One of the benefits of electronic media is that e-book stores are never closed for the holidays—at least for purchasers. But in some cases, for publishers, it’s another story. EbookNewser reports Apple’s iBookstore team sent an email to iBookstore sellers letting them know that the iTunes Connect app and e-book publishing platform is down from now until Thursday, December 29th for the holidays. It will not be taking any new updates during this time, and scheduled releases and pricing changes will be delayed. The iBookstore team wrote in an email to iTunes Connect users: “ We...

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...

EBookNewser has a short piece on Inkmesh, a sort of MySimon-style price-comparison site for e-books. The piece uses the example of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which “costs $5.00 from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony. It’s $6.99 from BooksOnBoard, $7.99 from the iBookstore and $9.99 from the Diesel eBookstore, eBooks.com and Kobo.” This puzzles me more than a little, given that I thought one of the chief tenets of agency pricing was that e-books were supposed to be the same price everywhere. If that’s no longer true (as this report a few days ago suggests...

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 IT World, Ryan Faas takes a look at some of the new features that Apple has added to the iBooks store with the new iBooks release. Citing a blog post by Liz Castro, Faas notes that Apple introduced a new form of fixed-content book for use with picture books, children’s books, and other books where page format is important. However, Apple has only been sharing details of how to create this type of book with a few publishers, and has done so under a nondisclosure agreement. This means that independent publishers and self-publishing authors or artists will be...

Apple has come out with a shiny new version of iBooks, which adds a number of important new capabilities. These include the ability to print PDFs and your own annotations via the AirPrint printing system, support for fully-illustrated books, organizing books into Collections (much like you can organize apps into folders in OS 4, I guess), and also hyphenating text (on OS 4.2 or later). As the above screenshot shows, the hyphenation really looks good, cutting down on rivers quite significantly even in facing-pages mode. I might just have to start reading fully-justified. The new version also...

Well, that didn’t take long. Back in October, I covered Charlie Stross’s post explaining why a middle book in his “Merchant Princes” series was not available in e-book form. Today, Stross posted another blog entry to note that situation has changed: I am happy to announce that The Merchants War has been available on Kindle and, I am told, via B&N and iBooks, since November 19th. (I'd be even happier if someone from my publishers had, like, told me, but the next time that happens will be the first time, so, well, better...

“I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.” —Darth Vader, The Empire Strikes Back Remember how all but one of the “big six” print publishers were so quick to hop into bed with Apple and its agency pricing scheme, out of fear that Amazon would sooner or later unilaterally dictate pricing terms to those publishers from its position of marketing strength, that they actually slashed their own e-book revenue to do it? Publishing executives must surely be starting to feel that twinge of regret that comes from waking up with a stranger by...

If there was ever a site whose URL sounded less worksafe than it actually is, leatherbound.me must surely qualify. As TechCrunch notes , this site is a search engine with a very specific purpose: to compare prices for a given e-book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBooks. It’s not perfect—book titles with special character in them, such as Nick Bilton’s I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works, can cause it to be unable to produce results. And in fact thanks to an influx of traffic from LifeHacker, TechCrunch, and Wired, the search is working...

From the Vook blog: Today, we made a very exciting announcement: We have 47 titles available for sale in Apple’s iBookstore. In the short time since our launch there, we’ve surpassed all players in the digital publishing space to become the largest and fastest growing publisher of enhanced eBooks in the iBookstore. In fact, we’re progressing so fast that by the time the press release hit the wires, we had 57 titles in iBooks.   Not only are we moving at the speed of light, but our titles are being received incredibly well. Reckless Road:...

According to Quill & Quire: University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist is reporting that the Canadian iBookstore is being reviewed by the federal government under the country’s cultural investment policy. According to Privy Council Office documents, an order authorizing the review was filed on Aug. 20....