From the GPO: The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has signed an agreement with Barnes & Noble to sell Federal eBooks. Titles are available in eBook format for Barnes & Noble’s Nook eReader. GPO works with Federal agencies to produce their publications, books, and reports in print and digital formats, including eBook formats. Approximately 30 eBook titles are available including popular titles like the Public Papers of the President-Barack Obama, Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster And The Future Of Offshore Drilling (the BP Oil Spill Commission Report), the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, and the newly released Basic Guide to Exporting from...

There's a new free ebook site in town - 100 Free Ebooks For Your Kindle. According to the site it is updated several times a day. Checking out the site I see that they are NOT a list of public domain books....

From an article in TechNewsWorld: ... To get a better feel for the effects of e-textbooks on student productivity, the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine's Health Sciences launched an iPad pilot program and study. With the aid of a US$10,000 Technology Improvement Express Award grant from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Middle Atlantic Region, Hofstra set out to determine the effectiveness of the iPad and apps as a tool for medical education. The grant paid for 10 iPads and cases, along with textbook, productivity and medical applications. Ten out of the 40 first-year medical students and 10 out of approximately 30 faculty members...

  Somehow Smashwords seems to get all the press, but Wattpad is a force to be reckoned with on a worldwide basis.  Here are some numbers: 3.2 million stories posted with another 300,000+ added every month Over 1 BILLION minutes spent on Wattpad each month 8 Million unique monthly visitors 1 comment posted every second Many popular titles have over 10 million reads and more than 10,000 comments And just look at the languages that that they cover: On June 2 they are having a meetup in New York City.  Here are the details.  You can sign up here. As you know, we took Manila and London by storm...

From the press release: Worldreader (worldreader.org), the non-profit transforming reading in developing countries by distributing digital books to children with limited access to literature, kicked off a campaign today with support from renowned soccer team FC Barcelona (Barça), asking people to help send 1 million e-books to students in sub-Saharan Africa. Using new technology and digital platforms, a $5.00 donation to Worldreader provides students in Africa with access to books that educate and inspire, so they can improve their lives.  Donations can be made through millionbooks.worldreader.org. Having already put more than 100,000 e-books into the hands of 1,000 students in Africa, Worldreader is...

Moderator, Laura Hazard Owen, Staff Writer, paidContent/GigaOM:   Charlie Redmayne, CEO, Pottermore: Pottermore came about from Rowling and her agent in order to give something back to fans.  Trying to create a digital future for Harry Potter.  First two parts in place.  Very expensive to run so created a commercial business as well to fund the site.  All ebooks are bought from Pottermore directly.  Unique arrangement, first time Amazon has driven customers to another platform.  Amazon "got it" and didn't have to be dragged into it kicking and screaming.  Other retail partners understood as well.  Can work for other brands. Thing that...

Moderator: Robert Andrews, Senior Editor, International, paidContent/GigaOM:   Thomas Bella, CEO,Piano Media:   sets up paywall for two countries in Europe.  When pay get premium content for all other newspapers they handle.   Created to lower the barrier to payment.  Split revenue with producers based on where the payment was made and what the user looked at.  Like cable TV in the US.  They make 30% and rest goes to publishers.  Have about 1% on online users in Slovakia.  When  put in paywall did not see users decline.  Found that even those who don't want to pay will stay on the site and...

Moderator, Staci D. Kramer, Editor and Senior Writer, paidContent/GigaOM Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, Chairman and CEO, Digital Media Group, News Corp.: Investing quietly in early stage companies in China for about a year.  Took a 20% position in a public film company in China recently.  Seeing some light at the end of the tunnel in MySpace. New media companies, like MySpace, are not as stable as traditional companies and when you get a bit behind it is very hard to catch up because everyone else moving so fast. Yahoo needs big answers and not many of them at a given time....

Moderator, Tom Krazit, Senior Writer, paidContent/GigaOM:   Rob Malda, Chief Strategist and Editor-at-Large, Labs Team, Washington Post: Have projects on all sides of the debate.  Have apps and HTML5 and agnostic as to which to use.  Pick whatever work with the content.  If want your stuff to work everywhere then HTML5 is the way to go.  Unless have a very specific reason to go native code then will be much faster to go to HTML5.  A lot of folks will go hybrid.  Can do this if have enough employees to go native plus HTML5, but not good for start-up with few people....

Got the following email from Paolo Amoroso: Italian engineering Professor JuanCarlos De Martin @demartin has found that the Italian Constitution downloadable from the official government site is effectively crippled with DRM. It's a PDF document that prevents content copying (not even for accessibility) and search engine indexing. Some details are available in this blog post:   http://ildebugger.com/2012/05/23/la-costituzione-drm-governo/   machine translation via Google Translate http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=it&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fildebugger.com%2F2012%2F05%2F23%2Fla-costituzione-drm-governo%2F&act=url   This is especially ironical considering that Michael Hart started Project Gutenberg by sharing the US Declaration of Independence.   This was pointed out to me by Giovanni Salvatori @borsista.   Regards,     Paolo Amoroso ...

Moderator, Larry Kramer, President and Publisher, USA Today:   Jim Bankoff, Chairman, CEO, Vox Media:  Only in the digital arena in sports and tech coverage.  Started with advantage of starting with clean slate, but have the disadvantage of not having the cash flow of older companies. Model is to find web-native talent and empower them.  Are a start-up but have grown to be one of the top 10 publishers on the net.  In sports area didn't want to "build a brand" because there are some very good brands already out there.  Decided that fragmentation was the way to go. SEO for Google...

Moderator, Robert Andrews, Senior Editor, International, paidContent/GigaOM Nick Bogaty, Director of Busines Development, Digital Publishing Group, Adobe Systems:  Started software project with Wired three years ago.  Great initial excitement when iPad come out.  But now are at the point of growing real businesses with real content, real advertising and real subscribers.  Provide software creation tools but also act as a distributor.  Now distribute 120,000 publications a day and last year served 26 million publications.  Shows that the business is real.  Producing the Wired magazines was a total collaborative experience.  Actually slept at Wired to see how they put out the magazine....