Yesterday, perhaps hoping to stage a preemptive strike on Amazon, Barnes & Noble announced a new cooperative venture with self-publisher Lulu.com, which is supposed to make it easier for Lulu customers to get their books published as Nook e-books. However, given that B&N was already partnering with Lulu on self-publishing e-books, it is entirely unclear how it was harder before and how it will be easier now. And this bright bundle of glittering generalities does not seem to have helped in the end. Barnes & Noble’s stock was down by as much as 13% after Amazon’s Kindle announcement today,...

Amazon's experiment with lightly subsidizing the cost of its ereader seems to be yielding good results. From VentureBeat: The digerati pooh-poohed it, but Amazon.com's advertising-supported Kindle 3G with Special Offers is now the company's top-selling e-book device. "Since AT&T agreed to sponsor screensavers, Kindle 3G with Special Offers is now our bestselling Kindle device," Amazon's press release said. The ad-supported Kindle 3G model was announced only two weeks ago, with AT&T named as the official sponsor. ...

In partnership with Condé Nast, e-magazine app Flipboard has started introducing advertising to some of its feeds, beginning with The New Yorker magazine. But Flipboard users need not fret that their app is going to go the way of the web, with intrusive advertisements that distract from the content. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue insists that the app is going to follow a more magazine-like model. “In many cases, people often look to magazines for the advertising,” [McCue] said. “That’s not the case with web ads. It has a lot to do with the format of online...

Late news out of Amazon: Apparently annoyed by Barnes & Noble getting so much press today, Amazon decided to issue a late (after 7 p.m.!) press release in which it announced a 3G version of Kindle with Special Offers, the ad-supported version of the Kindle that knocks $25 off list price. So rather than $189, Kindle with Special Offers can be had for $164. Amazon claims that the Wi-Fi Kindle with Special Offers is its best-selling Kindle yet, which suggests this one might soon follow. I’m a little skeptical that knocking $25 off the price is really worth...

Amazon is introducing an advertising component to the Kindle platform.  I love it.  Kudos to Jeff Bezos & Co. for their forward thinking on this initiative.  I'm talking about the less expensive ($114) device currently known as "Kindle with Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers."  (It's not the sexiest name but it certainly describes the product!  Still, I wonder what Apple would have named this...) I've blogged before about how advertising and its close cousin, sponsorship, will take on a larger role in the ebook world and most people have criticized that logic.  They say "books aren't magazines", "the book reading experience...

Amazon's press-release is being distributed by many online newspapers and blogs of course, and at this point I can't say it's that much lower (!) for the ads you will agree to see. I'll show below what the press releases say so you can find out about this sooner than later, and I'm adding a few thoughts here. First, they are essentially Kindle display advertisements that are being offered, and for that you spend a bit less for your Kindle.  I wish it were a better deal, but some will want to see...

On Booksprung, Chris Walters reports that a Spanish company named Bestsharer is testing 24symbols, a service akin to Spotify or Netflix for e-books, with an eye toward a June launch. It will essentially be a subscription-based service by which for a monthly fee readers will get access to a cloud-hosted e-book library that they can read as long as they’re paid up. (Also like Spotify, it won’t be available in the US on launch.) The article also suggests that the service will involve ad-sponsored e-books, and will also be DRM-free. (Not sure how that’s going to work if the...

eBookNewser reports that children’s author Mercer Mayer is going to be publishing books through e-publisher FastPencil in 2011. He will be publishing nine titles in 2011, and will be creating new character franchises exclusive to FastPencil in addition to the ones he already has. On ZDNet, James Kendrick has an interesting post in which he puts forward the theory that tablet computers are “impulse purchases”—things that people decide to buy because they look cool rather than out of any specific need for them. As such, he points out, they have to be priced low enough that the...

Rupert Murdoch’s paywalled Times papers have seen traffic drop considerably, leading advertisers to rethink their expenditures. But a report mentioned on Read Write Web suggests that paywalls, when implemented properly, may not be the kiss of death to ad revenue after all. Out of two dozen small- and medium-sized newspapers served by Journalism Online, those that chose to implement a progressive paywall scheme where visitors get to view a certain amount of content without paying (as I noted earlier today that the New York Times will be using) found unique visits and page views fell by only slight amounts,...

The New York Times has a piece summing up the unhappiness magazine publishers feel with Apple’s current limitations on e-magazine apps. Though it does not mention the “thou shalt not” that Apple issued to European publishers who wanted to give free iPad subscriptions to print subscribers, it mentions a number of the other points that have been raised over the last few months: high price, no reasonable subscription capability, and Apple’s refusal to share purchaser demographic data with the publishers. The article also mentions the planned News Corp daily iPad newspaper The Daily, whose debut has been held...

I just got around to doing a software update on my iPad. Among others it fetched a new update to the Reeder RSS reader, containing a remarkably useful feature that I am extremely glad to have. Although I mentioned the Reeder vs. MobileRSS controversy last week at the time the update actually came out, the nature of the update escaped my notice until now. Reeder has added a Readability button to its user interface. When I encounter a RSS feed that does not provide the whole article (some feeds are especially obnoxious that way—most notably The Bookseller’s, which...

The Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel has a piece looking at the potential intrusion of advertising into e-books (an idea we have covered a number of times before). Possible proposals include providing free advertising-sponsored e-books and incorporating video, graphical, or textual ads that display at the beginning or along the edges of a book. The ad business has experimented with putting ads in e-books, but it has never proven popular or lucrative. But now that e-books are taking off and sales of printed books are “under pressure”, the industry is giving it another look. The article looks...