TechCrunch reports that 1DollarScan, a US subsidiary of Japanese jisui (third-party book-to-e-book scanning) company Bookscan, has introduced an improved formatting service called Fine Tune. Fine Tune promises to custom-format its scans so that they work better and load faster on all different platforms. For example, Fine Tuning for the iPhone, Android devices, or e-readers offers compression, margin removal (to make the PDF fit the screen shape better and waste less space on already-small screens), and optimization for the different resolutions or display technologies. CEO Hiroshi Nakano says this approach is particularly important for making inroads in...

O’Reilly TOC general manager and occasional TeleRead contributor Joe Wilkert has a piece up on O’Reilly Radar looking at a survey O’Reilly recently conducted of its e-book customers, asking on what devices and in which formats they planned to do most of their e-book reading. Wilkert reports that the most popular non-PC e-reading device, with a 25% share, was the iPad—but 46% of those who responded said that their primary device for viewing O’Reilly e-books was their PC, and about half of the people who responded said PDF was their format of choice. When...

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...

Journalism.co.uk has an article discussing how newspapers and magazines are finding that they can mine their existing catalog of material to produce longer-form works they can sell as e-books. One in six Londoners are estimated to own an e-reader of some kind, and a number of UK and other publications are taking advantage of this. Catalonian paper La Vanguardia has published 100 e-book titles since November, 2011—mostly fiction. UK newspaper The Guardian has published 20 e-books since August 2011 under the Guardian Shorts brand. Hearst Magazines’s Cosmopolitan has released a number of e-books as well. ...

Do we remember less when we read e-books? Some neuroscientists think we do, because e-books don’t provide the same sorts of spatial queues that printed books do. Apparently location cues are a very powerful aid to remembering things—and just the fact that we know about how far through a book those particular things are helps us fix them in our memory. Jakob Nielsen, a Web “usability” expert and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, believes e-reading does lead to a different type of recall. “I really do think we remember less” from e-books, he says. “This...

I found an interesting article on the blog of “technology innovation company” DPCI about how PDF format is an e-publishing dead end. In an era when e-readers have so many different potential screen sizes and different text formatting and rewrapping abilities, the article notes, a format that was primarily developed to freeze a page into a form that would look the same no matter where it was printed is a dead end for screen reading. PDF is a dead-end format. What I mean by this is that the nature of the format mimics what it was...

In an article that showed up complete in my RSS reader but turned out to be behind a paywall when I tried to click through, The Bookseller reports that a group of 180 Japanese publishers are joining forces under an initiative with a goal of creating 1 million e-books. This may be just a bit optimistic, given how slow the Japanese market has been to develop so far: “Digitising one million books would revolutionise the market here but it is difficult to take that number seriously given that it has taken the Japanese publishers nine years...

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,...

Self-publishing author Will Entrekin has written a very interesting blog post about his participation in Amazon’s “Kindle Select” program, in which his books are made available exclusively on Amazon and are part of the Amazon Prime Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. In the first part, he talks about why he made the decision to go exclusive with Amazon. It boiled down to having greater comfort developing for Amazon’s platform, and liking the kind of control Amazon gave him over the presentation of his book that he didn’t feel he could get with Barnes & Noble. (And also, he never...

EBookNewser and GalleyCat have posted an infographic from e-book sales tracking company Booklr which compares the average e-book price of the Top 100 e-books for the Kindle and Nook platforms. Based on information collected over the week of January 12th through 19th, the chart shows that the average price of an Amazon Kindle e-book is $6.48, whereas the average price of a B&N e-book is $8.94. The difference seems to be caused by fully 35% of Amazon’s titles being $1.99 or less, whereas none of B&N’s were. I wonder, though, whether this might be caused by Amazon counting...

Jeremy Greenfield reports on the Digital Book World site that Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of social e-tailer Anobii, is urging publishers to drop DRM restrictions on their e-books as a way to fight Amazon. In a DBW slideshow presentation, Berlucchi argues that the big e-vendors use device choice to lock in consumers, licensing rather than selling e-books and offering inferior functionality to that of paper books. Berlucchi calls attention to the actions of the music industry in recent years, eliminating DRM and permitting ownership of music—you can now even import songs bought on one platform into a competitor’s via cloud...

On UpstartHR.com, which appears to be a blog dedicated to the theory and practice of human resources, a blogger identified only as “Ben” has written an interesting post about how and why he reads at least one book per week. Ben believes that reading books is extremely helpful to anyone with an HR career (and, indeed, anyone in general). He explains that books can help improve you in every aspect of your life by allowing you to learn from the mistakes of others without having to make them yourself. (He also links to a site called Personal MBA, which is...