Update: I had not noticed until it was pointed out to me in the comments that the article I was reporting on was a year old. It was shown in Zite as a recent article (probably because of the “March” dateline without a year in the blog posting format). My eyes slid right over the “2011” in the subject line. I should have done more research, but I was in a hurry to post. I apologize for misreading the date. In fact, there was a more recent article from July stating that, due to friction with Amazon’s...

Paul Sawers at TheNextWeb reports that Hachette UK has succeeded in getting user-generated-content website Mobiles24 to remove all Hachette-published e-book titles available for download. Hachettes sent the site a “letter before action” giving the site a deadline of February 29th to remove all unauthorized Hachette content from the site, and it has now done so. The Bookseller reports that the site will no longer offer any e-books at all, where it previously offered over 9,000. While “many” of those books were Hachette titles, it is not clear whether any were in the public domain or otherwise authorized for...

Venture Galleries has an amusing little anecdote called “Arrogance Doesn’t Become You,” by author Stephen Woodfin. It follows a dialogue between a pair of retiree readers on a Florida beach—one reading a Kindle, the other a printed book. Though the anecdote is fictional, it’s clearly drawn from real life examples. “I’ve seen a Kindle before, but I wanted to know what you were reading,” the man said. He had an edge to his voice. Bob ignored Ellison’s attitude. “Right now, I am reading Rebels on the Mountain. It’s historical fiction about the Cuban Revolution from a new independent author named Jack Durish,” he...

Laura Hazard Owen has a PaidContent post on a survey of the habits of over 1,100 “US Internet consumers” conducted by Citi analyst Mark Mahaney. Fully 23% of those surveyed own a Kindle-branded e-reader (which is really pretty impressive when you think about it). Perhaps more impressively, a July survey pegged Kindle owners at 12%, this means Kindle ownership has effectively doubled over the last 7 months. The survey also indicated that e-reader owners purchase on average 2.4 books per month, and 24% said they’d bought five or more books in the last thirty days. E-book reading is the most popular use...

With all the attention that the US Department of Justice’s e-book price lawsuit threat is getting, it can be easy to forget that there’s some anti-trust investigation going on over on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Reuters reports that the European Union’s competition commissioner wants to reach a settlement with publishers over agency e-book pricing. While Amazon continues to complain that the agency model is “a damaging approach,” the EU commissioner seems to be ready to settle if publishers act to remove the commission’s objections by offering concessions. What those concessions might be was not clear in Reuters’s...

Saw SFWA prez John Scalzi mention this on his blog a couple of days ago, but it slipped my mind until I saw GalleyCat link to it as well yesterday: the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Association is removing all links to titles on Amazon (save for those that are not available anywhere else) from its website, and instead redirecting them to Amazon’s competitors. The SFWA is taking this action in protest over Amazon’s removal of buy buttons from e-book titles distributed by the Independent Publishing Group after IPG declined the more-favorable-to-Amazon terms Amazon tried to impose on...

While libraries everywhere are scrambling to come up with an ebook plan that can satisfy both their patrons as well as their long-term organizational goals, sometimes the greatest resources they can offer are already in their libraries.  What’s this?  Simply put, it’s the utilization of their local resources, of history, genealogy, and local authors.  This is the sort of information that is highly desired, yet sometimes falls off the radar, lost to the deluge of publishers, best-sellers and other more “trendy” technological items. It’s easy to dismiss local materials from any project planning, arguing there’s no budget, no staff and no...

A reminder today that, if you self-publish with Amazon, you’re not guaranteed to be in control of your e-book pricing. Fantasy author Jim C. Hines recounts a recent pricing snafu with his e-book Goblin Tales, self-published through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. Hines had put the book on sale for 99 cents over Christmas and returned it to $2.99 in January (though apparently Kobo was slow to respond to Hines’s pricing change, meaning that his book was at 99 cents for a few weeks longer than he intended thanks to Amazon’s price-matching algorithm). Then on February 11th Hines...

Technology writer and blogger Robert X. Cringely (the one behind the 1996 TV miniseries Triumph of the Nerds, not the InfoWorld columnists) has announced he is going to be rebooting his written-in-1989, updated-in-1996 history of Silicon Valley, Accidental Empires for the modern Internet age: he is going to blog it. Over the next few months, Cringely will be reposting the entire book to a blog, and inviting reader participation to help him update it for the final e-book form. Like most blogs, this new one will allow reader comments. And it’s those comments I’ll use...

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...