Gaby Wood, the Telegraph’s Head of Books, has an fairly lengthy article on The Telegraph pondering what e-books mean for the future of literature. Wood considers Jonathan Franzen’s much-remarked-upon comments about how e-books are damaging society, and ponders the question of whether they really are. Though Wood found she did not care for the Kindle reading experience herself, she notes that there is nothing at all wrong with it for those who do enjoy it (a refreshing admission when it seems like everyone who doesn’t like e-ink reading is ready to claim it shot their wife and kicked their...

Here’s another one of those webcomics that calls attention to the issue of piracy as service problem. (Note: not really worksafe due to some R-rated language.) Although the strip concerns a television series, anyone who has ever wanted to buy an e-book that is not sold in his particular country or format will recognize the situation. (We once covered a different comic on a similar idea about the problems with audiobook DRM.) The strip chronicles The Oatmeal cartoonist Matthew Inman’s effort to find and purchase HBO’s Game of Thrones series. He is fully willing to pay to see it,...

Should we learn to stop worrying and love the Amazon? That’s the position espoused by writer/publisher Bob Mayer in a post to his blog “Write It Forward”. Mayer co-founded independent publishing house Who Dares Wins Publishing in January 2011, and “went from selling a few hundred eBooks that month to earning seven figures.” He doesn’t see a threat in Amazon, but instead sees opportunity. Mayer has some books in the Kindle Select program, but he is also providing exclusives to Barnes & Noble and doing business with Kobo and others as well. I’m not...

How to get kids to read? Lauren Grossberg has a suggestion: Find young-adult books that are being adapted into movies, then encourage the kid to read the book first, then see the movie and compare. There are plenty of such books around—the Harry Potter and Twilight series are obvious choices, as is The Hunger Games. Encouraging your children to read the novels before going to the movie allows the child to practice reading skills and to develop their own opinions and imagination of the ideas and concepts in the novel.  Then when watching the movie, it...

On FutureBook, Shane Rae wonders if the education publishing industry is failing to innovate as it should. He describes the legacy model of education publishing, which involves prototyping, trial, feedback, and development to make sure that what gets published is completely finished before it sees print or CD-ROM, forms of media with a long shelf-life. The problem Rae sees is that this often leads to trying to match competitors’ products rather than better them—creating the thing that users want now, rather than what they might want down the road. Now, in the age of online applications...

While not exactly news, it’s fun to look at a conversion-of-an-e-reader-skeptic story every now and then. Here’s one from Florida International University Medical Library Digital Access Librarian Bohyun Kim. Despite the digital nature of Kim’s job title, she had never really been tempted to get an e-ink e-reader device—mainly because she already had an iPad. But when she checked out a Kindle loaded with e-books from the university lending library, she found she enjoyed the experience more than she expected. And although the lighter weight and less eyestrain-inducing screen were nice, what she really liked was the way there...

The Verge reports that Barnes & Noble is placing a low-end version of its Nook Tablet in Wal-Mart, launching at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, February 22nd. The device will have only 8 GB of RAM, the same as the Kindle Fire, and is expected to launch at a lower price than the current 16GB model’s $249. (The most obvious price point is, of course, the Kindle Fire’s $199, but B&N and Wal-Mart could surprise us.) Of course, to call it an 8 GB model is something of a misnomer. Unlike the Kindle Fire, it will probably reserve all but...

Are digital audiobook services non-starters? On FutureBook, Martyn Daniels posts about all the up-and-coming audiobook services FutureBook expected to take off, but subsequently didn’t. These aren’t just fly-by-night services, either; at least one of them offered quite reasonable pricing and readings by quite famous actors. With the infrastructure already existing and music MP3 going DRM-free, there was no reason that the public should not have adopted them, or so they thought. But it didn’t happen and instead the ebook lurched forward, took off and we forgot the audiobook. The reasons for the lost audio opportunity were...

PaidContent reports that Open Road has filed a 14-page response to HarperCollin’s lawsuit over Jean C. George’s Julie of the Wolves e-book rights. The response went about as expected: Open Road is claiming that the contract for Julie of the Wolves does not cover e-books, and so HarperCollins does not have a leg to stand on in its lawsuit. Among other things, Open Road alleges that HarperCollins has not spent any money on advertising or promoting Julie of the Wolves since the mid 1970s, and that it never had any intention of producing a Julie of the Wolves e-book,...

In case you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me much over the last few days, part of the reason is that this weekend is the weekend of VisionCon, the yearly science fiction/fantasy and gaming convention in Springfield, Missouri, which has been going on for some twenty years now. Over the con, I met urban fantasy author Patricia Briggs and her husband, and attended a panel on the current state of SF that veered into e-book territory and I will probably cover in that respect tomorrow. I also met Palladium Games head Kevin Siembieda (for the third time), and...

Is Amazon evil or just good at business? We’ve carried a couple of articles lately whose authors believe the latter, but it’s never been a mystery what side the Authors Guild comes down on. The Guild has just posted a lengthy essay to its blog laying out what it sees as Amazon’s predatory pricing and anticompetitive business practices. While admitting Amazon has innovated with the creation of the Kindle, the Guild holds that Amazon used its pre-existing position as the world’s leading print book vendor to leverage its e-book position into a near-monopoly. It cites Amazon’s removal of the...

All may not be coming up roses in e-textbook land. Sarah Kessler reports on Mashable that one of Kno’s largest-selling textbook publishers, Cengage Learning, is attempting to pull its material from Kno’s store—and Kno is suing for breach of license agreement. Though Kno deals with about 40 publishers, Cengage’s content has historically made up 25% of its overall sales. However, Cengage doesn’t like the way Kno allows users to copy and paste passages from textbooks into a separate journal view, considering it an unauthorized derivative work. The publisher gave Kno 30 days to correct the issue, then terminated the...