From the press release: Santillana USA, the world's leader in Spanish language publishing, announced a 78% increase in e-book sales for the November 2011-January 2012 period. This increase, which corresponds to the United Sates and Puerto Rico alone, has been the biggest recorded by the company since it started offering titles in a digital format. Record breaking sales of e-readers and tables for the last holiday season is credited with propelling e-book purchases. Hispanic readers purchased titles in various categories, with literature, romance, and biographies being the most popular ones. This reflects a broad interest of a community in search of digital books in...

The Lamar Soutter Library has launched the Journal of eScience Librarianship. The first issue's "full-length papers" are: "DataONE: Facilitating eScience through Collaboration" "An Assessment of Needed Competencies to Promote the Data Curation and Management Librarianship of Health Sciences and Science and Technology Librarians in New England" "Tiers of Research Data Support Services" | E-science and Academic Libraries Bibliography | Digital Scholarship | [Via DigitalKoans under a Creative Commons LIcense]...

From the Daily Iowan: Authors want electronic publishing, and the University of Iowa Press is following with the trend. UI Press Director Jim McCoy said the press has approximately 800 books in print, with around 75 percent of those books digitized. Around 5 percent of total book sales is from e-books, he said, whereas two years ago, the sales from e-books were practically nothing. "I would say that's a substantial jump," he said. The press currently offers or publishes an electronic version of almost every book it has, because it is expected in the marketplace, McCoy said. "We distribute almost to anyone who's in the...

That's the title of a most interesting article in ReadWriteWeb.  Written by someone in the trenches.  Here's an excerpt: If you were to visit the library on the campus where I teach, you would see students waiting to use outdated desktops in the computer labs and library, particularly around midterms and finals week. It seems odd at first, considering the school has a laptop requirement for all undergraduates. That means you have to have a laptop computer when you enroll, and presumably, as an instructor, I can require my students to bring them to any class. But here's the reality: laptops break,...

  The press release says it all: Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today expanded its portfolio of bestselling NOOK® devices with the introduction of NOOK Tablet – with 8GB of memory,...

From the FuturEbook blog: Brazil is not a world example when it comes to digital books. The estimate is that we are three years behind big markets like North America. However, 2012 promises to be the year that things will really happen, so we present here an overview about the technology - both formats and devices - used in Brazil. Formats So far, the most widely used format for eBooks in Brazil is the PDF, which is a shame. As everyone knows, PDF is not a document format suitable for digital books, since you cannot resize the text, change the layout or...

From Today's Zaman: As the electronic book market continues to thrive around the world, particularly in the United States, e-books are slowly gaining popularity in Turkey. The first electronic book was launched in Turkey in April 2010 by idefix.com, now one of the most popular online bookstores in the country. The website offered 25 e-books for free to booklovers, in cooperation with the Can Publishing House. There are now 2,964 e-books for sale on idefix.com, a modest figure compared to the number available on Amazon.com, one of the biggest online booksellers in the US. Amazon now boasts almost 2 million e-books...

That's the title of an article in the New York Review of Books by Tim Parks.  Responding to ebook-hating authors like Jonathan Franzen, he says, in part: Only the sequence of the words must remain inviolate. We can change everything about a text but the words themselves and the order they appear in. The literary experience does not lie in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the “possession” of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to...

I love word games and this one by John Cog is certainly different from what's currently out there.  From the Amazon description: Create words by combining the correct sets of letters from two columns. Just select a word's vowels and their matching consonants, and then watch as the completed word appears onscreen. You don't need to rearrange any letters, since the letters from each column occur in the same order as in the completed word. (You'd match RPTN with EUIO to form ERUPTION.) The easy-to-play, matching-game format means no text entry is required. And the excitement increases as the game progresses...

From E-Reader-Info: There are reports that Amazon started to order 6" color (Triton) touch E Ink panels from E Ink. E Ink will ship over 3 million displays a month to Amazon - starting next week - which probably means Amazon will soon announce the new e-reader. E Ink is already shipping 9.7" Triton displays to Ectaco, used in their Jetbook color e-reader, which is already shipping in eastern Europe. They are also shipping the same displays to Hanvon for their Chinese market reader. More in the article....

Peter Meyers is one of the most intelligent and creative people working in the ebook field today.  The Kindle Chronicles has just posted an interview with him and I suggest you give it a listen.  Anything Peter says is worth listening to. Interview (starts at 11:13) - I spoke with Peter Meyers, author of the just-published Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual, on February 16th by Skype. Since finishing the 280-page tome, he has returned to work on Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience. This is the second half of the interview. I will post the first half separately as a TKC Extra. ...

From an article in The Digital Shift: University of California, Berkeley, law professor Pamela Samuelson, on behalf of more than 80 academics, sent a letter on Monday to Judge Denny Chin asserting that academic authors should not be included as part of a class authorization in the high profile Google Books case, due to fundamental disagreements between the interests of academics and other types of authors. Samuelson has written and lectured often as a critic of the Google Books case, and of the proposed settlement which was rejected by Chin last year. In her latest letter, she writes that the Authors Guild and other...