I’ve mentioned a time or two the personalized Disney’s Jungle Book children’s book tie-in that my parents got for me one Christmas. Printed in a rough font that I retrospectively recognized as coming from a mainframe line printer, it would never pass muster in the print-on-demand world of today, though as I pointed out when I first mentioned it, there are print-on-demand operations that exist to do much the same thing today in more polished form. Well, lately I’ve heard (via Galleycat) about one that takes the cake for sheer chutzpah. Rather than producing original fiction with the names...

The name is Zon. Ama Zon. In 2010, the Fleming estate chose not to renew its publishing contract with Penguin for the James Bond novels, and proceeded to release them electronically in the UK via Amazon, Waterstones, and other e-book retailers. In March of this year, Random imprint Vintage Books acquired the world publishing rights for ten years to the 14 Fleming Bond novels and two nonfiction titles, but not the US or Canadian rights. It wasn’t clear who would be the North American publisher. But now we know: the books are back with Amazon again, but this...

Ever had the experience of trying to find an out-of-print book and discovering it was only available at premium prices? The experience drives some people to pirate the book they want, since they can’t get it at what they consider a reasonable price. But when author Frank Giovinazzi discovered one of his favorite books was in that situation, he went in the opposite direction. Giovinazzi found the self-help book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by two-time Libertarian Presidential candidate Harry Browne was selling at prices of $30 to $100 on eBay and Amazon. Self-help books usually...

CNet has an interview with Kevin Smith in which he talks about his newest movies, his presence on the Internet, and the recent uproar over the MPAA giving an R rating to a movie made for children. But Smith also discusses his new book, Tough Sh*t: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob who did Good. Smith reports that he sold more electronic copies of it than paper copies. Is that disappointing to you that you sold more e-books than physical ones? Smith: God, no. Heavens, no. I don't have...

The other day, I mentioned a survey showing that the growth of e-books has reduced the overall value of the book publishing market in the UK, and wondered what the figures might look like for the US. While the figures don’t measure precisely the same thing, Laura Hazard Owen reports on PaidContent that some figures released in publishing conglomerates Bertelsmann (Random House) and Pearson (Penguin) show that, thanks to the broad adoption of e-books, publishing revenues are lower but profits are higher. In other words, publishers are making a better profit even though they’re taking less money in, because...

The Bookseller reports on a Bowker UK survey that the overall value of consumer book purchases in the UK has dropped 9% since 2008. Bowker blames the decrease on the rise of e-books—even though people are buying more e-books, the price of the e-books tends to be lower (especially since so many of them are self-published). E-books made up 5% of consumer book purchases by volume in the fourth quarter of 2011, but only 3% of the book market by value. According to Bowker, that low average e-book price is due not least to purchases from...

Here’s another story of a developer railing against used video games. Although it may not seem to have relevance to e-books at first, I think this story demonstrates the way the gaming industry and the publishing industry are struggling with some similar issues in the digital age. In an interview with GamesIndustry International, Silicon Knights head Denis Dyack states that used games are clobbering the game industry, cutting off the “tail” of sales that used to support game studios well after games’ original release. Without that “tail”, Dyack says, game companies can expect to receive almost all their sales...

One of the benefits of e-books is that they don’t take up any space. They reduce clutter and allow us to simplify our lives by reading more but not having what we read take up space. Though I doubt most of us go to the extreme of Joshua Fields Millburn. Millburn was inspired by the passages in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club about the tyranny of material possessions to sell or give away his entire 2,000-book physical library (save for four reference books he uses in a class he teaches) and do his subsequent reading via Kindle. The few books...

Do e-readers get young people reading? Here’s some more anecdotal evidence. “Author in training” K.D. Rush blogs about his eldest daughter receiving a Nook for Christmas and going from someone who just doesn’t care for reading to the sort of person who pulls a paperback version of The Hunger Games out of her purse when she asks her father if he wants to see the movie based on it. Now, that might not seem strange to the average parent, but to me it was mind blowing. Imagine your daughter pulling a snake out of her purse...

We’ve mentioned a couple of times the “problem” that e-readers create of people not being able to tell what the person next to them on the bus or train is reading. Some people seem to feel that something precious is being lost, be it the ability to satisfy your own curiosity or the inadvertent advertising that a book seen in public provides to induce other people to buy it. There was even a brief rumor that Amazon’s Android tablet would have a second screen on the back that could allow people to see what you were reading. However, Stephen...

Earlier today I posted about how self-publishing was affecting the modern science fiction genre. As it happens, independent publishing is not just for self-published e-books; io9 has discovered a Kickstarter project called “Save the Scifi!" by publisher Singularity & Co., aimed at purchasing publishing rights to out-of-print classic SF titles, scanning them, and publishing them as e-books and in print. The project had a goal of $15,000, which would have covered purchasing the rights to the first four books it was planning on republishing. It has currently been funded to $32,916. The titles to be rescued have not yet...

Blogger James W. Harris has been thinking about the effects the Kindle is having on the science fiction genre. Looking at Amazon’s Top 100 lists for paid and free e-books in the SF genre, he notices many unknown, usually self-published, authors grabbing up position on both lists, and a lot of books by classic SF authors (such as his favorite, Robert A. Heinlein) aren’t even on the list. Harris finds a lot of new writers are taking a cue from Amazon’s sales technique of lowering the price of a book for a few days to get attention and then raising...