As already noted in TeleRead, author Ted Heller has recently been bemoaning his woes as a self-publisher in Slate. He's now followed up with a further bulletin on his tribulations as an e-reader, first run on The Weeklings and also aired since on Slate. In particular, he cites the demise of that mobile billboard, the book jacket. Heller takes issue with the fact that Kindles and their ilk never show others your reading choices. "The Kindle tells you nothing about the book that’s being read and therefore nothing about the person reading it," Heller observes—though I'd object that this comes down...

Whenever Stephen King releases a novel, readers line up to grab his latest book. But those looking to download the digital version of Joyland might never get the option. King will not release Joyland as an e-book when it comes out on June 4, according to the Wall Street Journal. King, an e-book pioneer, held on to the novel’s digital rights in hopes of spurring his fans to buy the print edition in bookstores. He said it is unclear when he will make the coming-of-age tale available digitally. “I have no plans for a digital version,” Mr. King said. “Maybe at some point,...

Much publicity has surrounded the record prices fetched for poetry manuscripts at an auction held by Bonhams in London as part of The Roy Davids Collection of Poetry, Poetical Manuscripts and Portraits of Poets. The sale made a total of £750,000 ($1,141,550). The draft of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember me when I am gone’ fetched £33,650 ($51,217), almost ten times its presale estimate and over twenty times the previous record for her drafts. Modern Brit Philip Larkin’s ‘Love’ fetched £7,500 ($11,415) in his first outing at auction. The news aired on Seattlepi.com—the website of what was once the Seattle Post-Intelligencer daily newspaper—under the headline ‘Digital Backlash’: “If we need any...

The New York Times and Reuters ran articles recently that tell opposing stories about Apple's role in agency pricing. In the Times story, the Justice Department paints a picture of Apple as the ringleader of agency pricing. In the Reuters story, Apple insists that it just had tough talks with the publishers about the future of e-books and pricing. Apple had an interesting claim in the Reuters article that had me hunting down some history. Here's their claim: It [Apple] says that e-book demand "exploded" with Apple's iPad launch, and the average retail price of an e-book dropped to $7.34 from $7.97. I can't...

The numbers of e-books sold every year continues to rise, and publishers are making more money from them, too. Data from the annual BookStats study released by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group on Wednesday May 15 showed 457 million e-books were sold last year, accounting for 20 percent of all book sales reported by publishers. That’s up from 15 percent last year. Sales of fiction e-books rose by 42 percent in 2012, while the growth in sales of nonfiction e-books was just 22 percent. Perhaps most telling, however, was the fact the "e-book sales in the children’s...

The Real Costs of Publishing a Book (Media Shift) At every writers conference or self-publishing panel the question that almost always inevitably comes up is: “How much will self-publishing really cost me?” --- New Bookstats Report Shows Spectacular Growth of eBook Market Since 2008 (The Digital Reader) The American Association of Publishers announced their latest annual BookStats report today, and while the full report won’t be up for sale for another week or so, I got an early look at some of the data. --- eInk Announces New e-Paper Technology Called Mobius (Good e-Reader) E Ink has just unveiled a new large screen e-paper display screen that will soon...

'Unbundling' in the Book Business: The Fourth Big Trend (Shatzkin Files) A few weeks ago, I wrote that there are three big forces driving the future of publishing: scale, verticalization, and atomization. I was wrong. eBook Spending on the Rise (Digital Book World) In 2012 ebooks accounted for 11% of all book spending, according to a recap in Publishers Weekly... OverDrive Unveils Big Library Read Pilot Project (Good e-Reader) Overdrive has gained the support of over 3,000 libraries for a new pilot project to take ebook accessibility to an entirely new level. The intention behind this new initiative is to create a global “library book club.” Amazon Acquires Samsung Colour...

MediaShift and PBS are getting into the e-book business. The first line of e-books will focus on topics within the MediaShift realm. The books are Your Guide to Cutting the Cord to Cable TV and How to Self-Publish Your Book. Both books provide a ‘how-to’ on the respective topics with the ‘Cutting the Cord’ book also including essays on the topic. MediaShift says it plans to roll out more books in the coming months. These two topics seem like safe choices in first releases. However, these topics (especially self-publishing) have been covered so much with dozens and dozens of books on the marketplace. The more...

If you're looking for new reading material this summer, Amazon Local might have what you need. The discount site is offering a free voucher to purchase specific Kindle books for just $1.00 each. The voucher is only good for 37 titles, which are all part of a series. Some of the books include The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Potzsch and subsequent tales; The Dead Man volumes by Lee Goldberg; and The Mangel Series by Charlie Williams. Some of these books already seem popular with readers. Potzsch’s books have thousands of reviews; whereas books in the Simply Sarah Series range from one review to...

Note: An update of this post on LibraryCity.org focuses on education-related issues of read-aloud apps. A Catch-22 dogs those of us who most often read e-books visually but also want to hear them when we’re exercising or driving. The usual e-bookware doesn’t always come with or work with text to speech capabilities. Even if it does, we can’t control the aural part as closely as we’d prefer. I myself like the Moon+ Reader Pro Android app, and I’m in love with the added-on “Amy” voice, a British-accented delight from another developer, Ivona, now an arm of Amazon. But I can’t revisit already-viewed text quickly enough while I’m hearing audio by...

What News Organizations are Learning from their eBook Efforts (Poynter) News organizations have responded to changes in readers’ habits by moving beyond the newsstand and toward the bookshelf, zeroing in on ebooks as a new revenue source and a way to explore genres not typically found on front pages or home pages. Back to the Future: What if the Mass Media Era was Just an Accident of History? (Paid Content) We are used to thinking of a “mass media” market made up of large newspapers and TV networks as the normal state of affairs in media, but what if that was just a...

This book had me diving into my current e-book projects within the first few minutes of opening the review copy, looking at how to improve the preview, feedback hooks, tagging, category choice, etc. And by the end, I had a whole checklist of sites to visit, tweaks to make, programs to sign up for. That's how useful it is. Irish author and self-publishing proselyte David Gaughran has turned himself into quite an advocate for the e-publishing revolution. Advocate is putting it mildly; I wouldn't like to be the publisher or vanity press on the receiving end of a diatribe like this....