource Guide and Unisphere Research, ” The Digital Squeeze: Libraries at the Crossroads—The Library Resource Guide Benchmark Study on 2012 Library Spending Plans,” shows an increased demand for all types of digital content in libraries. This should come as no surprise, particularly for those librarians in public service fielding the questions about downloading ebooks and streaming movies.   Unisphere Research is the market research unit...

From Dead Tree Edition: When the U.S. magazine industry gets hot and bothered about the latest craze, you can usually bet that trend is about to run out of steam. E-books were the talk of many magazine people at this week’s Publishing Business Conference in New York, my spies tell me. The web – which is so hopelessly last year – was hardly mentioned. Everyone wanted to chat about their e-books and tablet editions, more so about their cool factor than about whether they were earning much profit. Meanwhile, the book-publishing half of the...

Introduce a new section of Ebook Friendly - Ebook Price Checks. We will be frequently sharing simple comparisons of prices of the same title in different ebookstores. The first book in the series is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. This weekend The Hunger Games movie will hit cinemas around the world, and it’s good to reach for the book it’s based on. It’s been recently announced that Suzanne Collins is the top-selling author of all time on the Amazon Kindle. Since last January we analyze Top 100 Kindle books, and the books from The Hunger Games trilogy were always included in the monthly lists. It’s...

  Introduction: The issues of plagiarism and copyright overlap in fan fiction (and fiction in general) causing a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding.  Wholesale copying without attribution (giving credit to the source) is plagiarism but not always copyright infringement.  Copyright infringement can happen even when credit is being given.  This piece attempts to talk about the two in a broad sense. None of the following should be considered legal advice.  If you have a specific legal question, consult with an intellectual property attorney.  This blog and the authors of the blog will not be responsible for any harm or damages suffered...

  In my post about  reading Australian Women Writers in 2012 I included a list of Australian bookshops that were supporting the Reading and Reviewing Challenge for 2012 AND selling ebooks. I wanted to keep the list growing of these bookshops but have the information available on one page.  This list will continue to grow as I’m informed about more bookshops. Australian retailers providing links to ebooks by Australian Women Writers Bookshops using the Booki.sh Platform participating in the Challenge Avid Reader in Queensland have a list of books for the Australian Women Writers 2012 Reading and Reviewing Challenge  here.(744 ebooks as at 14/03/12) Readings Bookshop (six shops...

March 12, 2012 – Palo Alto, CA – Bookshare, the global leader in providing digital accessible books to people with print disabilities, today announced its 10th anniversary. Throughout the last ten years, Bookshare has been at the forefront of the digital book revolution, applying Silicon Valley technology to pioneer an innovative new approach to a library for individuals with print disabilities. Jim Fruchterman, the CEO and founder of the nonprofit Benetech, the parent organization of Bookshare, envisioned a library of eBooks formed by volunteers digitizing and legally sharing them over the Internet with others with qualified print disabilities (such as blindness,...

I’m on the road right now, so unfortunately I don’t have time to compose a blog post of the usual length. But since I promised last week that there’d be new content here, now, I figured it would be worth sharing a few thoughts about something that’s been on my mind lately. I’m talking about Barnes & Noble, the beleaguered bookstore chain that was, until recently, practically synonymous with bookselling in the United States. Specifically, I’ve been thinking a lot about the books you see immediately upon entering any Barnes & Noble bookstore — the ones featured in the displays right...

Last week, news came out that the Justice Department was readying a petition to sue five of the largest publishing houses in North America along with Apple for colluding together to maintain artificially high prices for digital books. This was initially instituted in January 2010 after Macmillan pulled its entire digital catalog from Amazon unless Amazon concede to these new terms. Under the new terms, Macmillan would set the prices for digital books and Amazon and every other retailer would not be allowed to discount. This became known as Agency pricing, but the term “Agency pricing” is a misnomer. What the...

Science fiction in literature and movies has a long history and dates way back. The great Polish writer Stanisław Lem (1921-2006) wrote the 1961 sci-fi novel ”Solaris” that was later turned into a film in 1972 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and again in 2002 in a new Hollywood remake by Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney. And from “Soylent Green” in 1973 to “The Day After Tomorrow” in 2004, movies also began to venture into a new genre of science fiction that might be called “cli-fi” (for climate fiction). Cli-fi is also a new genre for novels and short stories, and one of the new practitioners is American writer...

I’m a big fan of Read an Ebook Week and have waited with this Kindle Store promotion until this year’s edition starts. If you’re into tech-related, fast-paced stories, which remind of Kurt Vonnegut or Stanisław Lem, you may be interested in the two collections of flash-fiction I wrote, Password Incorrect and Failure Confirmed. The titles and covers say all about the books: technology makes us fail, and we have to, actually, start enjoying it. The books are free till Sunday, March 11th, 2012. It would be absolutely amazing, if you left a short review and share the information about the books with...

Bobbie Newman, who blogs at Librarian by Day, has an excellent editorial post about current Ebook conditions in public libraries.  She questions whether libraries should step back and wait for better options, quoting several other prominent bloggers on the subject.  It’s an interesting thought piece from a public library perspective.  The comments are just as interesting. Here is a brief clip from the post – Should Libraries Get Out of the Ebook Business? Or get out at least until there is a better system? I know what you are going to say, I can hear it already – “We can’t! Our patrons...

Nook Simple Touch is supported with Adobe DRM Before you start buying books in a particular ebookstore, check what kind of DRM is used there. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is intended to prevent from unauthorized use. To put it simply: it means you can’t freely share the ebook file you bought. No matter how insane it sounds, we have to live with that. For instance, if you shop in Kindle Store, you can only access your ebooks via devices and applications developed by Amazon. If in iBookstore – via iBooks/iTunes. Both vendors are using their own DRM systems. That means: you can’t read Kindle...