Nico Vreeland's earlier post, which Teleread reprinted earlier, was one of many articles I have lately seen which explore the issue of the publishers versus Amazon. Is Amazon evil? Are their business practices 'predatory' and should publishers be trying to disable them? More and more, I am thinking the answer to these questions is no. Amazon is not evil. They have just figured out what the customers want better than anybody else has so far, and they are giving it to them. Vreeland points out, correctly, that customers don't buy 'Random House books' or 'Penguin Books.' They buy Stephen King...

So, Penguin has now dropped out of the Overdrive library service. Yikes! It strikes me that all of these 'legacy' publishers who are panicking because Amazon or Apple or Google or Indie Everyman are going to crush them to bits are taking an entirely wrong approach here. What if, instead of clinging to the way things were done before, they actually innovated? What if, instead of locking things down ever further and driving people away from their goods, they opened things up and brought them in? I think an ebook rental service, run in conjunction with the existing Overdrive architecture, would...

To celebrate and honor our friend, indie author, L.C. Evans, and her contribution to the Indie eBook revolution, we’re giving away a whole bunch of free books. Linda lost her fight with cancer earlier this month. We lost a friend and a compatriot. We’d like you to buy her books, read her books, and make her words live. In Linda’s own words, from her indieview a year ago… “ I want my books to appeal to everyone, though I understand that men in general aren’t fond of reading chick lit or romantic comedy.” If chick lit or romantic comedy is not your thing, authors who have been...

When people think about ebooks, they think about mostly text-based reading of straight, narrative work. But here are some off-the-beaten-track book replacements you can make yourself that save time and money and provide an enhanced experience. 1) Art books. Delphi Classics, a favourite vendor of mine who sells DRM-free bundles of 'complete works' by authors in the public domain, has an inspired new series focused on masters of art. The first book, at a budget-friendly $2.50, features the complete works of Leonardo Da Vinci, with bonus biographical content and other goodies. The iPad is a perfect medium for this type of...

Some interesting threads on here these last few days about the price of content. Are publishers gouging customers with prices that are unfairly high? Are customers bringing about the ruination of the media industry by demanding prices that are too low? Is there a halfway point at which these two conflicting groups can meet? I think there is. I would like to introduce the concept of pricing relativity. That is, a price should be considered not so much as an entity unto itself, but an entity in relation to what other choices a customer who may be in the target market...

I was thinking today about how ebooks have changed my reading habits in the last few years. I had flirted with them as early as 2005, when I experimented with Project Gutenberg freebies on a Palm Pilot while living in smalltown New Zealand. There was only one local bookstore, and its selection was lacking. At the time, Project Gutenberg was a revelation. In the years since, I have gone through 5 main readers and nearly as many preferred bookstores, and spent over $500 a year on books and content. So, how has my reading changed? There are some special points I'll...

I was able this past weekend to right a childhood wrong, and I owe it all to emerging e-technology. The background: years ago, we would summer at a cottage near one my uncle had. My cousin Andy had a large collection of MAD Magazines and Archie comics from the 60's and 70's that my sister and I used to look at whenever we were over there. Somehow, all or part of the collection somehow wound up in my hands one day, and got ruined---perhaps thrown out by a well-meaning mother on a cleaning streak, perhaps lost or damaged in a...

I have been a Kindle user for its last three incarnations: I bought a K2 to replace my Sony reader because I wanted to use the text to speech feature and I wanted support for multilingual dictionaries, then when my visiting aunt expressed interest, I sold it to her bought the K3. I was happy with it, and when the K4 came out, I was only mildly tempted---until this same dear aunt visited again and told the sordid tale of a husband who stole the K3 out from under her, registered it to his own account and left her reader-less...

So, until this weekend, my tally of relatives converted over to e-reading was as follows: Dad, gifted a Kobo and happily downloading his obscure boyhood favourites off Manybooks.net; Mom with a Kobo still registered to my account, and to which I do all the book loading; Stepmom, also with a gifted Kobo, happily downloading public library books; and an aunt who had bought my old Kindle off of me when I upgraded during one of her visits. So far, so good, right?Well, it turns out that last one hasn't quite gone as planned. The aunt was in town for a...

I'm sure you've read the same headlines I have: ebooks are cannibalizing print sales! They are driving people to pirate their media instead of purchase it! They are threatening local bookstores and small presses as Amazon/Apple/Google set out to rule us all! Or...are they? Might there be a simpler explanation for what's going on in the book marketplace today? Might it simply be that publisher indecision---on now to market, how to price and so on---is translating into customer indecision? Might a less confused customer be a better one?Consider the following case study. I...

I posted earlier about some problems I have been having recently with error-filled ebooks---I am not talking about major editing-process errors, rather, I am talking about typos and formatting glitches resulting from unproofed conversions. People used to complain about these at times before ebooks 'hit it big,' but now that we e-reading customers are a more mainstream group, the complaints are getting increasingly vociferous and this has been the first year where I have really noticed a widespread problem myself. But just how widespread is this problem? Is my feeling that these days, I am becoming more of a copy-editor...

I did an e-purge this weekend, deleting some 50-odd titles from my bloated Kindle, and what I have learned from the experience is this: on the blessing side, the e-universe makes getting your book into a reader's hand easier than ever. But the downside? The reader knows that there's always something else around the corner. If you don't win them over, and fast, they'll bail on you and your book forever, and in less time than you might think.When I started this little spring cleaning, I had 800 books to choose from, right on my Kindle, before I even went...