I’m not sure whether you can really call this “ironic”, as misused as that word often is, but it’s certainly amusing. Apple has notified some purchasers of the Steve Jobs biography e-book on iBooks that they should delete the current version and download a new version at no charge, Macworld UK reports. Apple confirmed to Macworld that the emails were genuine and the instructions were to fix formatting problems suffered by a small number of customers who had downloaded the iBook. No changes have been made to the content. Of course, this sort of...

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...

On PaidContent, Charles Arthur brings up one of the important facets of Steve Jobs’s legacy that tends to get overshadowed by Jobs’s hardware successes. Quite apart from all the gadgets Jobs designed, he also designed a new business model for the music industry: the 99-cent song. The headline of Arthur’s article suggests that Jobs’s great success was “persuading the world to pay for content,” but the article itself seems to take the opposite tack: the world was ready to pay for content, but Jobs’s success was in persuading the content-owners to sell it digitally. Arthur explains that...

One of my earliest blog posts about e-books, back in 2002 when I was writing for Jeff Kirvin’s “Writing on Your Palm,” was called “Whither the PDA D&D?”. I pointed out that, whereas fiction e-books had made the transition to portable e-format, role-playing games had yet to do so. Possibly one of the biggest obstacles was the way that so many of them depend on tables, which don’t tend to translate well to small screens. Given how big and thick role-playing game books tend to be, they would seem tailor-made for such a conversion—if someone could get around the...

If the iPad was supposed to be a magic bullet for e-books, why hasn’t iBooks made more of a splash in the e-book market? Jason Bennett asks the question in an entry on Melville House Publishing’s blog, pointing to the much higher Kindle (24%) than iPad 1 (13%) ownership among those waiting in line to buy an iPad 2, and Apple’s overall cageyness about iBooks sales in its quarterly report. Apple certainly hasn’t seen fit to go to some of the lengths Amazon or Barnes and Noble have for providing more avenues of sale for their books. There...

On The Bookseller, Philip Stone looks at the sales performance of a novel, Those in Peril by Wilbur Smith, that was sold in e-book form by Apple and Amazon for £5.99 ($9.79) while bookstores sold the hardcover for £13.30 ($22.07)—30% off its list price of £19 ($31.07). The novel sold remarkably well in paper, becoming Smith’s seventh consecutive hardback number one bestseller. One would think, Stone remarks, that such an inexpensive e-book should surely cannibalize the print sales—but that does not seem to be the case. Stone suggests that Smith must have gained more print readers than he lost...

That’s the provocative theory put forward by Sue Zoldak in an opinion piece on The Daily Caller blog. She starts out by noting that in some cases hardcover prices are lower than e-book prices (something I’ve mentioned before myself), and points out that—unlike the iTunes deal that lowered the price of music when sold digitally—Jobs used publishers’ fears of Amazon to negotiate a rise in e-book prices. This came at the expense of Amazon, who was using exactly the same model to sell Kindles that Jobs had used to sell iPods. The real question...

Since posting my review of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, I have been moved to go back and reread the entire thing, including the latest book that was released only recently. And a couple months ago I had purchased a $20 Groupon to Barnes & Noble, which was only good through April. So it seemed like a reasonable excuse to snag the e-books and do some reading—especially since the books were so reasonably priced. Which, in turn, was a good excuse to get around to reviewing the new Nook e-reader for the iPad, iPhone, and Windows Desktop and see...

Paul linked to a positive Project Gutenberg review of Ibis Reader a few months ago, but it first came to my direct attention when I tried out Jolicloud and discovered what it was: a web-based EPUB reader. It was an interesting idea, I thought, but I wasn’t sure what it was really good for. But a couple of days ago, my perspective changed. One of the great things about Baen Webscriptions and the Free Library is that they allow people who have access to Baen e-books to read them on-line as well as download them. Not too many other...

Raise your hand if you’re surprised. Apple Insider reports that Random House e-book titles have started appearing on the iBooks store, just in time for the launch of the new iPad today. It must have been in the offing for some time before Random House actually announced the change to the agency model. I’ll be watching the liveblogging of the iPad 2 launch event just like anyone, but will probably have to wait for this evening to post my thoughts on it due to my day job. ...

Engadget reports that the Android Market has added a section for e-books, with music and movies apparently soon to come. Upon further research, the books turn out to be Google’s cloud-stored Google Books. The prices are, of course, set to agency standards and so not really anything to write home about. It’s not clear that iBooks is any great danger here, but it’s good to see that Android users have another way to buy titles if they want it. And since these books are readable cross-platform, perhaps it might be more apt to compare them to Amazon or Barnes...

The jailbreak wars continue. Last week, users found that a recent iBooks update had the undocumented side-effect of failing to open DRM-protected e-books on jailbroken iOS devices. ReadWriteWeb presumed this was Apple’s way of trying to protect its DRM from being broken and unprotected e-books subsequently exported. However, the jailbreakers have struck back. ReadWriteWeb now reports that the developers of the jailbreak Sn0wbreeze have released a new version that supposedly fixes iBooks “100%” (though some users have still reported trouble with it). As always, if you jailbreak your device, you do so at your own risk. I’m...