Hold onto your hats, folks. We have raw data on the Australian digital book industry. Yes – actual data. Which really means we have data on Borders. Locally, Borders are the only ebookseller that has made decent progress in collecting “the full set”. That is, signing contracts with every major of Australian publisher to sell their ebooks. The fact that we are nearing the end of 2010 and no-one has cracked this yetis distressing. But we’ll ignore that whine for now. In talking with harassing REDgroup Retail head of publicity Malcolm Neil, I’ve weasled some data out of him about how many...

Everyone knows that publishers in Australia are playing catch-up on ebooks, and therefore so are many agents and their authors. Why this is so when the writing has been on the wall for ebooks for years is a gripe for another time. Borders Australia, among others, are the catalyst for this. Prior to (and also after) the launch of their ebook store back in May, Borders minions have been racing around the country getting major publishers signed on to offer ebooks in their store. They tell me, as of today, they have now signed all but one Aussie publisher, but...

Jason Davis of Australia's Book Bee has an important article about the outage at Amazon's website: Yesterday, those who use Amazon Web Services, including our own ebooks search site www.EbookAnt.com, have noticed, um, that their Amazon ebooks catalogue was gone. For the uninitiated, AWS supplies thousands of third-party websites with Amazon product data. Sometimes. And forget about API access (the method used to remotely extract Amazon’s data from its servers). We’re working hard to get the Amazon data back. If a giant snafu can delete Amazon web pages and data, who’s to say it couldn’t happen with customers’ books? There’s a lot to...

Jason Davis at Book Bee is certainly the most insect-friendly ebooker I know. He's just incubated and hatched Ebook Ant, a new ebook search and comparison site. Currently they've indexed 270,000 non-public domain ebooks from "the likes of ebooks.com, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and more. There are also almost 40,000 emagazines, from emagazines.com and others, eTextbooks from eCampus.com and CengageBrain, newspapers from wherever we could get ‘em, and even eChapters." Take a look. Actually, if I had done it I would have tried to be a bit more Australian about it all and would have named the site Ebook Tobacco...

A major bookstore chain, an international ebook platform, a crowd of media, a comically large ereader - welcome to the launch of the Borders ebookstore in Australia. On the edge of Sydney Harbour today, the media saw REDgroup Retail, owners of the Angus & Robertson and Borders bookstore brands in Australia launch its ebook offering. There are now 2 million ebooks live on Borders.com.au and Australians finally have a competitive local ebook site. Seemingly permanently stuck two to three years behind the rest of the world, Australia's ebook lovers are a long-suffering bunch. It took the Kindle a few years to get...

From Book Bee: I’m all for competition in the ebooks market, and the Borders.com.au press release that just landed certainly showed promise, with a screaming headline: BORDERS AUSTRALIA ONLINE LAUNCHES PRICE GUARENTEE (SIC): WE ARE CHEAPER THAN AMAZON.COM – GUARENTEED! (SIC) Apart from the howling spelling errors in the headline, that’s good, right!? But then I read that they’re talking about p-books – meh. So the deal is, if you can buy a p-book cheaper on Amazon.com (including shipping), they’ll refund your money +10%. Sounds okay for p-book lovers. But I just can’t see how they’re going to honour that promise. What about Amazon’s...