On PaidContent, Bill Rosenblatt looks at whether we can ever expect a universal format for e-books, equivalent to “MP3” for audio. He doesn’t think so. For one thing, he points out that MP3s aren’t actually used all that much in digital music sales. Apple uses AAC, which has generally better sound quality. The only major commercial market for MP3s is Amazon, and it only has 10% of the music market. And whereas MP3 had a number of advantages over the competing CD format (in particular, it was much smaller and easier to transfer digitally), EPUB doesn’t offer...

One of the hottest new computer games is the latest entry in the Elder Scrolls franchise, Skyrim. Although I haven’t played the game myself, it seems that one element of the game is that it includes a bunch of in-game books, some of them quite long, that go into the backstory of the game world and various things in it. As Jeremy Hill notes on our sister blog Gamertell, there are so many of them that there just isn’t time to read them while in the game (where there are, obviously, better things to do, like killing dragons). ...

Diane Duane has revised and relaunched another of her backlist as an e-book. This one, Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, takes CSI-style forensic drama (though it was first published in 2002, the same year as the original CSI launched) and puts it into an SF/fantasy setting. It’s one of the few Duane books I haven’t gotten around to reading yet—but now I have a good excuse! Duane writes that she took the opportunity to fix a few issues she’d noticed in the book over the last ten years, including restoring some material that had previously been cut and rewriting the...

For “absolutely no reason”, Diane Duane is running a 50%-off sale on every e-book in her on-line store, good today, October 10th, only. Use the coupon code NOREASON to get the discount. Duane’s e-books are available DRM-free in both mobi (Kindle) and EPUB (Nook, Kobo) formats, and are already quite reasonably priced. 50% off that is quite a deal!...

A couple more e-book-related news items from Diane Duane’s blog that hit in recent days: First, Duane is now able to make available multi-format bundles, including both EPUB and Kindle/MOBI, for all the DRM-free e-books in her store. (And .LIT will be added to these bundles as well, over the next month.) To celebrate, she’s running a week-long 20%-off sale using the coupon code BUNDLE. (When you place the order, you will enter the code on the very last screen after you verify your PayPal information.) Second, Duane has added a package deal where all nine volumes of...

Those worried that Kindle owners might be left out in the cold by Google’s partnership with Pottermore for Harry Potter e-books no longer need worry. On PaidContent, Laura Hazard Owen reports that an Amazon spokesperson told them that Amazon is working with Pottermore, too. Indeed, Owens reminds readers, Rowling said from the first mention of Pottermore’s e-book sales that she would be making the e-books available in as many DRM-free (albeit watermarked) formats as possible, so everyone would be able to read them in their own format of choice. Just because there have been a number of prominent exclusive...

My, how quickly fears can change. It wasn’t so very long ago that Amazon was a big meanie who forced everyone to use DRM whether they wanted to or not. (What’s more, it used a different DRM format from everyone that had gone before, including the Mobipocket format that was the basis for Kindle in the first place, as part of its consumer lock-in strategy.) It wasn’t long before Amazon relented and gave authors greater control over whether DRM was used or not. Now Amsterdam-based publishing exec Jürgen Snoeren, whose post about publishers’ core competencies I mentioned yesterday, is...

Steve Weber of Plug Your Book received the following email from Mobipocket on December 24: Soon, publishing for distribution in the Kindle Store will no longer be available through Mobipocket.com. Publishing and selling in the Mobipocket.com store and other Mobipocket partner retailers will not be affected, but the Digital Text Platform (DTP) will become the preferred path to publishing on Kindle. In the coming weeks, we would like to begin consolidating your titles into one location – DTP. We’re writing to remind you about our earlier message, and to again offer assistance with moving your Mobipocket.com titles to DTP. By making the move,...

The Black Library, the publisher of tie-in novels and audiobooks for Games Workshop’s Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 role-playing game settings, is going digital. To promote the event, the publisher has been giving away some free digital content every Friday for the last four weeks, with something more to go up on the site this coming Friday. Available thus far are the novels First & Only and Nightbringer, the first issue of Hammer and Bolter magazine, and an mp3 of the first disc of the Horus Rising audiobook. The e-books are downloadable in MobiPocket or EPUB format, and are...

Related: TeleRead E-Book Primer Part One: What is an e-book? You may be old enough to remember a time when there were two different formats of video tape--VHS or Betamax. If not, you're almost certainly old enough to remember that there were two different competing high-definition DVD formats a couple of years ago--HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. And you'll know that in both cases, you had to have the right player to play each format: Beta tapes would only play in Beta players, VHS tapes would only work in VHS. It's much the same way with e-books, except...

Andrew Savikas of O’Reilly has posted a very interesting chart of the breakdown of format downloads by percentage of O’Reilly books for the last two years. The chart shows PDFs falling from around 90% of the total to around 50%. The sharpest drop in PDF happened around the end of 2008, and the decline has been more or less stady since then (save for a big spike brought on by an “any book for $9.99” promotion earlier this year). The biggest gain has been seen by EPUB format, which seems to account for about 25%, followed by Mobipocket...

I have lately been thinking about writing an e-book guide for the average consumer—something very simple and basic that breaks down some of the complex issues surrounding e-books into something easy to understand for people who don’t currently know anything about them. Before I begin, I’d like to know what members of the TeleRead community might think such a guide should contain. My new tech support day job has brought home to me once more just what a gap there is between how much the average person knows about computers and how much computer geeks know. In a...