Yahoo confirms $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition (CNET) Yahoo announced the news on Monday, saying that it "promises not to screw [Tumblr] up." Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr, and the company has confirmed that "substantially all of which is payable in cash." When can a book be digital-only, and when does it need to be print too? (paidContent) Book publishers discussed digital-first and digital-only initiatives at the Making Information Pay conference this week. OverDrive & SourceBooks Test Lending Same eBook to Millions of People (AppNewser) OverDrive has launched a pilot program that will allow millions of library patrons to check out the same eBook all at once...

India's OMICS Publishing Group threatens scholarly critic with $1 billion lawsuit, jail time (Boing Boing) OMICS Publishing Group, an Indian scholarly publisher has threatened to sue one of its critics, Metadata librarian Jeffrey Beall, for $1 billion, and has threatened him with prison time over posts he made to his prominent Scholarly Open Access site. Changes at The New York Times Book Review (New York Observer) The New York Times Book Review is modernizing under the editorship of Pamela Paul, who was appointed to the position in early April. The Astoria Bookshop to Open This August on 31st Street (We Heart Astoria) I’ll just let that title sink in...

Yesterday evening, we posted as our final story of the day a fascinating article about a new Nintendo video game titled Tomodachi Collection: New Life, which has been described as not unlike a Japanese version of The Sims. The crux of the article was that Nintendo had unintentionally made it possible for the male characters in the game to have homosexual relationships. According to the article we posted, for example, "gamers playing Nintendo's Tomodachi Collection: New Life noticed that this latest iteration of the game ... had the option for the first time to have their male characters marry other male characters and raise children together." Nintendo, however,...

Barnes & Noble's Nook Dilemma (Dear Author) What's left if B&N sells the Nook business to Microsoft? (Forbes) Free Books for Mother's Day (GalleyCat) Now Amazon is selling bongs, nitrous oxide, and deadly hallucinogenic drugs (Business Insider) Kindle Daily Deals: 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke (and 3 others)...

What news organizations are learning from their e-book efforts (Poynter Online) What's left if B&N sells the Nook division to Microsoft? (The Passive Voice) A 'novel' idea for spreading literature in Africa: The cellphone (Christian Science Monitor) The e-book piracy debate, revisited (NYTimes.com) The fascinating stories behind classic book titles (Flavorwire) Kindle Daily Deals: Subterranean by James Rollins (and 3 others)...

Yes, this is a few months old, but nevertheless, a kindly tip o' the hat goes out to GadgeTell editor Matthew Marchesano, who just alerted me to the bizarre YouTube video we've embedded for you below. The video features Dmitry Golubovskiy (the CEO of Esquire Russia, interestingly enough) reciting the chemical name of Titin. Apparently, it's either the longest word in the English language or the longest world in any language; it's made up of a mind-bending 189,819 letters and takes 213 minutes to pronounce. As some YouTube commenters have pointed out, Golubovskiy begins the 3.5-hour-long video with a respectably clean-shaven look; by the video's end,...

Until I opened an email this morning from a publicist at the Penguin Group (USA), who'd sent me a press release about the company's newest so-called "creativity app," The Pocket Scavenger, I was under the impression that I was at least somewhat tuned in to the world of Android apps. But apparently, not so much. Penguin, it seems, has been busy releasing quite an impressive suite of creativity apps lately, and like their latest, The Pocket Scavenger, many are based on the books of author, illustrator and self-described guerrilla artist Keri Smith. Smith writes books that are not only about creativity, but that actually encourage it...

Some of you may remember a post we ran last Wednesday, May 1, about a ridiculous website calling itself Blognix, and which had seemingly cloned TeleRead's entire site—content, design and all. Well, I suppose I was remiss in mentioning that just two days later, and without too much of a hassle, frankly, the head of NAPCO's IT department succeeded in squashing Blognix like the sad and pitiful little project it was. Incredibly though, Blognix morphed like an amoeba almost immediately after ridding itself of its bogus TeleRead cloak; it's now cloning a website called Cheap Tech For Me. Take a look for...

The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, if you're not familiar with it, is generally agreed upon as being one of the finest graduate business schools in the country. Unbeknownst to TeleRead until just earlier today, however, was the school's online business analysis journal. It's called Knowledge@Wharton, and we've learned that the smart minds behind the website recently teamed up with Ernst & Young to produce a free, video-enhanced e-book titled Mobile Banking: Financial Services Meet the Electronic Wallet.  "Mobile banking is far more than simply online banking by using mobile phones," according to a press release that accompanied the e-book's launch. "Banks...

Over the past two or three months, you may have begun to notice that nearly every time you get around to catching up on your digital publishing news, yet another media outlet is announcing their new e-book division. And that's definitely a good thing—don't get me wrong. But so many of the bigger media companies launching digital imprints today seem to be repurposing much more old content than they are creating new stories. To me, that sometimes comes as a bit of a disappointment. It seems a little cheap, almost. But a new company that refers to itself as a digital...

Wired magazine will be celebrating its 20th anniversary throughout the remainder of 2013, and as something of a celebration, the editorial team has put together Wired @20, an e-book consisting of what the editors consider to be "20 of the most important and mind-blowing stories from the [Wired] archives." Interestingly (and wisely, I'd say), the stories include "all-new epilogues that bring the articles up to date." So even if you've been reading Wired cover-to-cover from day one, you'll probably still find something of interest here. The anthology includes Evan Ratliff's absolutely masterful feature on how to vanish in the digital age, for instance. It also...

StoryBundle Launches Video Game-Themed E-Book Campaign (Good e-Reader) Is Nigeria Ready for the E-Book Revolution? (This Day Live) How I overcame snobbery to self-publish an e-book (The Telegraph) Samsung filed for e-book page-turning patent (Slash Gear) The Progressive Opens E-Book Line (GalleyCat) E-Book Deal: Self-Improvement E-Book Bundle...