January 31, 2012 Adler, Prudence S., Patricia Aufderheide, Brandon Butler, and Peter Jaszi, co-facilitators. Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 2012. Aslib Proceedings 64, no. 1 (2012): Includes "Long-Term Digital Information Preservation: Challenges in Latin America," "Organizing Open Archives via Lightweight Ontologies to Facilitate the Use of Heterogeneous Collections," and other articles. Bailey, Charles W., Jr. Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, version 6. Houston: Digital Scholarship, 2012. College & Research Libraries News 73, no. 1 (2012): Includes "Supporting Tomorrow's Research: Assessing Faculty Data Curation Needs at Georgia Tech" and...

I posted some earlier comments from Patricia Ryan (pictured at the left), who is part of a wave of emerging self-publishers who are releasing not new books, but rather, their own print backlists. Patricia was kind enough to answer some further questions on how she went from published category romance author to self-publishing indie e-author. Enjoy! THE EXPERIENCE OF PRINT PUBLISHING Patricia began writing category romances in the early 90's. As she explains: "I had read a bunch of category romances that didn't do much for me, a few that were really pretty good, and one--The Black Sheep, a Silhouette Desire...

 Be sure to read the first Kindle 3 Tips and Cautions blog article here. The picture on the left is of my white-bezeled 6" Kindle 3 next to the Graphite 9.7" Kindle DX. The Graphite DX does have a slightly greener tint under certain lighting, but a touch of green can make an image look brighter. Here's the larger image.  Following the larger version is a second, closer shot of the text of both. Further on down the page, I have a tip to get the Kindle text to a closer match with the DX...

While it has been increasingly clear over the past year that Amazon is dominating the market share and price wars among dedicated ebook reader devices, it is now clear that Amazon is also winning its tug of war with traditional book publishers over ebook pricing. Amazon is succeeding dramatically in its efforts to bring an ever increasing number and percentage of all Kindle Store ebooks into its preferred price range between $2.99 and $9.99, inclusive, according to our most recent analysis of the overall pricing composition of the Kindle Store catalog and the "Top 100 Paid" spots on the Kindle Store...

It's been a big news week in Australia in the world of ebooks - as it has overseas. But, for this much-overlooked corner of the world, ebooks have started to take their first tentative steps into the mainstream, and the logjam of rights, content and device issues has started to free up. In short, some important players in book publishing and selling here have evidently been looking at the whole "ebook thing" and decided that rather than a fad, it's the inevitable direction of the book industry. To be fair, I'm sure this happened a while back but, aside from one major...

   1. Smashwords Smashwords continues to kick goals in self-publishing. In an increasingly crowded market, I just don’t think you can beat Smashwords for ease of use, price (you can’t do better than free), and distribution. Fling your words to Smashwords, and you’ll quickly end up with an ebook in multiple formats, playable on all devices, and distributed to iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and the Diesel eBook Store. Soon they’ll be adding Amazon to the already impressive list. The website could use prettying up, but this offering is the best one-stop-shop free solution out there. Other services...

Given Australia’s geographical position, we’re used to seeing “Made in China” stickers on the backs of everything from TVs to Australian flags. For a while, Korea made a play as our chief supplier of everything, then Japan had a tilt at the title, but China is still king. In fact, China is now the world’s manufacturer. And I, for one, say hooray. During the last month, the promised flood of cheap ereaders and touchscreen tablet computers has begun here. And they haven’t been big brands. I either have reviewed, or am about to review three – the Kogan eReader, the LASER EB-101...

Imagine only being able to open one window or application at a time on your laptop. Work for a bit in Excel and when you need to switch to Word, you've got to closer the former before you open the latter. Or what if you want to open two spreadsheets at the same time? Imagine you had to close the first before you could open the second. That's silly, right? On a regular computer, yes, it is. So why do we accept those sorts of restrictions on our ereader devices? I can't open two books...

Editor's Note: I am proud to announce that Australian journalist Jason Davis will be contributing a regular column to TeleRead on the state of "e" in Australia and New Zealand. This content will be exclusive to TeleRead. Jason also runs the BookBee and EbookAnt websites. PB. This is my first official guest post, so I thought I’d start by bringing those who are interested up to speed with the state of play in ebooks in Australia. That Australia is a couple of years behind the rest of the West in ebook uptake is probably not news to many....

 I’ve spent too many days this summer visiting this page on Amazon’s Kindle store, waiting for the price of the latest book from Charles Stross to drop to $9.99 (as of the date of this post, it’s $11.99). Clearly, it’s not going to happen until the publisher feels it’s notched as many $12 purchases as it can from eager fans who aren’t as price-conscious as I am. But wait a minute! I too am an eager fan, and because of this pricing issue, I ended up reading the book for free. I’m still a fan but now...

 The Kindle for PC app has been quietly updated.  Some have chosen the option to have it updated automatically when they open the program and an update is available. I like to choose the time, but then I didn't get a notice that there was an update waiting to be 'noticed.' I read about it when @MikeCane tweeted it the other day in his inimitable way. See below: So, I went to my Kindle for PC program, still showing a bright, plain white background, chose the menu's install-update option, and got what ...

Over the course of this summer I've read a couple of great Yankees books: Munson and The Bronx is Burning.  The former was read on my iPad and the latter, because it's not available digitally, was read from a dead tree.  After seeing countless references in both to another Yankee classic, The Bronx Zoo, I decided that should be on my reading list too.  Unfortunately for me, that's another book that's not available digitally.  I also was unable to find a copy at the local brick-and-mortars or even the second-hand bookstore, which got...