Review of Kindle Touch on Świat Czytników - the most popular Polish blog about ebooks, with over 450,000 pageviews a month Two extremely helpful and comprehensive articles about ebook market in Brazil were just published at Futurebook. First one, written by Stella Dauer, describes in detail the state of the ebook technology. Eduardo Melo shares information about the current number of titles offered by Brazilian ebookstores, as well as predictions for 2012. So far, based on news coverage from top ebook sites (check posts in Publishing Perspectives), I was convinced Brazil is far more advanced than any other international ebook market. It makes perfect...

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...

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...

From LIBER: A group of 17 European partner institutions have joined forces in the “European Newspapers” project and will, over the next 3 years, provide more than 10 million newspaper pages to the EUROPEANA service. The European Newspapers project (funded under EC’s CIP 2007 – 2013) aims at the aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and Europeana. [Clip] Each library participating in the project will distribute digitized newspapers and full-texts free of any legal restrictions to Europeana. There will be a special focus on newspapers published during the First World War, thus providing a meaningful addition to the resources aggregated by the current Europeana 1914-1918 project. Additional Details in the Complete...

From a post in The Distant Librarian which discusses the new Canadian National Reading Campaign report: In a nutshell, the NRC now has data from a week in Jan 2011, and a week in Jan 2012, so they're able to give us some information about book sales AND book circulations from Public Libraries in Canada, including both hard and e-copy. Some of the interesting numbers: E-book sales comprised 10% of all books sold in English Canada. Public libraries reported that 3% of their circulation comprised digital formats. 1,153,081 print books were sold by retailers including Indigo Books & Music, Amazon.ca and other...

From Publishers Weekly: An international alliance of publishers and publishing associations has succeeded in getting a Munich court to serve cease and desist orders to the operators of two Web sites that have been illegally offering more than 400,000 copyrighted books for free. The operators, currently based in Galway, Ireland, are estimated to have earned over $10 million annually from advertising sales, donations and premium subscriptions. According to the Association of American Publishers, the investigation took over seven months to complete and spanned seven countries. A total of 17 publishing companies filed requests for injunctions involving 170 titles. The Landgericht, a regional...

Really fascinating glimpse of the development of the UK ebook business from BML/Bowker (as a teaser for their annual conference in March): The survey also looks at how the e-book industry fares by genre. The adult fiction market saw spectacular e-book growth in 2011, up from 2.8% of purchases in the four weeks ending 26th December 2010 to 12.5% in the four weeks to 27th November 2011. But again, as e-books are being bought for lower prices, they accounted for only 7.1% of adult fiction spending in the latest period via Bowker – British Book Buyers are Switching to “e” from Print and...

From the press release: MOMENTUM, Pan Macmillan Australia’s new digital-only imprint, has launched today with 22 ebooks available for sale. Pan Macmillan is the first major book publisher in Australia to launch a digital-only list. Momentum’s list is an exciting and vibrant mix of books from established and emerging authors. Publishing ebooks and utilising print-on-demand (POD) technology, Momentum aims to make new and old books more accessible than ever before. Momentum combines all the editorial expertise of a traditional publishing house with strong and highly focused marketing and promotion. The dynamics of ebook publishing allow Momentum to publish globally and at highly accessible...

From a BML/ProQuest News Release: E-book sales are rising to offset a decline in physical book purchases, but only in volume. With the lower price points of e-books versus their print counterparts, the value of book sales is shrinking.” “The Books & Consumers survey shows that in the 48 weeks ending 27th November 2011, compared to the same period the previous year, British consumers’ purchases of physical books declined by 4%, with value down some 6%. However, with e-book purchases included, the total consumer book market grew very slightly in volume terms, up 0.4%, with a market value drop of 3% overall. “The survey...

I’m a mobile freak, spending a lot of time on enhancing my daily life with the smartphone in every possible way. I also share tips on how to better experience ebook-reading with mobile phones. Many users own smartphones, but they are not aware how good their devices are for reading-related tasks. A phone is extremely well-suited to shop for ebooks on the go. You don’t need to have a tablet or ereader with 3G for that. Shopping in Kindle Store is very easy, as it is optimized for small screens. It’s obvious that the major Kindle Store, the one which is a part of Amazon.com...

From Publishing Perspectives.  Here's a snippet: BARCELONA: In a recent memo to publishers on GigaOM, award-winning journalist Matthew Ingram asked a painful question: Remind Us Why You Exist Again? Catalan publisher Ernest Folch has been preparing an answer, although it is partial and in ongoing review… Folch has served as Editorial Director of Ediciones B — a privately held, medium-size trade publisher of best-selling popular fiction and non-fiction — since February 2011. He launched their digital imprint, B de Books, last November, making them the first commercial and profit-driven publisher to offer DRM-free e-books. Prices started at 0.99 euros, a bold step in a market where...