FutureBook has a brief report on the Dutch e-book industry, which appears to have started taking off since Kobo and Apple entered the market in the last year. E-book market revenue makes up about 3% of the market now, and is expected to account for 5-7% by the end of the year. Barnes & Noble, Google, and possibly Amazon are expected to enter the Dutch market this year, and Dutch e-book distributor Central Bookhouse expects to make 1.5 million sales by the end of 2012. ...

The “Writer Beware” blog usually warns of scams and fly-by-night publishers trying to take advantage of inexperienced writers, but a guest post from writer and writing instructor Marcia Yudkin warns of something else—inexperienced writers apparently trying to take advantage of readers. I’m reminded of the aphorism, “Fast, cheap, good: pick any two”—because Yudkin is talking about writers who write fast, and self-publish for cheap, but may not actually be any good. Yudkin talks about communities she’s encountered where writers, enamored of the way they could make money right away by listing cheap e-books on Amazon, share tips on how...

Fanfic and other original Internet fiction were some of the very first “e-books”, but ever since copyright owners have started paying more attention to the Internet the relationship with fans has sometimes been a thorny one. Reason TV has a 7.5-minute interview with Rebecca Tushnet, Georgetown University law professor and long-time legal advocate for fanfiction. (She wrote an article for a law journal back in the ‘90s that I believe is one of the first places fanfic was mentioned positively in a legal context.) At the moment, Professor Tushnet is a member of the Organization for Transformative Works, a...

On The Digital Reader, Nate Hoffelder discusses Rakuten’s response to those who noticed it has chosen to hide all consumer reviews of its Kobo Touch e-reader from Japan. Rakuten claims that a version of its site and service leaked before the actual launch date, so the reviews were of a product that was not actually meant to be reviewed yet. However, Hoffelder points out that this doesn’t explain all the problems brought up in the poor reviews, such as Rakuten launching with less than 2/3 of the Japanese-language titles it promised to have available, or overall poor customer service...

Found this amusing little anecdote over on Not Always Right, the site where people post their stories of hilarious encounters with rude or obnoxious customers, and chuckled for quite a while afterward. It begins innocently enough: (A customer walks into the bookstore and begins looking around.) Me: “Hello! Is there anything I can help you find today?” Customer: “Yes, there is this book that I heard about on the radio that I want to read.  I can’t remember the title, though.” Me: “Alright, do you know...

paidContent reports that self-publishing firm FastPencil is going to offer a new service to its higher-end customers. The company is now promising that those customers who publish through the company’s Wavecrest (packages ranging from $4,499 to $7,499) or Premiere (no prices listed, so presumably if you have to ask it’s too expensive) programs will have “full access to online and in-store placement through Barnes & Noble as well as NOOK bookshelf merchandising.” Except this doesn’t mean quite what you think it does—it just means that FastPencil will pitch Barnes & Noble at quarterly meetings on “all Premiere and...

Sometimes it’s weird how two news sources can look at the same things and come to entirely different conclusions. Both paidContent and The Verge have coverage of Amazon’s latest quarterly earnings report, and they have rather strange differences in tone. PaidContent’s headline is “Amazon disappoints investors with plunging profits.” pointing out that net income for the quarter is down from $191 million for the same quarter last year to $7 million.  Investors are reportedly “concerned” about Amazon Prime, which they think is too cheap at $79. But there’s nothing in The Verge’s longer article to suggest anyone...

WordPress-based platform developer Chris Brogan has an interesting observation about social media. It’s been flooded by image macros—photos with words pasted over them. While this began with Lolcats, it hardly stopped there, and now everyone’s Facebook stream is a by and large a cascade of these images. The interesting thing about this is that it flies in the face of the accepted wisdom that links are what you’re supposed to be using. By that standard, these photos are “junk.” They’re an end in and of themselves; they don’t send you on to somewhere else. Hence, Brogan calls it the...

I’ve covered the Humble Indie Bundles here before—bundles of independent computer games sold at a pay-what-you-want price, in support of the developers and charities (usually Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation). I’ve discussed the potential relevance to e-books, but the Humble Bundle’s latest move has possibly even more relevance—they’ve made the jump from games to digital music. The latest Humble Bundle is the Humble Music Bundle, which includes albums from MC Frontalot, They Might Be Giants, Christopher Tin, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Jonathan Coulton, and, for beating the average donation ($7.87 at the time of this writing), OK Go....

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting piece by Jan Bozarth, an author who has created a series of children’s books, “The Fairy Godmother Academy,” that are intended to be a “transmedia experience” from the very beginning. The article isn’t really too clear about what “transmedia” aspects are incorporated into the series, though the project’s website hosts do-it-yourself projects and activities and a recently-completed contest in which readers submitted their own dance videos. The article does have some interesting insights into how girls feel about technology in general as opposed to what that technology can do for them. For me,...

Foner Books’s blog reports that Amazon has lately reassigned new ASINs (Amazon Sales Identification Numbers) to thousands of free public domain e-books. This has the practical effect of orphaning them from their sales histories and reviews, and making thousands and thousands of web links to them no longer work. Amazon has also apparently changed the weighting of its “also bought” lists, so that paid public domain books show up with more prominence and frequency than free versions of the same books. It may not necessarily be all bad news, though. The relative absence of public domain titles...

Last year we covered Ars Technica publishing John Siracusa’s 27,000-word comprehensive review of OS X 10.7 Lion as an e-book, and the very successful sales numbers for a review that could still be read free on-line. This year, with the release of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Siracusa has done it again—but as the Nieman Journalism Lab reports, the process has not been without snafus. Since Mountain Lion was under NDA until the day it launched, that means that the e-book had to be submitted to Amazon at the same time the article was allowed to be published online...