Coker and Poynter will be on a panel entitled "The Ebook Revolution" on Saturday, February 13. It will be moderated by literary agent Ted Weinstein. Coker is founder of Smashwords and Poynter is author of Dan Poynter's Self-Publishing Manual. You can find more details here....

Did you know for only $24.95 a month, you can subscribe to a service that gives you access to a database of thousands of articles you can turn into e-books? If you're too lazy or too clueless to write a real book, now you slap your name on another person's work and get rich in the process. Or, so parasitic "Private Label Article" services are leading an ever-growing number of fools to believe. Tonight while reviewing Smashwords titles to add to the Premium Catalog, I ran across an e-book about a common childhood mental disorder. My first thought...

BusinessWeek has a two-page article talking with Mark Coker from Smashwords, about how e-books may be migrating to “the cloud”—that is, to be hosted on remote servers and accessed at need rather than stored on your computer. (Speak of the devil.) The article touches on some of the stories covered by TeleRead in the past—publishers delaying e-books, the multitude of new reading devices. But there are some other very interesting things here, too. Already, many readers are using public libraries as a kind of e-book "cloud." The library e-book distributor OverDrive predicts downloads of...

Check out Why e-books are getting hotter and hotter, a Huffington Post piece by Mark Coker, Smashwords publisher and TeleRead contributor. I’d respectfully disagree with Mark on the issue of screen quality. It is better than before, but still isn’t as close to paper, in my opinion, as Mark apparently thinks---either E Ink or LCDs. Consider the E Ink contrast issue. Still, I believe Mark’s analysis as a whole is right on target. Useful ammo for e-book advocates! Some of the other factors Mark mentions: “Proliferation of multiple-high-quality reading devices,” “Oprah Winfrey,” “Early adopters become new...

Eons ago Crown Books---the retailer, not the publishing group and imprint---made a splash with its slogan, “Books costs too much.” Crown is out of business now. A warning for discounters, among stores or publishers? Not necessarily. First, Crown may well have survived if it hadn’t been for a family feud between a Harvard MBA son and his crazy father, some nasty fallout from the latter’s divorce. Second, I happen to think that price is a major source of resistance for buyers, who have so many alternatives to new books, including used p-books, which pay writers $0 in royalties. The best...

Mark Coker, Smashwords’ CEO, has blogged the details. Cool wrinkle: Mark’s published a bar code for Android cellphone owners to point their cameras at---to facilitate downloading of the Aldiko app. Format in use is ePub---nonDRMed. Hooray! Get it, B&N, Borders and Amazon? A new e-book ecosystem---not just involving Aldiko---is aborning on the Net without “protection” to pollute it. I just hope Aldiko will resist any buyout offers from Amazon. (Via PW.) Disclosure: Both Mark and Tiffany Wong, an Aldiko co-founder, blog at times for TeleRead---which we see as an op-ed for e-book business figures among others....

Print books are like zombie pirates. They don't die easily. When I told my wife Lesleyann I was considering titling this post, "Why Print Books Must Die," she flashed me an icy stare that said, "Don't you dare!" In deference to Mrs. Smashwords, I changed the title. Don't get me wrong. I love print books. Lesleyann and I collect them. Every Friday, we do date night at the book store. Books form narrow hallways in our house. I'd say I'm cursed by print books except it's really more of a blessing, as anyone sharing our affliction will tell you. I don't want print...

Received this press release from Smashwords. By the way, Mark Coker of Smashwords will doing an e-book session with Dan Poynter on Thursday morning, then participating in a luncheon keynote roundtable on ebooks Thursday with Lexcycle, Sony and others at the IBPA's Publishing University. He will also be participating in Mike Shatzkin's Friday morning session at BEA with BookOven, FiledBy and Cool-er Readers. Smashwords, an independent publisher, distributor and retailer of ebooks, today introduced the Smashwords Affiliate Marketing Program. The program allows bloggers, authors, readers, publishers, website operators, online specialty bookstores and professional affiliate marketers to...

Editor’s note:  the following in reprinted in whole, with permission, from Mark Coker’s Smashwords Blog. PB Last month I wrote a two-part series examining why publishers are like venture capitalists and authors are like entrepreneurs. In both pieces, I drew parallels between technology startups and publishing. Today, I add a part three to the series with an exclusive interview with entrepreneur, Forbes columnist, and now Smashwords author, Sramana Mitra. Yesterday, Sramana published two books on Smashwords that explore the secrets of successful entrepreneurship. In the interview that follows, Sramana explores the intersection between entrepreneurship and indie authorship, and shares how authors can think...

Editor's note: the original of this post can be found on Mark Coker's Smashwords Blog. PB. My roots are in Silicon Valley. For most of the last three decades, Silicon Valley was the world's hotbed for startup innovation. Our advantage over the rest of the world was our unique ecosystem of talent and funding, and a culture that celebrated creative risk taking, creative destruction, knowledge sharing and yes, even failure. In Silicon Valley, our heroes are the risk-takers, those who put their skin on the line to pursue a dream of changing the world. For much of these last 30...

[Editor's note:  It seems that some of these charts are truncated.  If you need the originals please look at the Smashwords blog referenced below.]  This is exciting news.  The following is reprinted from Mark Coker’s Smashwords blog with Mark’s kind permission: Alright folks. Turn your clocks forward. If you're waiting for ebooks to go mainstream, it may have happened already. The IDPF reported today in an email to members (see below for snippets of the email) that wholesale ebook sales for January 2009, as reported by the American Association of Publishers, jumped 173 percent over the same period one year ago...

Mark Coker is founder of Smashwords and Dovetail Public Relations, as well as moderator of a February 10 panel at Tools of Change on "The Rise of E-Book." See a San Jose Mercury News Q & A on Smashwords (a publisher for independent writers), which recently signed a Stanza-related distribution deal. - D.R. The IDPF says e-book sales were up 108 percent for the month of November 2008 compared to the same period a year ago. The data is provided in conjunction with surveys conducted by the American Association of Publishers, and represents wholesale sales from only 13 U.S.-based e-book...