The Sun has an op-ed by “chick-lit writer” Adele Parks—another one of those conversion stories about e-book doubters who become e-book evangelists. In Parks’s case, she became curious enough to buy a Kindle after learning she was selling a huge number of e-books. After buying the Kindle, she discovered she liked it so much she has used it it constantly ever since—though mostly for travel and commuting, where a slim device that can replace a ton of books is most useful. She will “always choose a ‘proper’ book” for reading at home. Parks does not have an...

Some blogs are making a big deal out of how the recent 200th-birthday Charles Dickens Google Doodle linked, not to a general Google search for its subject as other such doodles have in the past, but rather to the Google Books search for Charles Dickens. CNet’s Chris Matyszczyk (rather smarmily) calls it a “pure, straight-up piece of commercial communication.” You might not see today's Google Books-pointing doodle as a moneymaking effort. After all, these Dickens e-books are free. And yet, surely, the aim is gravitate your mind and habits over to the Google eBookstore, where money...

Genre fiction represents a weird dichotomy. On the one hand, literary critics absolutely abhor the stuff. On the other hand, the public eats it up. This is why the Guardian piece observing how much of e-book sales genre-fiction makes up is really hilarious from a genre fan’s point of view: snooty Guardian writer Antonia Senior confronts the fact that “downmarket genre fiction” is driving e-book sales. For example: The ebook world is driven by so-called genre fiction, categories such as horror or romance. It's not future classics that push digital sales, but more...

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...

We’ve mentioned the e-writing app Scrivener (available for Windows or OS X) a time or two, and some of our commenters have expressed fondness for it. Indeed, even my brother loves it and has been pestering me to try it; he seems to think that lack of Scrivener is all that’s keeping me from writing the next Great American Novel. I have to admit, with the things I’m seeing about it I’m definitely starting to get tempted to try it out. On The Creative Penn, writer Joanna Penn blogs that she used Scrivener for her latest book, and that...

How can publishers create graphical e-books without a lot of duplicated effort? That’s the question posed by Richard Stephenson on FutureBook in a post about the different approaches taken by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple for displaying fixed-layout graphical content on their e-readers: Amazon's Kindle format 8 (KF8) relies on a completely separate process to create a fixed layout e-book than Apple's version of fixed layout for titles that are design-led e-books. Both are based on XHTML, but there are important differences in how pages are laid out. With KF8, each page has to be...

It seems like more and more people lately are coming to the same conclusion as Gabe Newell of Valve about piracy as a service problem. Paul Tassi has an op-ed on Forbes in which he points out that no matter what Hollywood and other media industries do, they will never manage to stomp out piracy through legislation. It’s already illegal in most of the world, but that hasn’t slowed it down much. Right now, Tassi writes, pirates have a big advantage over commercial interests in how easy it is to download and view their media. The editorial mostly applies...

In my email this morning, I received a notice from Quora that I had been invited to submit an answer for the following question: Are there any services or business models in which one can trade paperback or hardcover books for digital books, without having to pay full price again? After typing my answer, I thought it was interesting enough to repost here: Not that I've ever heard of—or no model that is legitimate under copyright law, anyway. The idea has been suggested by a number of people as something that publishers should...

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...