Reader's Digest UK Undergoes Restructuring, Drops 75% of Employees (Good E-Reader) Ebook 'Lines' Can be Powerful for Brand Extensions (Digital Book World) New Price List Shows Marked Change in Library eBook Availability (The Digital Reader) eBook Bestsellers Average Price Drops $0.61 This Year (App Newser) Kindle Daily Deals: In the Land of the Long White Cloud by Sarah Lark (and 3 others)  ...

The slow pace of ebook innovation (O'Reilly Tools of Change) The transformation of publishing (The Guardian) Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler on the Future of Discoverability and Social Reading (Digital Book World) A New Era for Books: The Random House-Penguin Merger Is Just the Start (The Atlantic) Kindle Daily Deal: Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser {and} Puss in Boots by Eric Metaxas & Pierre Le-Tan * * * Follow us @TeleRead  Join us on Facebook...

On Publishing Perspectives, Rod Younger of European e-book store Books4Spain had a guest column a few days ago discussing what might become of DRM. Younger discusses difficulties in e-book distribution (wanting to carry a book from a publisher not currently available through the distributor his store uses) and notes that, as difficult as distribution questions are already, DRM adds a layer of complexity that is both unnecessary and unwanted. Younger notes how smoothly Amazon has locked customers in with its Kindle DRM—it’s all so easy and seamless customers never even notice their books are locked up, until they want...

On paidContent, Laura Hazard Owen has a number of charts based on data from Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s recent outlook report on the future of the global e-book market to 2016. These charts break down growth by region, and to countries within specific regions. PWC’s report believes overall book spending in the US will be relatively flat, and that spending on paper books will decline as e-books take up the slack so that by 2016 “e-books will account for half of total spending on consumer books.” Total value of the market will be $21 billion—only $1.5 billion more than 2011’s $19.5...

On The Bookseller, Neill Denny reflects on how Fifty Shades of Grey is burning up the sales charts. He looks at it in terms of the overall spiciness of the erotic content, which goes somewhat beyond the boundary of what is normally considered “romance” and wonders if it will start a trend toward publishing more explicit books. Certainly British society has been “pornified”—by strip clubs, the web, lads’ mags, you name it—on a level that would have been inconceivable a generation ago. Perhaps publishing has lagged behind the curve while a new mainstream market, more comfortable...

Australian bargain site Cudo is offering, for 8 more hours at the time of this posting, a $99 budget e-book reader bundled with a CD of 4,000 written works—whose list of titles includes hundreds of works that are verifiably still within copyright, and enough duplicates and wrong author-title matches that it looks as though the seller simply grabbed the highest-ranked e-book torrents off any site they could find. I have to agree with John Scalzi here: this is some pure, high-quality premium-grade stupid, soliciting a list of so many copyrighted titles on a major bargains site like that. Add...

Found on PaidContent: A company called Gluejar has launched a new website called Unglue.it with the goal of “freeing” e-book versions of copyrighted books that do not have any yet. The site hopes to contract with the owners of particular books to determine how much money they want to allow free e-book versions of the books under a Creative Commons license, then raise that money from its users. [Site founder Eric] Hellman says Gluejar is in part a reaction to the changing role of libraries in the U.S. “We’re excited about the possibility of using libraries...

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting article about comic book piracy in France, focusing on a report by the Paris government’s “Le MOTif” book and writing “observatory”. The third in a series of reports on piracy that began in 2009, Le MOTif zoomed in on comics, as this is the category of books that is pirated the most in France. Comic books make up 10-14% of France’s global book market, but the availability of comics in e-book format does not meet the readers’ needs — resulting in organized teams of pirates (up to 100) that have...

Whether it will ever be great again or not, Barnes & Noble seems to be trying to survive by imitating Amazon. An article on Time explains that B&N is adding more shopping categories to its bn.com website, including Home and Gift, Consumer Electronics, Arts and Crafts, Toys and Games, and Baby. The items in these new categories will mostly be provided by third-party vendors, with B&N taking a sales commission on each item it sells. This seems to be an example of playing to one’s strengths—thanks to Nook e-book sales, the bn.com website seems to be one of...

The Bookseller has a long feature article about the plight of independent bookstores in the UK. Their numbers have been dropping over the last few years, from 1,483 in 2006 to 1,099 in 2011. The article puts this down not only to Amazon and e-books, but also supermarket competition and the down economy in general. But even so, most of the remaining booksellers don’t seem to subscribe to the gloom and doom going around that e-books are going to kill bookstores altogether. They think they have at least a good chance of sticking around for years to come....

The aftershocks of HP’s $99 TouchPad fire sale continue to make themselves felt. On ReadWriteWeb, Dan Rowinski posts an op-ed looking at the lessons the tablet sale can teach. He touches on some of the same points I did yesterday, others are worth mentioning—such as when he points out that the lack of apps for WebOS does not necessarily mean purchasing the tablet is a bad idea. Perhaps spurred on by Apple’s in-app purchase stance, HTML5 browser-run apps are coming in a major way and, Rowinski notes, the TouchPad’s browser is the best one on any of the current crop...

The Literary Platform has a look at a new publishing project called “Booksurfers”. Booksurfers e-books consist of classic, public-domain works (such as Treasure Island or The Wizard of Oz) paired and hypertextually interlinked with a newer work based on the older one. The article goes into further detail about the ways the narrative is interwoven, and how the publishing company behind it hopes that this will get kids more interested in reading the classics. But more interesting to me is the way that this shows, once again, that there is still current value in the public domain—even for...