13 Lessons from Killing Our College Daily Newspaper and Going Digital (Media Shift) In the seven months since that party, the Revolution has worked in most of the ways we can measure. But we also see flaws yet to be fixed and lessons yet to be learned from our college peers. Here’s more on the results, the lessons and the future of the Revolution. --- Kobo Suspends Google Affiliate and Switches to Rakuten Linkshare (Good e-Reader) Affiliate programs are very popular with booksellers, indie bookstores, authors and online websites. Kobo has been running theirs for a number of years and allows people to earn a...

Fan fiction is an interesting genre. You start with characters that already exist from movies or television shows and create new stories around them. Admittedly, I read my share of fan fiction. Sometimes a show’s run ends too early, or a video game pulls me in so deeply, that I want to read more about the characters (this happened to me with Mass Effect, for instance). Amazon announced Kindle Worlds today, the first commercial platform for writers to create fan fiction and earn royalties. Amazon says it has secured licenses for Gossip Girls, Pretty Little Liars and Vampire Diaries. According to Amazon, it...

An independent children’s publisher has decided to cut ties with Amazon. Barefoot Books has pulled its books from the online retail giant, claiming that it wants to focus on more grassroots types of campaigns, it said in a press release on Digital Book World on Tuesday. Among the issues with Amazon that Barefoot faces is Amazon heavily discounting its books, and Amazon often selling its books before Barefoot has even received advanced copies from the printer. “As entrepreneurs, we admire Amazon and its ground-breaking accomplishments. However, Barefoot’s commitment is to diversity and to grassroots values; to ‘small is beautiful’,” Barefoot’s co-founder and CEO...

Apple Deems 55 Digital Comics too Hot for in-App Buying (Good e-Reader) On Tuesday, comiXology announced, via its blog, that several comics had been removed from the apps “In order to comply with the Apple App Store guidelines regarding adult or inappropriate content, some new releases were rejected for our iOS app this week. In addition, certain previously released titles that fall outside of these guidelines were also rejected and will be removed from sale.” --- 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novelist Awards Finalists Announced (GalleyCat) Amazon Publishing has revealed the five finalists in each category of its sixth Breakthrough Novel Award competition. --- eBooks on the Decline in...

This is as much a thought piece and a kickoff for discussion as a fully fleshed-out article, but it goes like this: Is the end of the golden age of self-publishing already in sight? Part of the reasoning behind this comes from the dawn of the dot-com era just over a decade ago, when Internet companies were racing to build their public profile prior to going public. I used to do a lot of this stuff in Hong Kong, back in the day when page views rather than "friends" or retweets were the key metric; and with the prospect of high-rolling...

Amazon Fights to Keep Secrets in eBook Trial (Publisher's Weekly) Amazon attorneys last week filed a letter with the court asking that it be allowed to redact sensitive business information about its Kindle e-book program gathered as evidence for the upcoming Apple price-fixing trial. --- CourseSmart Enhances its eTextbook Offerings (Good e-Reader) With some reports showing that the Android platform currently holds about 68% of the market for applications, digital content creators are taking steps to increase their current offerings to meet these customers where their devices are. CourseSmart, a leading provider of digital educational materials and textbooks, has been available on the Android...

UK press, politicians and public all seem heated up about Amazon’s tax bills in the UK—or lack thereof. Seems those deceitful corporations have been daring to incorporate and structure across jurisdictions, rather than standing meekly inside good honest British borders and reaching their hands into their pockets whenever that nice Mr. Osborne tells them to. Whisper it not, but rumor has it that some of them even have profit motives. Scandalous, I know. Politicians eager for scapegoats to fling before an electorate grumbling under the weight of misgovernment have seized on Amazon, Google, et al, as a Godsend. Watching them posture...

Reports on Androidos.in and later picked up on Engadget and elsewhere have outed the Notion Ink Adam II Android tablet, successor device to the much-hyped Adam device produced by India’s Notion Ink Design Labs, and apparently supported by the Indian Department of Science & Technology Technology Business Incubators program. Documents indicate a reasonably specced and very price-competitive tablet, but one without the Pixel Qi screen that was the key differentiator for the prior model. Notion Ink’s original Adam design engendered considerable pre-launch interest because of the promise of a daylight-readable display that could switch back any time to regular mode. Sadly, the device was both...

LibraryCity knocked Amazon for not letting users of the Kindle Fire HDs adjust their line spacing. But guess what I noticed just now within the font-related submenu of my Kindle HD 8.9” model running version 8.3.1 firmware? Alas, on my several files tested, I still couldn’t narrow the spaces sufficiently on the HD even though the Kindle app for Android, as in previous versions for my Nexus 10, pulled off this trick just fine. Apologies if the HD improvement is old news, but Amazon pushes out updates automatically, and this is the first time I myself became aware of the line-spacing change. May Amazon...

'Unbundling' in the Book Business: The Fourth Big Trend (Shatzkin Files) A few weeks ago, I wrote that there are three big forces driving the future of publishing: scale, verticalization, and atomization. I was wrong. eBook Spending on the Rise (Digital Book World) In 2012 ebooks accounted for 11% of all book spending, according to a recap in Publishers Weekly... OverDrive Unveils Big Library Read Pilot Project (Good e-Reader) Overdrive has gained the support of over 3,000 libraries for a new pilot project to take ebook accessibility to an entirely new level. The intention behind this new initiative is to create a global “library book club.” Amazon Acquires Samsung Colour...

By Michael Weinstein There’s been a great deal of conjecture lately about the future of the bookstore: What will happen to the B&N stores (especially if they do plan to reduce the number of stores)? What about independent bookstores? Will Amazon crush bricks-and-mortar stores out of existence? Oh, lordy, will there even be such a thing as a bookstore!?!? Not surprisingly, this all made me think of a song. Under time pressure to have a song for the first Earth Day concert in 1970, the great Tom Paxton created the gold standard for songs about ecology when he wrote “Whose Garden Was...

Amazon has just gone live with its own digital currency dubbed Amazon Coins. Announced in February 2013, Amazon Coins is described as a new way to buy Kindle Fire apps, games and in-app items from the Amazon App Store and on Kindle Fire. To kick off the launch of Coins, Amazon also announced that they are giving away 500 coins for free to existing and new Kindle Fire customers in the U.S. Said free coins have a store value of $5, which will be deposited into your Amazon account today, assuming they're not there already. Not only is Amazon Coins a new...