Whenever Stephen King releases a novel, readers line up to grab his latest book. But those looking to download the digital version of Joyland might never get the option. King will not release Joyland as an e-book when it comes out on June 4, according to the Wall Street Journal. King, an e-book pioneer, held on to the novel’s digital rights in hopes of spurring his fans to buy the print edition in bookstores. He said it is unclear when he will make the coming-of-age tale available digitally. “I have no plans for a digital version,” Mr. King said. “Maybe at some point,...

Today marks an important day in Internet history. April 30, 1993, was the day the World Wide Web entered the public domain, which allowed the rest of us to use it on a royalty-free basis. Want to see the first ever web page? Not much to look at by today's standards, but still very cool. Apart from providing us all with animated cat gifs from now until the end of time, this is also an important milestone for e-books and e-reading. Without the Internet, we wouldn't have had Project Gutenberg in its easy to search and access format. (Project Gutenberg began in 1971,...

After closing a $1 million seed funding round led by ICG Ventures, Livrada just went live with e-book cards authors can sell at events, such as conferences, trade shows, books signings and the like. E-book-only authors (like myself) run into problems trying to sell their books at events. What do you do? Have a laptop or tablet set up so people can sign-in to their Amazon account and buy your books? Just think though the logistical nightmare of that for a minute. (I tried to do it last month at a conference. Didn't work.) But selling cards like this? Great idea. It allows authors...

Apple is now the lone hold-out. As you may recall, three publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster—immediately settled, leaving Penguin, MacMillan and Apple to fight it out in court. Penguin settled in December, probably to protect their pending merger with Random House. And now Macmillan joins its fellows. Macmillan CEO John Sargent cited financial reasons for the settlement, according to this story on Publishers Lunch: "Our company is not large enough to risk a worst case judgment. In this action the government accused five publishers and Apple of conspiring to raise prices. As each publisher settled, the remaining defendants became responsible not only...

Tools of Change is Almost Here (Good E-Reader) Australian Bookseller Mary Ryan's Opens New eBook Kiosk (The Digital Reader) How EBook Readers Shop and the Importance of Sampling (The Creative Penn) Dan Blank and Seth Godin on The Icarus Deception, Book Publishing, and Today's Author (The Book Designer) Kindle Daily Deals: Beautiful Boy by David Sheff (and 3 others) ...

According to a press release distributed late last week by BookBaby, the self-described "one-stop self-publishing solution" and "the world's largest ebook distribution network for independent authors," the company has just announced a new partnership with the Malaysia-based eSentral. Perhaps not coincidentally, eSentral is itself the biggest e-book store in Southeast Asia. [caption id="attachment_77962" align="alignright" width="125"] BookBaby president Brian Felsen[/caption] "I’m thrilled to add eSentral to our growing list of partners,” says BookBaby president Brian Felsen. “Now our authors can sell their books on the big e-book retail sites in over 200 countries, and manage it all from one account." Along with eSentral, BookBaby’s e-book distribution network includes Amazon, Barnes &...

Late last year, OverDrive began rolling out a new look to their site. My own library in Fairfax County had a "New Look Coming" banner up for several weeks. When I tried it out for the first time, my reaction was, "Not great, but I can live with it." I wasn't crazy about the new thumbnail view of the catalog. Maybe it's just me, but I find it easiest to process information in lists, not in blocks of images. I also missed the feature that told me exactly where I was in the hold line. The old site would tell me,...

I wrote earlier about the site issues facing Delphi Classics this week. I had some questions about some of the items in the email they sent to their customers yesterday, and Peter from Delphi Classics was kind enough to reply very promptly: "Thank you for your email. It has been a very difficult time for us here lately! Unfortunately, last Friday our webhost company deleted from their servers the entire files of several websites, including the Delphi Classics store. This was an error which we had no control over. We have managed to salvage web page information, eBook files and other...

Delphi Classics has been a favorite Web store of mine for over a year. In fact, I wrote about them as recently as this week, when I talked about my DRM-free January. And just as that story was going up, their site went down, due to a mysterious 'deletion' on their servers. I have been anxiously checking to see when it came back, and just a short while ago, I received the following email: Dear customer, We are writing to inform you of changes to our website. Unfortunately, last Friday our webhost company deleted from their servers the entire files of several...

Sometimes a book comes along that is so good you know it'll stay with you forever. Tears in Rain is one of those books for me. I found it by accident. It showed up on my Kindle with Special Offers earlier this month. I saw it was about replicants and was Prime Lending eligible. I wasn't expecting much, but hey: Free! Now I intend to go back and buy it. It's that good. The story is a thriller. The main character is a replicant private detective who has been hired to investigate some gruesome murders. Bruna Husky is well drawn and three-dimensional. She's...

In my last post, I discussed what I've observed to be the three biggest reasons people pirate e-books. Now that we understand the reasons, how do we actually deter piracy of e-books? Let me answer that question for each of the three reasons. 1. I Like To Collect stuff Here's the bad news: There's not much you can do about this one. Collectors like to collect in quantity. They are unlikely to spend much money, if any, on the books. You can deter piracy by offering free books for download, but that will only solve the problem for people who are willing...

Piracy is an endlessly debated topic. Views on it range from "don't worry about it too much" to "it has a huge impact on sales." What is often ignored are the reasons why people pirate and, from there, what publishers could do about it. I've hung out in forums with e-book pirates. I've read about the subject, and I think I can distill my observations down to three main reasons why people pirate (or why they justify it to themselves). In this article, I'll examine them. In my next article, I'll discuss how understanding the reasons can lead to practical ways to reduce...