In the last few years, Amazon’s Kindle publishing facilities have sparked a self-publishing revolution. Everyone from established authors with backlist titles to new wanna-bes who can’t get publisher attention has been able to send their words out over the Internet for others to buy. We tend to assign most of the credit for that to those very facilities, but on NovelPublicity.com, Novelist Terri Giuliano Long blogs that there’s another element that should share in the credit—book bloggers. Long feels that book bloggers plugging her book In Leah’s Wake are the main reason it was able to sell 80,000 copies...

Everybody’s getting in on the e-book act these days. On Digital Book World’s website, Jeremy Greenfield reports that NBC News is launching an e-publishing arm, NBC Publishing. NBC took notice of consumers’ increasing comfort level with electronic books, including those that feature video, and has decided to leverage its existing archives of over one million hours of video content to create such e-books (and some traditional print-only ones as well). NBC has hired a number of publishing-industry veterans to staff the new publishing arm, as well as adding a couple of its own television production staff. The company will...

On Wired’s Epicenter blog, Tim Carmody writes about why he thinks that the main global e-book competitor Amazon has to worry about is Kobo. He points out that while Amazon and Apple have been making highly visible splashes with their new hardware or e-publishing initiatives, Kobo has quietly been building support from a multinational network of bookseller partners, including major booksellers in England, Hong Kong, and France. And now its acquisition by Rakuten adds all of Rakuten’s previously-existing worldwide digital book and media operations to the Kobo brand. “An e-book reader will ultimately not be only...

We previously mentioned Penguin’s decision to stop making new e-book titles available to libraries in the USA and the UK. The Digital Shift reports that decision extends to downloadable digital audiobooks as well. A message from Overdrive yesterday explains this applies to audiobook titles released after 11/14/2011. In an apparently unrelated move, Amazon-owned BrillianceAudio will also stop offering downloadable audiobook titles. It’s not clear exactly why Penguin is doing this. The reason the company gave for its e-book restrictions was “concerns about the security of the copyright of its authors.” It has not given any explanation for this audiobook restriction. As...

ATM fraud can strike the best of us. In this case, it’s struck Diane Duane, whose bank account has been suddenly cleaned out by someone who apparently skimmed her ATM card. The bank will compensate her for the fraudulent charges, but it will take a few days, leaving her without money at the moment to pay the bills that are coming due. As a result, she is running a store-wide 20%-off sale on her already-reasonably-priced DRM-free multi-format e-books to encourage a quick influx of cash on which she can get by until the bank comes through. Use the discount code DDGOTSKIMMED...

When I started my “Cheap Reads” series, I expected I would be posting a number of entries. I never expected it to be limited to just two for all this time! Fortunately, I’ve found another inexpensive novel that is highly worthy of mention. In recent weeks I became aware of a small-press-published novel that looked very interesting by one of my Facebook friends, Sara M. Harvey. It is called Seven Times a Woman, and is a tempestuous romance set in ancient Japan involving a kitsune woman named Rei-Rei, the god Inari, and a dragon Rei-Rei has to...

On FutureBook, Martyn Daniels takes a look at writer Michael Chabon’s decision to take the e-book rights to his backlist books to an e-publisher that will give him a 50% royalty rate rather than the 25% his print publisher offered. Daniels compares the decision to the sentiment expressed in a Jessie J song, “Price Tag” (which I’d never heard of), whose lyrics suggest that, for the singer, creative freedom is more important than making money. He wonders whether Chabon’s decision is just about the money, or whether it suggests authors are starting to become more canny about binding themselves into “digital...

John Scalzi makes a series of posts on his blog called “The Big Idea”, in which he lets an author discuss their latest works. Lately, he has gotten fed up with people leaving comments on these posts saying that they won’t buy the book because the e-book is too expensive. He posted to his blog today announcing that he would be deleting any such comments he came across from now on, Scalzi writes: I think it’s important to understand that eBooks are not special snowflakes; they’re just books in electronic form. As someone who prefers to...

One of the hottest new computer games is the latest entry in the Elder Scrolls franchise, Skyrim. Although I haven’t played the game myself, it seems that one element of the game is that it includes a bunch of in-game books, some of them quite long, that go into the backstory of the game world and various things in it. As Jeremy Hill notes on our sister blog Gamertell, there are so many of them that there just isn’t time to read them while in the game (where there are, obviously, better things to do, like killing dragons). ...

Our sister blog GamerTell points out a set of game-related e-book deals for the holiday season. Games Workshop e-book publisher Black Library (whom we’ve covered here before) is offering a number of e-book and audiobook bundles for fans who haven’t bought in yet. Some of them are a little pricey. For example: Christmas Space Marine eBundle: Space Marines are always fun. This collection takes the best novels and novellas highlighting specific famous Space Marine battle. In total, you get seven novels and four novellas for $75.89. Though when you look at the individual books in the bundle, it doesn’t appear that you’re...

Mike Shatzkin has another fascinating essay in which he goes into detail about how e-books are priced by various actors in the e-book publishing industry. He explains that the break between agency pricing and non-agency pricing creates two separate standards—the “digital retail price” (of which agency vendors take 30% and are not allowed to change), and the “suggested retail price” (which is usually close to the cost of the lowest print version, and agency vendors pay half of to the publisher but can then choose to mark down for their own sales). The non-agency publishers who sell to Apple are obliged...

As I mentioned in my review of Honor Among Enemies, with In Enemy Hands the Honorverse series changes from a pure space navy series to something more politically-based. While there are still plenty of naval battles in the offing, at times the space combat takes a distinct back seat to all the political maneuvering. I suspect that this is why a number of readers seem to feel it “jumped the shark” at this point—they started reading it because they liked space battles, and suddenly it turned into something very different. This book begins a phase of the series expressly...