At FutureBook, “namenick” has a post explaining why he sees Kobo as being much better-suited than Amazon or Apple for international expansion. In short, Kobo has much better international content availability. Where Amazon has been opening separate stores for various different countries and languages (most recently a French store), Kobo makes all content for all languages available from the same store. One example which shows why Kobo is ahead of iBookstore or Kindle Store – Smashwords. Books from Smashwords are theoretically available at Kindle Store, Kobo and iBookstore. The deal with Amazon doesn’t seem...

Marie Lebert's review of the past forty years of ebooks continues over at Project Gutenberg News with eBooks: 1993 – PDF, from past to present. Lebert's post focuses mainly on the timeline of the format's evolution, so I heartily recommend you supplement it with Nate Hoffelder's OMG PDF WTF at The Digital Reader, which highlights some of the format's huge security issues....

How expensive should it be to publish an iPad magazine app? If you said it should cost at least £7003 ($11,537) per year, then you’ll like the deal Adobe is offering with the latest version of its Digital Publishing Suite, the iPad magazine InDesign plugin. Designer Elliot Jay Stocks blogs about Adobe’s pricing scheme, which involves a £3636 platform fee plus a minimum of £3367 set toward the .16 per issue Distribution Service Fee Adobe charges.This is in addition to the cost of the software itself, which doesn’t exactly come cheap, and the 30% fee Apple charges for...

eBookNewser reports that children’s author Mercer Mayer is going to be publishing books through e-publisher FastPencil in 2011. He will be publishing nine titles in 2011, and will be creating new character franchises exclusive to FastPencil in addition to the ones he already has. On ZDNet, James Kendrick has an interesting post in which he puts forward the theory that tablet computers are “impulse purchases”—things that people decide to buy because they look cool rather than out of any specific need for them. As such, he points out, they have to be priced low enough that the...

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)—best known as the organization that forced the World Wrestling Federation to change its name to World Wrestling Entertainment—has come up with a clever idea to end paper wasting through accidental or unnecessary printing: a PDF file format that can’t be printed out. The WWF format is a PDF that cannot be printed out. It’s a simple way to avoid unnecessary printing. So here’s your chance to save trees and help the environment. Decide for yourself which documents don't need printing out – then simply save them as WWF. ...

Remember that Mark Twain autobiography, allowed to be published in full only a century after Samuel Clemens’s death? The New York Times reports that it’s turning into a surprise runaway bestseller—the publisher can’t print the books fast enough to keep up with the demand. It originally thought a run of 7,500 copies would be sufficient—after all, who besides scholars would want “a $35, four-pound, 500,000-word doorstopper of a memoir”?—but has printed 275,000 so far and is still not meeting holiday season demand. “It’s frustrating,” said Rona Brinlee, the owner of the BookMark in Neptune Beach, Fla....

Khoi Vinh, formerly the design director for the New York Times’s website, has a post on his blog, Subtraction.com, looking at the problem with magazine apps for the iPad. (A couple of weeks ago, I covered another article on the same issue for which Vinh was interviewed.) The major problem, Vinh says, is that they are trying to be far too much like printed magazines, and failing to take advantage of advances the iPad makes possible. iPad magazine apps do attract strong advertiser interest, Vinh notes to his surprise. He suspects that it may be an indicator of a...

Mike Masnick at Techdirt has a post considering the possible copyright status of the new three-volume Mark Twain autobiography that is being published in its entirety and as Twain originally intended for the first time, a century after his death. Masnick finds the overall copyright claim that the Mark Twain foundation puts on it to be misleading, because the portions of it that have never before been published, as well as the portions that were published before 1923 and any portions published between 1923 and 1963 on which copyright was not renewed, ought to be in the public...

Adobe has released the newest version of its Acrobat system, Acrobat X. The release comes just a few weeks after Acrobat released version 9.4 to patch critical security flaws. The press release is full of claims that it provides better security and efficiency and enables better collaboration. I have little doubt that most ordinary users will probably never touch even a tenth of these new features, and probably won’t notice the difference in general. Christopher Dawson at ZDNet reports on one feature he finds particularly interesting, however—it simplifies the process by which students can build digital portfolios...

“We left Grafton-Underwood at 1700 hours 26 June 1943 to bomb Villacoublay. After making landfall over France we encountered flak and were attacked by FW-190’s….The whole ship was shaking violently…” Recently released by the National Archives, digitized Escape and Evasion Reports are now available for download in PDF format to your eReader of choice. Detailed firsthand accounts of harrowing escapes and near-captures by Axis occupiers, Allied aircrew no longer remain faceless.  Instead, we learn their names, hometowns and quite possibly a new view of World War II that up until now was not available online. The fastest way of getting to the...

Peter Kafka at All Things D’s MediaMemo has an interesting piece looking at the size problems with Condé Nast’s magazine iPad apps, such as the ones for Wired and the New Yorker. Wired’s app weighs in at half a gig for a monthly publication, and the New Yorker is 173 megabytes for a weekly. Kafka explains that the blame can be placed on Adobe’s magazine app, which “essentially functions as an image reader”, turning each magazine page into “several big photos” rather than presenting it as text. The problem with presenting it as text in HTML, New Yorker...

Download Squad mentions this alternative reader today: There are all sorts of compelling reasons to try an alternative PDF reader, security not being the least. Adobe Reader is also quite stingy with its functionality – you can't even annotate PDFs. Nitro PDF Reader is an alternative reader with a modern-looking interface, and it offers generous annotation options. Unlike Foxit Reader, Nitro doesn't appear to watermark your PDF when you annotate it. You can highlight sections of the document, add text, add sticky-notes, and stamp your signature (not a digital signature – just a scanned one)....