Technical publisher O’Reilly is having an e-book sale today to benefit Japan. All of the publisher’s books are on sale for 50% off, and O’Reilly will be donating all revenues, less author royalties, to the Japanese Red Cross Society. If you’re actually donating money directly, I’ve been told that Japan’s disaster relief now has just about all the money it needs, and it’s better to make a donation to places that can make a difference in more parts of the world, like Doctors Without Borders. But on the other hand, 50% off DRM-free O’Reilly e-books would be a great...

I may vacillate between liking Apple’s iOS devices and disapproving of Apple’s policies, but sometimes Apple is capable of doing cool things completely unrelated to hardware and software matters. Kevin Rose has posted to his blog a couple of interesting emails from an Apple Store employee in Japan. The messages detail the heroic measures Apple took to help both the people of Japan, who relied upon the store’s open wireless hot spots (a rare thing in Japan) to message their families, and Apple’s employees (retail and corporate), who were faced with offices fifty floors up in buildings with...

eBookNewser reports based on a paywalled story on Nikkei that the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan has announced it will adopt EPUB 3 as its standard format. Expected to be finalized in May, EPUB version 3 will include support for displaying vertical text, which is commonly used in Japanese-language books. This will allow Japanese books to be read on overseas e-reader devices. (Though given the territorial restrictions that currently plague e-book sales, it’s anyone’s guess just how many overseas readers this will actually benefit.) The EBPAJ is expected to finalize its specification by the end of March. (We...

I remain intrigued by the fact that, helped along by the "free spree," The Path of Dreams had 2118 total Amazon downloads for October, while A Man of Few Words had 1900. And yet paid sales of the latter continue to outstrip the former ten to one. It seems that people were more willing take a chance on the "exotic" looking The Path of Dreams when the opportunity cost was zero, but are more willing to actually pay for the familiar A Man of Few Words (this was true even when they were priced the same). Joe Konrath emphasizes the importance a...

According to Bloomberg, Sony will start selling the readers for the first time since 2007. They hope to sell 300,000 readers in the first year through a venture with KDDICorp, Asahi Shimbun Publishing Corp. and Toppan Printing Co., who will provide the content. They will face some competition from Sharp which plans to start an Japanese ebookstyore service next month. Sony said in May that it plans to start selling ereaders in China, Italy, Span and Australia this year. In Japan the Pocket Edition will sell for about 20,000 yen ($240) and a bigger screen unit for about...

From the Mainichi Daily News: Under the National Diet Library Act, publishers must send copies of all printed books to the library. However, texts published only on the Internet remain outside the law and, save those collected from government ministries and agencies' websites, un-catalogued by the library. The National Diet Library -- similar to the Library of Congress in the United States -- plans to start collecting electronic materials as early as fiscal 2011. A consultative body put together by the head librarian and composed of scholars and publishing industry figures submitted a report on the collection of e-books in June. The...

Only a tiny fraction of the $4-5 billion manga market in Japan is licensed and published in the U.S. every year (to say nothing of the backlist). As a result, websites that host "scanlated" (scanned and translated) manga have become a major source of supply to meet the growing demand by manga fans. Acknowledging the considerable sweat equity contributed by these literary pirates, Hikaru Sasahara, CEO of Digital Manga Publishing, is offering a path to legitimacy by outsourcing the localization of manga to these same "scanlators." An opportunity to work on duly acquired properties for a share of the profits. [Digital Manga...

From Asia Pulse: A common e-book format will likely be available in Japan as early as April, making content viewable on any reader device. Sharp Corp. and e-book software developer Voyager Japan Inc. will submit the specifications of their formats free of charge to the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan. The trade organization, consisting of 41 major publishers, will then create a common format by the end of March. The government will provide 150 million yen (US$1.8 million) as a subsidy. Currently, publishers must pay fees when they convert their e-book content to fit various formats created by reader device manufacturers. This has...

It's called "Jisui", and it means "cooking your own meals." As the digital age grows more and more complicated, in terms of copyright law and copyright theft, some Japanese companies are "cooking their own meals" in a way that some book publishers can't quite digest. A few enterprising firms are setting up shop to digitize selected paper books into e-books for individual customers. But lawyers for the Japan Book Publishers Association (JBPA) say the practice violates Japanese Copyright Law. Oops.This is how it happens, according to a recent report in the Japanese-langauge Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. The firms remove the spines...

From the press release: Sharp Corporation will launch a new cloud-based media service business, named “GALAPAGOS”, to provide a new user experience, while evolving to meet each customer’s changing needs with a network service and device specifically designed for the Japanese market. The first effort in this area will be an e-bookstore service that is planned to begin in December of this year. Two compatible tablet terminals have been developed specifically as e-book readers and will be introduced at the same time. This new e-bookstore provides an “Automatic Scheduled Delivery Service” (fee-based service) for periodical publications. The most recent editions of newspapers...

Sumo wrestlers need iPads, too! Sumo wrestlers in Japan have a problem — but I am not going to be the man to tell them. When they try to send emails from a mobile phone or a personal computer, then can't do it very well thanks to their fat fingers, which push more than one key at a time. The Japan Sumo Association (JSA) has purchased 51 iPads to distribute to their wrestlers, thinking that the larger keyboard on the iPads will solve the problem. I am speculating that a new screen technology might be required: the sumi-eInk screen. More information about this story is...

According The Bookseller, Google will launch its Editions platform in Japan in 2011. Agence France-Presse says that the reception from Japanese publishers has been "chilly". The article goes on to say: Google Japan strategic partner development manager Yoichi Sato told journalists that the Japanese version of Google Editions may have to start with a limited number of titles because major publishers remain uneasy about handing over book data for in-copyright titles....