Is the youngest generation going to grow up thinking of books as digital objects first, and print relics a distant second? That's what Shane Richmond, the Head of Technology (Editorial) at the Telegraph, thinks. In an editorial published today he argues that print can't compete with digital when it comes to search, annotation and portability: My daughter’s generation will probably have ebook textbooks. They will never experience dog-eared, vandalised, outdated school books, shared one-between-two. They will enjoy books that are enhanced with video, interactive graphics and picture galleries. And they will see these things are the norm. Printed books will be...

Back in June, Apple introduced a new iBook feature it calls Read Aloud, which is similar to Nook's Read to Me feature in that it provides a human voice narration that syncs to the onscreen text. In both commercial cases, the feature is meant primarily for children's books. Now Apple has updated its iBookstore Assets Guide to include instructions on how to add a Read Aloud narration track to your EPUB file. You can't access the latest guide unless you're a registered iTunes Connect member, but eBookNewswer has printed part of the relevant section: "You can create a Read Aloud book...

Last month, Tracey Edwards self-published to the Amazon Kindle Store a nonfiction book about the stock market. She's previously published nonfiction titles through a traditional publisher, but as this is her first time going the DIY Kindle route, she's documenting the experience on her blog. Her July numbers are modest, but she's happy with them so far: Well the month has just finished and while 5 Simple Rules has only been up since the 8th July I thought I’d report on my progress so far. As of today I have sold 10 copies. 10 copies that I’m actually pretty thrilled with given it’s my...

Yesterday, Simon & Schuster's parent company CBS announced that while the publisher made less money last quarter than the one before, ebook sales accounted for a greater percentage: Publishing revenues for the second quarter of 2011 decreased 3% to $183 million from $189 million for the same prior-year period, as strong growth in the sale of more profitable digital content was offset by lower print book sales. Digital content revenues for the second quarter of 2011 more than doubled last year's second quarter digital sales and represented 15% of Publishing's total revenues. This is in line with what Pearson reported about...

Inkling, which develops digital textbooks for the iPad, has been around for a couple of years now, but this year its been steadily building up steam (or at least cash) as it prepares to dramatically expand its offerings this fall. Earlier this year it secured funding from Pearson and McGraw-Hill, and today it announced a second round of funding from several investors. Inkling's approach is to augment textbooks with interactive, social, and annotation features, then sell them by the chapter for $3 each. The approach may or may not be cheaper--CEO Matt MacInnis says it can end up costing a...

The magazine "Fantasy & Science Fiction," which has been around for over 60 years, is trying out a new way to sell copies: it's going to start giving away the nonfiction sections, plus one fiction story, from each issue for free through the Kindle Store, while offering a paid subscription (at $1/month) for the full issue. In some ways, this is sort of like using the Kindle Store as an email list marketing tool—get users to sign up for the free stuff, then remind them regularly that there's new content for sale. But another analogue may be the freemium...

Apple may have forced usability downgrades on all of its ebookseller competition, but Kobo has found an amusing way to place an active link to its website back on the iOS app. When the updated, store-free version of the Kobo app was released a couple of weekends ago, it replaced the store with a news feed that's updated periodically. As The Digital Reader noted, this feed was bare when the new app first came out, but now that the media coverage has died down it's displaying a few posts—and the topmost post has two forbidden items: a link to the...

When Amazon promised to introduce its Kindle format to public libraries earlier this year, the company would only say that it would come before the end of 2011. There's still been no official announcement, but now OverDrive's own CEO Steve Potash has dropped a not-too-subtle hint that September is the launch month: Throughout the conference, CEO Steve Potash, looking like a kid with a delicious secret, kept saying "soon" and, "I'm not allowed to announce a date yet." During the final session, he delivered a broad hint, by summarizing the main points of his "Crystal Ball Report" : Streamlining (both downloading...

From July 18-27, Amazon ran its second big ebook sale of the year, only this time it managed to get the Big 6 publishers on board with titles. Now that the sale has ended, Dan Lubart of eBook MarketView has parsed the publicly available data to determine whether those publishers benefited from participating. In terms of gaining list share on Amazon's Top 100 list—what Lubart calls "one of the new digital equivalents of premium retail space in the front of the store"—the only winner was HarperCollins. Harper also placed more titles for sale than the other publishers, which may indicate...

Mashable's Lauren Indvik recently shadowed the men and women behind Sports Illustrated and published a case study of their workflow. There are some interesting lessons here for other publishers who are developing a digital strategy. Indvik writes: ...web and print are divided mainly by article length: the web is for shorter, newsier hits and print is a repository for long-form journalism. Quality is consistent largely because most of Sports Illustrated‘s staff touch every extension of the brand. Nearly all the writers (95%) produce content for both the web and print, filing short news pieces for the web while building out longer,...

We've featured several stories about the web-connected print-on-demand Espresso Book Machine (EBM), which can access millions of digital books and create print versions in minutes. Most of those stories, however, are light on actual user reviews, so I was happy to stumble across this detailed summary of "the good, the bad, and the sexy" qualities of the EBM from librarian Rick Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen. His library at the University of Utah has had an EBM for two years now, and he's put together an insightful list of what works and what still needs work. You should read the full...

Nate Hoffelder at The Digital Reader has been tracking signs of new ereader activity coming from Sony, and despite the company disavowing its own executive's slip-up it looks like a new device is on the way. The first clue is that a device called the PRS-T1 Digital Book Reader was found last week on the FCC website. The second clue is that several ebook models are showing up as out of stock or discontinued on the Sony Style store. Via The Digital Reader ...