I wrote previously about Star Dispatches, an e-book subscription service being produced by the Toronto Star. According to this article on The Star's website, they're being recognized for this series with two Online Media Awards. The service has an intriguing set-up where, for a nominal fee, subscribers get a new e-book sent to them every week. There is no à la carte purchase, but the weekly fee is so affordable that subscriber retention has been high. From the admittedly self-congratulatory write-up: "We’re extremely proud of the stories being told in our weekly eRead format, our subscribers are highly satisfied and the business model has...

Over the past two or three months, you may have begun to notice that nearly every time you get around to catching up on your digital publishing news, yet another media outlet is announcing their new e-book division. And that's definitely a good thing—don't get me wrong. But so many of the bigger media companies launching digital imprints today seem to be repurposing much more old content than they are creating new stories. To me, that sometimes comes as a bit of a disappointment. It seems a little cheap, almost. But a new company that refers to itself as a digital...

Media Shift has a great write-up of the Toronto Star's new monthly e-book subscription, called Star Dispatches. I know I've mentioned the Star's e-book experiment before, but this particular article goes into a lot of detail about how the series was created, and how its unique subscription feature works. From the article: Sandy MacLeod, vice president of consumer marketing at the Toronto Star, said their market research showed it took an "incredible amount of marketing" to produce single-copy e-books that generally sold 100 to 300 downloads at $4.99 each. The math just didn't work out to make a viable business case, he...

Tim Waterstone is embarking on a new e-book project. It kind of involves owning a bookstore again. Sort of. Waterstone talked about his new venture, Read Petite, with The Guardian this week. It will be officially announced to the public at the London Book Fair next week. Read Petite is a digital imprint for short-form e-books. It will include fiction and non-fiction titles, according to The Guardian. The site will use a monthly subscription format and have unlimited access to all the work, which will be about 9,000 words or fewer. Here's Waterstone, as quoted in The Guardian: A lot of the best short fiction has...

If the true definition of entrepreneurship is the process of finding a need and filling it, then it must also be true that C. Max Magee, founding editor of the online literary magazine The Millions (photo at right), is a publishing hustler of the highest order. Yesterday, the 10-year-old site, which primarily covers literary topics and book reviews, announced the launch of a new e-book publishing initiative known as The Millions Originals. According to Magee, the general idea behind The Millions Originals is to "give our talented writers a platform to publish as ebooks longer, magazine-quality pieces that will explore a variety...

From Moco News: Penguin is the latest publisher to test out e-singles with the launch of Penguin Shorts, an ongoing digital series of original fiction and nonfiction titles from authors like Colm Toibin and Anita Brookner. The program is launching in the UK first, with nine titles being released on December 1. All are priced at £0.99 ($1.58) or £1.99. ($3.17) In the U.S., Penguin has been publishing short-form “Penguin eSpecials” since 2008, and those will be rebranded as Penguin Shorts next year. SEE ALSO: Our Guide To E-Singles A glance at the two countries’ lists suggests that Penguin has a little work to do...

Another news outlet has decided to sell short pieces on current events as standalone ebooks, reports paidContent. UK newspaper The Guardian has launched Guardian Shorts as , and the first title is Phone Hacking: How the Guardian broke the story. Although the series is Kindle only for now, the first title isn't listed as a Kindle Single but rather a standard Kindle title. The Guardian says that it will release "up to several" new titles each month depending on what's going on in the world, at lengths of 5,000-30,000 words and priced from £1.99 to £3.99 depending in part on...

Over the past couple of weeks, Robert Niles at OJR has posted a series of guides to help journalists self-publish their content in ebook form. He starts with suggestions on how to choose good content for epublishing, then moves into technical issues like formatting and listing content with ebooksellers. The three posts together come in at about 3,400 words, so it's a quick way to jump start your own self-publishing project if you need some guidance. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 [Online Journalism Review]...

Perhaps spurred by Amazon’s new Kindle Singles submission page, PaidContent has taken a look at the new “E-Singles” format for shorter works. The best-known example is, of course, Amazon’s “Kindle Singles” program, through which a number of magazines and writers are publishing feature-length non-fiction works (and some writers are publishing short stories) for prices ranging from 99 cents to $4.99. Unlike Amazon’s options for self-publishing, the Kindle Singles program is curated and edited (though Singles-length works can, of course, be self-published through Amazon’s regular Kindle books program). It has its own section on Amazon’s site, and currently boasts...