The Bookseller notes that cheap and discounted e-books have been selling really well on Apple’s iBookstore. HarperCollins and Pan Macmillan are mentioned to have a lot of cheaper-then-print e-books on the bestseller list, whereas Hachette who prices e-books higher only has two books there. David Roth-Ey, group digital publisher for HarperCollins, said: "Our goal is to find the optimum price for our e-books to maximise value for ourselves and our authors, while giving consumers a fair deal and incentivising them to buy, rather than motivating them to fileshare our digital content." Roth-Ey...

Every Friday morning I post a list of my favorite posts for the past week. Purely a subjective judgement on my part. Google Book Settlement market analysis on how it would work with academic libraries Original Alice manuscript digitized by British Library iPhone/iPad e-book app review: iBooks by Chris Meadows iPhone/iPad e-book app review: BookShelf by Chris Meadows Digital Writing and Pedagogy: How Do We Teach, What Do We Teach by Matt Hayler Whitcoulls of New Zealand to launch ebooks – Kobo is branching out High Quality free audiobooks can be read on app for iPhone/iPad Summing Up the Last Week for Amazon: Phases I, II, and...

Paragon, a German company, builds expensive dictionaries for the iPhone, Blackberry and other platforms. According to the LA Times: With Google pushing its free dictionary and others like Dictionary.com dominating Web searches, Paragon Chief Executive Alex Zudin contends that there's still a very attractive market for the "premium reference content." "Google can't own this market," Zudin said over lunch recently. "Merriam-Webster is the Bentley of the dictionary world." For many, the fast-improving free dictionaries are good enough. Paragon's reference apps target the hyper-intellectual -- the grad student in English, the business executive and the PhD, Zudin said. The elite names in...

They have a long interview with the Edge people and you can find it here. Just a snippet: Q: The eDGe is the first e-reader with a dual display. Or maybe the first netbook with an e-reader display... How did you come up with this design? AM: We saw a gap in the e-reader market for a device that could combine reading with note taking, Web surfing, email, Word/PowerPoint/Excel and music and video playing and recording, which would ultimately enhance the learning process as well. My teenaged kids confirmed it as well, saying they couldn’t do much with just a dedicated...

You can't get more mainstream than that! The Opus is selling for $199.95 on the Network. If you check out the HSN site you can see a video demo of the unit. Smart Bitches is running a survey to find out where you buy your romance ebooks. It's a one question job with a big long list. Go over and complete it. The first dial-up BBS went on line in Chicago 32 years ago today, says Wired. I remember when I got started with dial-up and was hugely excited by my 300 baud connection using acoustic cups. Why...

That's the premise of an article by Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Their email has a "teaser" but the full article is only available by subscription, which I don't have. Looks interesting, though. Can any of our readers tell us more? All together now: Many university presses are in the same leaky boat, and they had better start bailing together if they want to stay afloat. Among the many holes that threaten to sink them, one of the largest is the problem of making and selling electronic books. Many individual publishers have been daunted by...

This is worth reading.  I’ve excerpted the beginning and the end, but the middle is where the meat resides. All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way. … The fact remains, of course, that not only is online...

Might the inherent hassles of DRM---not just the legal complexities associated with copyright books---be one reason why only public domain volumes are offered through the Google-Sony partnership announced today? And isn't DRM fraught with risks anyway, as shown by the encryption-related patent suit that Discovery Communications has filed against Amazon? The solution is simple. No DRM---at least not for publishers that, like my own, don't want it. Sony acted brilliantly in lining up the new 500,000-book public domain initiative with Google, which can provide the infrastructure and scanning power to grow the collection. While things aren't as open...

Received the following press release from Pan Macmillan: Today, GoSpoken.com, mobile platform for audio andeBooks, and the book publisher Macmillan announced an extension of their already existing partnership on audio books for the mobile; the full catalogue of more than 320 ebook titles from MacMillan will be made available to all UK mobile phone subscribers. EBooks have successfully entered the market on several portable eReaders. Macmillan has been one of the most active publishers to engage with mobile channels and is now extending its activity through GoSpoken. Whilst the portable eReaders cost up to a few hundred...