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....

Katie Gatto at our sister blog Appletell has made a post explaining how to determine which e-books in your iTunes listing are DRM-protected and which are DRM-free. It is a useful little tutorial for those who are not sure (or, for that matter, bother to purchase iBooks titles in the first place). However, annoyingly, Gatto repeatedly conflates DRM with copyright. She begins the article with “If you want to know which of your ebooks are DRM free and which have been protected by copyright,” then mentions that this process “will let you know if a book has...

CNet reports that Apple has released an e-book-related update to its iWork productivity suite. Pages 4.0.4 now includes the ability to export into EPUB files, and Apple has posted a support document to its web site providing tips for creating EPUBs: Documents exported to ePub format will look different than their Pages counterparts. If you want to get the best document fidelity between the Pages and ePub formats, style your Pages document with paragraph styles and other formatting attributes allowed in an ePub file. A sample document is provided on the Apple Support site that...

Kaplan Publishing is going to give away 95 of its books as free iBooks editions for the week of August 24-30. Brett Sandusky, director of marketing at Kaplan, has a post at the O’Reilly Tools of Change blog about the giveaway, and about the marketing challenges that free e-books present. Advocates and enthusiasts of free e-books may be a little confused by this, given that it doesn’t seem exactly “challenging” to give an e-book away for free and reap the benefits that come afterward—after all, Baen has been doing it for over ten years—but Sandusky writes: ...

The UK e-book price of the last Twilight novel, Breaking Dawn, has been “defanged” by consumer protests. The Bookseller reports that publisher Little, Brown is dropping its e-book price from £13.99 ($21.79 at current exchange rates) to £4.49 ($6.99). Graeme Neill of The Bookseller writes: Publishers have said they want to see e-books priced at close to parity with the prevalent print edition, but the publisher has been criticised by customers on Apple's iBookstore for its pricing of Breaking Dawn, with the Kindle edition available for £3.59 [$5.59], and the hardback priced at £7.49...

On July 28 we published a story about how Douglas Cootey bought a copy of Ender's Game from the iBookstore and how it was full of errors. Apple refused to replace the book, even though a corrected edition had been posted to the store. Now the end of the story. From Douglas' website: On Thursday, August 5th, Apple contacted me via email with instructions on how to redownload the corrected version. A reader let me know they had received that email, too, so I know that others with the corrupted text received their corrected versions. It all took place within...

Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, was interviewed by German magazine Der Spiegel about the changes he sees e-books making to the book market. (Reuters has an English translation.) In terms of e-books as a percentage of Random House’s total bookselling revenue: "We're at 8 percent in the United States currently, it rose by leaps and bounds," Dohle told Der Spiegel. "I could well imagine that we get beyond 10 percent next year," he said. However, he doubts e-books will “overtake” printed books within the next five years, dismissing Amazon’s recent hyperbole...

It seems as though Apple has been doing this sort of thing so often that it’s hard to call it “news” anymore, but a Telegraph article reports that four erotica titles mysteriously vanished from the iBookstore best-seller chart after The Times asked how the chart was compiled. Erotica titles have been among the e-book industry’s best-sellers ever since they were being read on 160x160 LCD Palm Pilot screens. Philip Stone, charts editor for The Bookseller magazine, told The Times: “The embarrassment factor of being caught reading something like that in print is not there....

A number of news sites, such as Engadget, are reporting that Apple has released paired updates of iTunes 9.2.1 and iBooks 1.1.1. The iTunes update is largely a bugfix issue, according to its patch notes, but Crunchgear calls the iBooks release a “major update,” adding dictionary lookup of words and improvements to in-line images and PDF viewing. It also includes support for audio and video content in e-books. Given that a lack of dictionary lookup prompted some grumbling when iBooks first came out, the addition should please some of the app’s critics. Of course, the problem...

We’ve covered the saga of David Carnoy’s self-published novel Knife Music quite a bit over the last couple of years. One of the first controversial instances of “app store censorship”, the book was originally rejected from the app store due to a single instance of “the f-word” until Carnoy replaced the word and resubmitted it. More recently, an iPhone appbook containing the first half of the book was released with the obscenity intact, as a sample for the professionally-published hardcover which is coming out soon. Now Carnoy has an essay on Publishing Perspectives talking about his...