Here's fresh proof of the veneration and wonder that books and libraries can inspire—especially in a literature-biased country like Scotland, whose national day commemorates a poet. The mysterious artist who has been crafting beautiful paper sculptures from printed pages, most recently with a nest and egg theme, and leaving them anonymously at libraries, cultural events and literary locations across Scotland, has now delivered a fresh one to Leith Library. The label on the box the Leith sculpture came in said: “Libraries are special places.” The mystery sculptor has been at work since March 2011, when the first sculpture, a tree, was left...

After James Joyce and George Orwell, we now have another 20th-century classic in the public domain exhibiting added value in its print legacy. A rare UK first edition copy of "The Waste Land" by T.  S. Eliot, donated to Oxfam, is to be auctioned at Bonhams in London on June 25, where it is estimated to fetch £2,000-3,000 ($3,100-4,700). This first edition is one of only 460 copies hand-printed by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in September 1923. [caption id="attachment_87111" align="alignright" width="194"] Cover of the UK first edition of "The Waste Land" at auction, courtesy of Bonhams[/caption] Fortunately for modern...

With some e-reader and tablet manufacturers apparently feeling the strain, and other brands pushing hard to corner more of the increasingly commoditized market in smaller generic tablet devices, Budapest showcases one example of a regional device maker trying to build itself some brand equity and move up the value chain, closer to the dizzy heights of an Apple Store. Hungarian tablet, smartphone and mobile device manufacturer MyAudio has opened its MyAudio Arena on central Budapest's hip Király Street, showing off its product range in fine style. The MyAudio Tablet Series 7 range is probably the most suitable for e-reading, with the...

A blog post from Tosca Reno, owner of Robert Kennedy Publishing, alerted me that CANUSA Products, Inc. (formerly known as Canusa Publishing Group), their parent company, has just shut down after 40 years in operation. Their two most popular properties, Clean Eating and Oxygen magazines, are officially in limbo—Reno seems to imply she's trying to find them another home, but that's a wish, not a plan right now. Officially, the reasons for the shutdown make perfect sense to me: She attributes the difficulties to the "sharp decline" of traditional publishing, and to uses' adoption of tablet and electronic devices, as well as...

Following my earlier report on Barnes & Noble’s plans for the German market, Amazon now seems to be taking up the challenge with a new ad campaign, according to Germany’s Buchreport.de. The news and information portal of the principal magazine for the German-language book market shows a banner and tent installation campaign across the German rail network, with one of the major slogans roughly translating as: “Please change … to the text size of your choice.” “Is this Amazon’s answer to the Tolino offensive?” asks Buchreport, referring to the German publishing industry’s own Tolino e-reader platform, featured at the bottom of the same...

Poland’s Piotr Kowalczyk is an "iPhone artist, digital storyteller and self-publisher" with a self-reported download count of 150,000 and rising for his "short stories for geeks"—picture stories created on an iPhone or short Twitter fictions. Kowalczyk is also the founder of Ebook Friendly and an occasional TeleRead contributor. I spoke with him recently about the e-book and e-publishing situation in Central and Eastern Europe; what follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. TeleRead: How has the e-book market developed in Central and Eastern Europe, and especially Poland? Kowalczyk: At the beginning, the e-book market was being developed just like in many other countries around the...

German book press has picked up on the news that Barnes & Noble is still pressing on with its launch plans in Germany. According to the original article, “Barnes & Noble still wants to expand to Germany this year,” this follows on the establishment of Barnes & Noble GmbH in Berlin and a statement by the U.S. book giant’s CEO that the company would be debuting in international markets from June 10th. June has come with no sign of B&N, the article points out, but company staffers are still heralding expansion into 10 international markets within the next six months. The report singles...

That same Japanese craft-based sensibility that brought us origami and ikebana has obviously been at work again—in book stacking. Thanks to Rocket News 24, we can now gaze in wonderment at the awesome creativity and dexterity of bookstore shelf stackers in Japan, as they build book displays that would put their Western peers to shame. Despite the global importance of Sony devices and Rakuten’s Kobo as e-book readers, Japan’s e-book market has reportedly been slow to take off, and is still held back by hidebound publishing houses reluctant to face the same digital disruption that has upset their Western rivals. One upside of...

There’s nothing like a bad idea for going viral, and it seems the British Booksellers Association (BA) took a sere and yellowed leaf out of the French government’s book in calling for government curbs on Amazon, as reported in The Guardian. Tim Godfray, the Association’s CEO, was quoted in the article as saying that UK booksellers identify Amazon as “the main threat to their business.” But aside from demonizing Amazon, Godfray seems just as barren of ideas as the French on how to revitalize bookstores. [caption id="attachment_86329" align="alignright" width="164"] Tim Godfray[/caption] Previous gestures by the BA include support for  Independent Booksellers Week...

The French state has launched its latest battle against change and reality with an attack on Amazon, with Aurélie Filippetti, the Minister for Culture and Communication in the embattled government of President Francois Hollande, castigating the U.S. giant for “dumping” in France. And tellingly, she had to use the Anglicism for the practice, despite endless initiatives from her own department and elsewhere to stamp out Franglais in France. Labeling Amazon the “destroyer” of bookshops, Filippetti claimed that the company abuses its position to artificially lower book prices to create a situation of quasi-monopoly, only to raise them again once competition is extinguished. The positive...

In this era of cloud-everything, Michael Geist reports on a hugely important story for Canadians—the CRTC, the regulatory body that deals with telecommunications issues, has released a new 'Consumer Wireless Code' that addresses a number of consumer complaints about cell phones. Significantly, it effectively eliminates onerous three-year contracts by phasing out the cancellation fee for customers whose contract has lasted a minimum of two years. The new rules also put limits on fees for cell phone roaming and data overages, and require carriers to permit unlocking of any paid-for phone. From the article: "The issue of contract length was the top issue raised by...

By Dan Bloom A little more than a year ago, I wrote a piece for TeleRead that was headlined, ''Cli-fi ebook to launch on Earth Day in April." The article was about a cli-fi novel by Tulsa writer Jim Laughter titled Polar City Red, which I produced and packaged from far away in Taiwan—although every word in the novel belongs to Mr. Laughter, and all the royalties go to his bank account. In the year since his novel hit the book-ordering sites, it sold 271 copies nationwide, which just goes to show that selling e-books, especially dystopian novels about polar cities in...