The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, if you're not familiar with it, is generally agreed upon as being one of the finest graduate business schools in the country. Unbeknownst to TeleRead until just earlier today, however, was the school's online business analysis journal. It's called Knowledge@Wharton, and we've learned that the smart minds behind the website recently teamed up with Ernst & Young to produce a free, video-enhanced e-book titled Mobile Banking: Financial Services Meet the Electronic Wallet.  "Mobile banking is far more than simply online banking by using mobile phones," according to a press release that accompanied the e-book's launch. "Banks...

Toni Weisskopf has posted a series of messages to the Baen Bar indicating major changes in the offing for the Baen Ebooks (nee Webscriptions) store. Baen is finally on the verge of getting its titles placed directly into Amazon (and is negotiating with others such as Barnes & Noble, etc.) The problem is, that comes with pesky contractual obligations. The changes amount to the following: “Old” bundles containing books that have already been published will no longer be available for bundle-priced purchase. (Already-purchased ones should still be available for download, though it is possible some books may...

Cory Doctorow—blogger, former EFF employee, and all-around Internet activist—has a new novel out. It's part of the Humble E-Book Bundle I mentioned a few days ago. It's also available for free, separate from said bundle, from his website. I bought the bundle, and also checked out the free version from the website, and figured it would be worth a review. Is it worth reading free? Well, for starters, sometimes it seems like Doctorow has this Jeckyll and Hyde thing going on. It's like there are two different Cory Doctorows who show up in his writing. Not so much "good Cory" and "evil Cory," but more...

EBookNewser reports on an interesting e-book promotion. The publisher of You Changed My Life: A Memoir is giving away free e-books of the title to anyone who goes (to a participating theater) to see the the movie based on the book between July 27 and August 3. Like the book, the movie The Intouchables tells the story of the relationship between a quadriplegic French aristocrat and the Algerian ex-con he hires as a helper. Moviegoers will get a coupon code that will permit download of the e-book from stores including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Sony. I...

Foner Books’s blog reports that Amazon has lately reassigned new ASINs (Amazon Sales Identification Numbers) to thousands of free public domain e-books. This has the practical effect of orphaning them from their sales histories and reviews, and making thousands and thousands of web links to them no longer work. Amazon has also apparently changed the weighting of its “also bought” lists, so that paid public domain books show up with more prominence and frequency than free versions of the same books. It may not necessarily be all bad news, though. The relative absence of public domain titles...

On Felicity Wood’s blog, Julia Crouch writes a guest post about her experiences writing on trains, using it in part as a metaphor for the e-book experience, and partly to discuss a publicity project she did in which she wrote a complete short story over the course of her train journey to and from a writers’ convention. The story, Strangeness On A Train, has been published as a free eBook on Amazon and Apple, as well as being printed up into samplers to be handed out on the Harrogate train and at the Harrogate Crime Writing...

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but I still mean to get the whole series reviewed so it’s time I got around to another one. As with prior reviews in the series, in each review I’ll include spoilers for previous books or stories but not spoil the ending of the current one. (Too much, anyway.) Remember that if you should want to read this or other books in the series based on my reviews, all the books up through Mission of Honor are available as free e-books via the Fifth Imperium Baen CD site, from...

Even though the Justice Department has kiboshed “most favored nation” deals in the arrangement with the three agency publishers who settled, those deals are only binding on those publishers. Amazon is still using it in its arrangements with smaller publishers, and will probably continue to do so until and unless the DoJ turns its gimlet eye on them. The New York Times and PaidContent, among others, are reporting on the case of Buzz Bissinger’s 12,000-word essay “After Friday Night Lights,” a sort of afterword to his book Friday Night Lights whose normal list price is $2.99. However, this...

The idea of throwing in a free e-book copy with purchase of a printed book is one that a lot of book fans have long said they’d like to see publishers try. Well, now one is—though it’s a comic book publisher. Marvel has posted an article on its news blog announcing that, starting in June 2012, it will be bundling digital codes with all $3.99 Marvel comics—flagship titles such as Avengers, Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man, and others—that will allow download of the same issue in the iOS and Android Marvel Comics apps at no additional fee. Marvel already bundled...

I just noticed that an e-book I reviewed here some time ago, Agatha H and the Airship City by Phil and Kaja Foglio, is currently being offered as a free Kindle e-book. (Barnes & Noble and Kobo do not appear to be following suit; the book is still $8.19 for the Nook or $7.69 for the Kobo (or $9.99 DRM-free from Kobo. Is this new, offering a DRM-free book at a higher price?). But if you want to buy it, you should get it for $6 DRM-free from Baen instead.) The book is the novelization of the first part of...

The Read an E-Book Week website for 2012 is loading up on promotions and giveaways for the March 4-10 week (and a few that will cover the entire month of March, in honor of the proclamation of Read an E-Book Month in Canada). 15 authors are offering free giveaways at the moment, and over 20 ebook publishers are also supplying promotions.  The list of participants come from Canada, the U.S., the Philippines, Argentina, Italy, Australia, Poland and Hungary.  And at present, there are contests to give away as many as five ebook reading devices. Rita Toews would like to remind everyone of...

Read an E-Book Week has updated its new website for 2012. Designed by myself, a longtime supporter of REBW (and why not? Web design is my day job), the REBW12 site provides the same great content about ebooks, plus an easier-to-navigate design and easier access to specials and freebies. This year's big news is, of course, the recognition of the Read an E-Book Program by the Canadian Parliament by passing a motion declaring the entire month of March Read an E-Book Month! Other parts of the site have been updated as well, including information about the ebook market, links leading to...