From the press release: Wattpad ... today announces an ebook distribution agreement with Sony Electronics. A selection of top unique Wattpad titles will be available on Sony’s Reader Store starting today. Titles available immediately include award-winning “Dinner with a vampire. Did I mention I'm vegetarian?” by Canse12 (http://www.wattpad.com/user/Canse12), “Destined To Happen” by lovemehunni (http://www.wattpad.com/user/lovemehunni), “Bye Bye Virginity” by Just-Krissy (http://www.wattpad.com/user/Just-Krissy) and many more. Many of these titles have been read over 1,000,000 times on Wattpad and are the top picks from Wattpad’s library of over 250,000 ebooks created by the community....

Very informative article in CB Online about Kobo. One of Kobo's major investors is Hong Kong-based Cheung King (Holdings). The owner, Li Ka-Shing is one of the richest men in Asia and his holding include a variety of telecom carriers in Asia, Europe and the UK. He also owns China's largest publishing group and a stake in Facebook. The article says that Kobo will be announcing partnerships with telecoms to set up co-branded ebook stores which will be pre-loaded on the carriers phones. Kobo is also working to get onto high end smartphones from RIM, HTC, Dell and...

Received an email from Allen Lau telling me that Wattpad will be available for the iPad when the iPad launches in March. _________________________ Received another email from Kindle Nation saying that Tuesday was their first anniversary. When the Nation started there were 1,031 recipients of the first issue of the newsletter. Over 10,000 now. ...

Wattpad closes funding round: From their press release today "Riding on the success of 1,216% year-over-year growth in 2009, Wattpad today announced that the company has completed its first round of funding. A consortium of private investors including Harvey Beck and Alan Levine, former co-CEOs of ICOM and Bert Amato, co-founder of Delrina participated in this round." ---- Google has issued an apology to Chinese authors on Chinese state-run televsion and apologized for scanning copyrighted books. It promised to stop scanning books without authorization, but announced no new offers of compensation. ---- Apple's tablet does indeed exist confirmed Orange's second...

I went to the Expo yesterday and was quite impressed. It was the first one and everything ran like clockwork - good job! The quality of all the speakers I heard was top notch and the price is right ($30). I would recommend that authors keep an eye out for it next year. The Expo is primarily about regular books, but there were two ebook items of interest. First, Allen Lau of Wattpad was an exhibitor. We chatted about how Wattpad was doing and Allan made the following comments: Looking at the statistics from his servers, there...

Introduction In the early part of the last century when TV was first introduced, the format of early TV programs were borrowed directly from their radio predecessor. “Actors” were hired to fill the screen by reading from a visible script. It was only later when people realized there was more to this new medium and began to act out scenes in front of the camera that modern-day TV production took off. Fast forward to the 90s when music was digitized en mass- First it was RealAudio and then Windows Media. But it wasn’t until Napster, iTunes and more recently...

Another edition of this fascinating report has been issued. You can find the full report here. Here are some highlights: • Although Java devices continue to be the most popular mobile ebook devices, the usage gap between Java devices and iPhone is shrinking. Fewer than 50% of ebook consumption was on Java devices while 42% of was on iPhone, this compares to 63% for Java devices and 33% for iPhone in Q2 2009. BlackBerry usage has grown almost 160% compared to Q2. • US replaced Indonesia as the leading country in mobile ebook consumption in this quarter. Its...

It looks as if social sites such as Wattpad can lead to commercial success. Wattpad writer, Abbie-Alex Stobbart, writing under the pen name Redflame, will see her ebook "The Blind Truths About Vampires, Werewolves, Witches" go into print in early 2010. The press release does not give the publisher's name. According to Wattpad's figures the book was read by over 200,000 readers within 4 weeks and resulted in Wattpad organizing a cover art contest for the book. The print edition will use the winning creation by Caitlin Richardson....

Received this press release from Wattpad. This is certainly good news as Wattpad is gaining worldwide acceptance for its platform. In parts of the world it is becoming a definite force for literacy. The release reads as follows: Wattpad, the world’s most popular ebook community, today announced its support for EPUB, the International Digital Publishing Forum’s XML-based standard for digital books and publications. “We are excited about the support of EPUB, which is quickly becoming the de facto standard for ebooks,” said Eva Lau, COO of Wattpad. “It opens the door to a whole host of content...

Appearing on both Motley Fool and besttabletreview.com (who published this chart), these stats are from a study by iSuppli. As you can see from the graph, Amazon's market is 45%, Sony's is 30% and 25% goes to others. The question is, of course, what do they mean. First, since Amazon doesn't release, supposedly, its Kindle sales figures I don't know how the analyst has come up with these percentages. Looks like some speculation to me. Taking them as true, however, here's what they mean to me. First, Sony has done a pretty good job of garnering market share with inferior devices. ...

This is a big deal for all us Nokia fans. For those who don't know (mostly here in the US) Nokia has opened its own app store under the "Ovi" moniker. As Nokia is the largest phone seller in the world this means lots of people will be looking there for an ereader. This is from the Wattpad press release: Wattpad, the world’s most popular ebook community, today announced the availability of its popular mobile application on Nokia Ovi Store. “Nokia devices have always been the most popular among Wattpad users,” said Eva Lau, COO of Wattpad. ...

This looks like fun and there is some real money going to the winner. From their press release: Wattpad, the world's most popular ebook community, has launched it's biggest contest ever. The "Share What You Have Written" contest gives everyone a chance to win great prizes by entering their written work and having it judged by the site's nearly 3 million monthly visitors. Everyone has dozens, if not hundreds, of written material sitting on their computers - perhaps an essay from school, an interesting short story from vacation, poetry, a screenplay or a novel. Wattpad's mission is to untap their...