Remember the Humble Indie Bundle, the Humble Indie Bundle 2, and various successors? They applied the pay-what-you-want model to selling sets of popular independently-developed computer games, and have reportedly made a lot of money for the developers, as well as for the charities that they also support. Now a new site, StoryBundle.com, has sprung up that promises to do for e-books what the Humble Bundle does for games: select a few quality independent e-books and allow people to set their own price for the DRM-free bundle. It still seems to be in the planning stages—the site is taking the...

A trio of articles from our sister blog Gamertell bring up an interesting situation with at least a bit of relevance to e-books. The popular BioWare video game series Mass Effect has had a series of spinoff novels, depicting events that take place elsewhere in the game universe simultaneously with the games. The first three of those novels were written by one of the games’ writers, Drew Karpyshyn. I’ve read them, and they told some very interesting stories, part of which formed backstory that was brought up in the first game. But for whatever reason, the most recent...

Canadian bookstore chain Indigo has added its voice to Barnes & Noble and Books a Million in stating that it will not carry books published by Amazon’s publishing imprint, the Globe and Mail reports. Indigo issued the standard statement decrying Amazon’s predatory tactics and congratulating Barnes & Noble for “taking a leadership stance on the matter.” Not too surprising, especially given that Indigo was the creator of Kobo, one of the only serious e-book competitors Amazon has. The Globe and Mail article characterizes this as a “setback” for Amazon, and quotes the Wall Street Journal that this is “sending...

Don’t tell my Nook, my achey breaky Nook… Billy Ray Cyrus, singer of a particularly overplayed country song and father of Miley “Hannah Montana” Cyrus, has landed a book deal with Amazon’s publishing arm for his memoirs, GalleyCat reports. Publication date is expected to be spring 2013 in both hardcover and e-book editions. The deal was brokered by Trident Media CEO Dan Strone, who also arranged the $800,000 deal for Penny Marshall’s memoirs. As that anonymous publishing insider lamented a few weeks ago, Amazon is lining up some pretty big names for its publishing arm. What with...

A post by Robert McCrum on the Guardian books blog on “the power of paper in the digital era” didn’t turn out the way I thought it was going to from the headline. I expected it to be another one of those “paper books rule, e-books drool” stories we’ve been seeing with increasing frequency lately, but instead it took quite a different approach. McCrum discusses the dichotomy of paper archives and digitization. Thanks to digital copies of records, author Sarah Thornhill was able to do much of the research for a historical novel based on her ancestors without ever...

At PaidContent, Laura Hazard Owen reports on the recent Verso study that showed over half of book buyers are “not at all likely” to buy an e-reader in the next year, up from 2009. Owen talked to representatives from Verso who suggested that, to the resistant, e-readers aren’t yet better enough than print books to suit them, they don’t like reading off of screens, and they like being able to rummage through books in physical stores to find new books they might never otherwise have considered. She also notes that teenagers lag behind other age groups in e-book adoption,...

The Authors Guild blog has an interesting piece looking at Amazon’s growth in light of a decline in antitrust enforcement. For background, it brings up the Bloomberg Businessweek story I covered the other day, it moves on to excerpt a piece in Harpers by Barry Lynn that compares Amazon to the current state of other monopolized markets, such as the chicken-raising industry: Mr. Lynn makes the case that Amazon’s dominance isn’t just a story of an industry disrupted by online commerce and digital upheaval, it’s about the abandoning of New Deal era protections of retailers in...

Found on PaidContent: A company called Gluejar has launched a new website called Unglue.it with the goal of “freeing” e-book versions of copyrighted books that do not have any yet. The site hopes to contract with the owners of particular books to determine how much money they want to allow free e-book versions of the books under a Creative Commons license, then raise that money from its users. [Site founder Eric] Hellman says Gluejar is in part a reaction to the changing role of libraries in the U.S. “We’re excited about the possibility of using libraries...

Social reading site Goodreads is changing the API it uses for pulling book metadata to the site, PaidContent reports. It had been using Amazon’s public Product Advertising API which allowed it to import title, author, page count, and so on. However, Goodreads finds the terms of use for the API have become too restrictive for the site to continue to use it. In particular, Amazon will not allow sites using the API to link to the book on any other on-line retailer except Amazon, but Goodreader provides links to titles on multiple retailers. Also, Amazon will not allow content...

FutureBook’s Philip Jones had the chance to talk with self-publishing star Amanda Hocking, whose move to a $2 million traditional publishing deal with St. Martin’s Press caused some controversy in self-publishing circles last year. In the interview, she confirms that Amazon actually made a higher monetary bid to publish her books, but she was concerned that the company would not be able to convince other bookstores to carry the printed versions. Hocking discusses the reasons for her switch—mainly that she wanted to be able to devote more time to writing rather than to all the fiddly little things that...

I came across a rather interesting pair of posts on BookRiot today. Cassandra Neace opined that there’s no point in reading “the classics” anymore, because they are essentially boring—no four-letter words or sex and violence (because those classic writers were far too couth to include any such things), and too many dead white males. (Ah, how Roger Mifflin would cringe.) Amanda Nelson wrote a longer and amusing rebuttal, pointing out that a lot of classics became classics because they pushed the boundaries of couth for their day. (Indeed, some of them, such as Huckleberry Finn, continue to be controversial...

On UpstartHR.com, which appears to be a blog dedicated to the theory and practice of human resources, a blogger identified only as “Ben” has written an interesting post about how and why he reads at least one book per week. Ben believes that reading books is extremely helpful to anyone with an HR career (and, indeed, anyone in general). He explains that books can help improve you in every aspect of your life by allowing you to learn from the mistakes of others without having to make them yourself. (He also links to a site called Personal MBA, which is...