An e-book shop will open on Dec. 1 for Australia ---Read without Paper---and will sell both international and local authors. Supposedly prices will be comparable to those of U.S.-based stores: let’s see. The publicity says that “Over 110,000 Fiction & Non-Fiction Titles” will be be available, including books from “Stephanie Meyer, Dan Brown, James Patterson, Dean Koontz, Nora Roberts and many more.” It will also feature top Australian and New Zealand writers such as Colleen McCullough, Kerry Greenwood, Michael Faber, Nick Cave, Tom Collins, James Clavell, Thomas Keneally and Kathy Lette.  Formats will be Adobe-DRMed ePub, Adobe...

Around the same time Adobe is losing e-booker Bill McCoy and hundreds of other people, it’s expanding investment in digital publishing and restructuring. I’d welcome comments from Adobe with details of new appointments and all that. A post from the Digital Editions blog follows. – D.R. As part of a restructuring announced yesterday, Adobe has made the decision to expand its investment in digital publishing, creating a new organization focused on delivering products to increase digital revenue opportunities for book, newspaper and magazine publishers. This organization will combine the efforts of Adobe's eBook business responsible for the...

Bill McCoy, Adobe’s main e-book guy, is leaving the company “in the near future to pursue other opportunities ‘to be determined.’” He is one of many departing the Adobe, which is trimming back 680 jobs out of around 7,600 to help stay afloat in this dismal economy. I wish everyone the best of luck, especially Bill. Among various projects, Bill and his team have been involved with Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions and Adobe InDesign. Bill sits on the board of the International Digital Publishing Forum, the e-book industry’s main trade group,...

The Los Angeles Public Library won’t buy e-books in a format for Adobe Digital Editions until ADE software supports text to speech, according to Library Journal. OverDrive, supplying ADE-format books for the library, hopes that a solution can be worked out, but if not, it will be “working on other avenues” beyond Adobe. The controversy has all kind of ramifications for disabled and nondisabled users alike. I applaud the Los Angeles library and OverDrive for their concern and hope that it sends a strong message to publishers, especially those who’ve used the Kindle’s DRM to switch...

Adobe is holding a free on line seminar on its ebook platform. Here is the info on what will be discussed: How to author, protect and deliver content using the Adobe eBook platform. How to maximize content interoperability across devices using the EPUB file format. How Adobe ecosystem partners enhance the platform's reach. How publishers, libraries and content aggregators can securely distribute eBooks. Why an open eBook ecosystem serves consumers and publishers best You can find information about the seminar here. I must admit that I find it misleading to call the Adobe ebook platform "open" when it includes DRMed ebooks that can only be read...

Downloading an e-mailed ePub---or any other e-book format---should be a snap. In fact, I don’t recall having problems doing this with a mix of Firefox and Gmail. But today I received the following note from someone in Europe trying to get a press copy of my novel in ePub: “It downloaded as a folder, not as a single file, and even when I tried to compress it, I got an error message from Adobe Digital Editions” (Adobe-originated screenshot). What’s going on here? The email recipient himself is apparently using Gmail, and when I tried Opera with it...

Big publishers are too damn cheap toward development of the ePub format for e-books. The International Digital Publishing Forum is short of the resources it needs to keep up long term with Amazon’s Kindle team---or perhaps with Apple, if Steve Jobs and friends are about to hatch something. Decent shared annotations, anyone? Or reliable interbook linking? What’s more, the official ePub logo is months late, almost surely for want of resources. I’d advise the IDPF against its Scrooge-level miserliness. The more ePub lags in funding, the less leverage publishers enjoy against Amazon and perhaps Apple. Blame Markus Dohle types if Kindle wins If...

Some PDF news today. Thanks to Planet PDF. First, a PDF viewer for the iPhone: this week in PDF has also seen the launch of Readdle's new iPhone-based PDF viewer. PDF Expert 1.0 allows users to save PDF email attachments, perform full-text document searching, navigate using PDF bookmarks and includes support for password protected documents. In addition to PDF documents, PDF Expert can also be used to view Microsoft Office files, iWork documents, HTML, TXT and image files. The built-in network file server allows users to mount PDF Expert as a shared network drive over a Wi-Fi network to any...

For years TeleRead has complained how hard PDF can be on people with disabilities. Now Robert Kingett, a 12th-grader with severe tunnel vision, has shared a harrowing account of his struggles. “I have come across numerous instances where I can’t even read a book, let alone navigate it,” he writes. “And here I’m supposed to study it for class!” Robert finds a partial solution in Accessible PDF Reader, and meanwhile TeleRead community member Bob Martinengo is recommending PDF Equalizer. Just beware. DRM may thwart those trying to use special reading tools. Also this weekend...

“The open-source education software developed for the ‘$100 laptop’ can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to give aging PCs and Macs a new interface and custom educational software.” – David Talbot in Technology Review. The TeleRead take: I wonder if the USB-housed software in time will include a Sugarized version of FBReader? Or other good e-reading software? What’s more, could mainstream commercial e-reader developers use the same USB concept to ease installation? Remember, a Net-connected PC can download and display books---potentially, with Kindle-style ease. Hello, Adobe?...

Stephen King, Dan Brown and Mary Higgins Clark are among the authors of the 5,000 e-titles that Simon & Schuster will offer through Scribd. Currently known as the YouTube of text, Scribd lets people post their own contributions They also can embed them in blogs---everything from sample book chapters to recipes---and traffic is said to be some 60 million visitors a month. More pubs in talks with Scribd Other large publishers are in talks with Scribd, according to the New York Times, and O’Reilly already does business with Scribd. Smart---of both Scribd and the publishers,...

Editor’s Note:  Yesterday I took a comment by Felix Torres and posted it on the front page because I thought it was really important.  After I did that I emailed Felix and asked if he would be willing to write an extended version of his comment for us.  Well he did, and this is the result.  It is, IMHO, the best post we've had this year, and I bet it will take that number one slot for the full year as well. The title, above, is from his email to me.  Thanks, Felix.  PB One of the things that most folks...