From the press release:

Copia, the interactive eBookstore, announced that music critic Will Hermes will answer reader questions inside his book, the acclaimed Love Goes to Buildings on Fire.

Starting today, anyone who purchases a copy of Hermes’s much-lauded book from Copia can use the site’s free eReader app to post questions to the author in the margins of the eBook. Hermes will respond to the questions through Feb. 21, 2012.

While users have always been able to create and share notes on any eBook purchased from Copia, thanks to the platform’s app, this promotion marks the first time readers can converse with an author in the margins of their eBook.

“We are thrilled to have Will Hermes debut this promotion with us and showcase the interactive possibilities of our app,” said Seth Kaufman, VP of Merchandising and Marketing. “Will’s book is great conversation starter, not only because it breaks new ground in music history, but because it dishes on so many musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and David Bryne.”

Hermes, a senior critic at Rolling Stone and a frequent contributor to NPR and the New York Times, has earned rave reviews for his examination of the New York music scene from 1973 to 1977, a vital five-year period that gave birth to punk rock, disco, and rap while also jump starting innovative minimalism, salsa and jazz scenes.

“I love talking about the book, and music in general, and this platform seems like a really interesting way to do that,” said Hermes. “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is about artists pushing into new territories of communication; this sort of virtual book club definitely fits the spirit.”

“We look forward to other authors following Will’s lead and using our app to create special experiences for their readers,” added Kaufman. “In a retail environment where so many books are priced exactly the same, it’s nice to offer readers some truly special added value.”

To learn more about reading and talking to Will Hermes, visit www.thecopia.com/willhermes.

From the Worldreader blog.  Worldreader aims to put a library of books in the hands of families worldwide, using e-reader technology.  They have a post on their blog thanking volunteer  for his efforts.  Here is part of it:

Here are a few things that have us in awe with Carl back in our Barcelona office and excerpts from his blog:

1. His knack for trouble-shooting and encouraging kids to use built-in features on their Kindles:

“I suggested they tried out the ‘text to speech feature’ one day, a function of the Kindle Keyboard, which reads out a book’s content with a computer voice. Stephen’s [A Worldreader student] opinion: ‘The e-readers are great to read by yourself, but sharing and using them together with someone makes you enjoy them even more.’”

2. The connection he’s building with Worldreader’s students and families:

“We went on to visit Mabel and her family, a smaller but equally welcoming family, consisting of Mabel, her parents, her sister Millicent and her baby brother Abdel-Asis. Mabel’s father is a cab driver, while the mother stays at home to take care of the family. Both Mabel and Millicent have an e-reader, and they are often seen reading together outside of their house. Their mother had become a great supporter of Worldreader’s work and reported how both children had improved at school and in speaking English. They did indeed speak good English, particularly Millicent spoke great English for a primary school student, benefiting from the being in the e-reader class, and reading at home with her elder sister. Together with Diana [another Worldreader student], we read another of their favorite books on the e-reader: Ananse and the Pot of Wisdom.”

3. His keen observation and the questions he asks:

“Towards the end of our chat I asked if he had any suggestions for improvements. ‘Reading Lights,’ he suggested, ‘So students can read at night. And e-readers for all the other classes as well, so people don’t constantly come and want to borrow ours.’”

You can find out more about Worldreadere here.

That’s the title of an article in PC World.  Here’s a snippet:

I am not suggesting that you ditch your laptop and just use the Kindle Fire as your primary mobile computing device (although I have argued in the past that you could conceivably get away with that with the iPad). However, if you are traveling and you only want to take one device, it is nice to know that the Kindle Fire is capable of meeting your needs at least in the short term.

Although Amazon targets the Kindle Fire as a consumer device, it does come pre-loaded with the QuickOffice app. QuickOffice is a productivity suite which contains Quickword, Quicksheet, and Quickpoint – a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation app respectively.

From an article in Andrys Basten’s A Kindle World Blog:

This is the new but not yet announced page by Amazon forKindle Touch International, now buyable by customers in countries outside the U.S. finally – for $139 U.S. from Amazon U.S.

This is for the Kindle Touch WiFi only, but on that page there is an international table that tells you whether your country is on the list for delivery of this model. 

The internationaal page was discovered by the Canadian “Nathan” who is able to see the non-U.S. page(s).

Amazon has stores in France, Germany, Spain, and the UK and Kindle Touches can now be ordered there but ONLY from THEIR Amazon stores, which makes sense.

The main Kindle Touch page for international orders has adapters shown for other countries.

More in the article.

Wilkert suggests that EPUB could be a solution to this if Amazon could be convinced to adopt it and drop DRM. (Well, of course it could. Heck, pretty much any e-book format would work if Amazon dropped DRM, thanks to Calibre.) He reiterates the usual music-industry-based arguments for ditching DRM.

Several years ago Steve Jobs posted a letter to the music industry pleading for DRM to be abandoned. My favorite part of that letter is where Jobs asked why the music industry would allow DRM to go away. The answer: "DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy." In fact, a study last year by Rice University and Duke University contends that removing DRM can actually decrease piracy.

Publishing-industry observers and consultants have certainly ramped up the anti-DRM rhetoric in the last few weeks, haven’t they? I wonder if there’s some particular reason for that. The Kindle Fire securing Amazon’s lead in the e-book market bringing on a fresh wave of lock-in panic?

I also wonder whether anything will come of it. Are publishers taking heed and even now holding secret discussions on whether to follow the music industry’s lead? I suppose we can hope, at least.

New Features

• Implement the ability to automatically add books to calibre from a specified folder.
• Conversion: When automatically inserting page breaks, do not put a page break before a
  

  or

  tag if it is immediately preceded by another

  or

  tag.

• Driver for EZReader T730 and Pint-of-View PlayTab Pro

Bug Fixes

• Fix device entry not visible in menubar even when it has been added via Preferences->Toolbars.
• Fix metadata plugboards not applied when auto sending news by email
• Fix regression in 0.8.34 that broke recipes that used skip_ad_pages() but not get_browser().
• Restore device support on FreeBSD, by using HAL
• Get books: Show no more than 10 results from the Gandalf store
• Content server: Fix metadata not being updated when sending for some MOBI files.
• Heuristic processing: Fix the italicize common patterns algorithm breaking on some HTML markup.
• When trying to find an ebook inside a zip file, do not fail if the zip file itself contains other zip files.
• EPUB Input: Handle EPUBs with duplicate entries in the manifest.
• MOBI Input: Handle files that have extra tags sprinkled through out their markup.

(Via calibre Changelog.)

Chris Walters, a respected tech commenter, and the guy who sat in for me while I took my cross-country motorcycle trip last year, has gotten so fed up with the bloating in the new Kobo app that he just doesn’t use it any more.  Here is a part of his post from his Booksprung blog:

I no longer enjoy launching the Kobo app on my iPhone or iPad. I stopped looking forward to interacting with it a few updates ago, and now I actually avoid it.

This has been building for a while. A year ago, I praised Kobo for being ahead of the curve when it came to adding entertaining new features to its iPad app (the features were later extended to other platforms). “Best app,” I wrote then, and I meant it. But over the past six months—well, ever since Apple crippled all the competing ebook retailers’ apps for strategic reasons in the summer of 2011—Kobo has been adding new features to make its app more and more “social” and “networked” and “fun”, with the consequence that the app has started to become less and less enjoyable to use. The latest upgrade (version 5.3) has simply made it not worth bothering with anymore.

Find out the details in his post.

The increase in market share is due largely to the entry of the Kindle Fire by Amazon.  With Flurry in tens of thousands of Android apps, including many of the most popular, the company estimates that it tracks over 20% of all consumer sessions on more than 90% of all Android devices each day.  A session is defined as the launch and subsequent exit (or pause for more than 10 seconds) of an app.  For example, a consumer may play a game in one sitting for five minutes.  Let’s take a look at the data.

The chart above compares application sessions among all Android tablets before and after the holiday season.   For January, we use month-to-date figures, at the time this report was written.  Since we’re looking at proportions of use, estimating the remainder of January would not change percentages.  For an easier visual comparison, we label Amazon Kindle Fire in orange and Samsung Galaxy Tab in blue.  On the left, in November, we see that Samsung Galaxy Tab dominated application session usage on Android, with the Kindle Fire only having recently launched.   At that time, the Samsung Galaxy Time was widely considered the only viable competition to the iPad, though a distant second.  In January, after the holiday boom in devices and in apps, we see that strong adoption of Kindle Fire, combined with significant downloads driven from the Amazon App Store, resulted in a massive surge in session usage that just edges out the Galaxy Tab.  Unrounded, Kindle Fire represents 35.7% of sessions and Galaxy Tab represents 35.6%.  Remarkably, and from a standing start, the Kindle Fire overtook the Galaxy Tab in just a few short months. Total Android tablet sessions in January more than tripled over November, with Galaxy Tab sessions increasing by more than 50%.  Overall, Android Tablets are growing aggressively as a category.

That’s the title of an article in Dear Author.  Anyone reading on the Android platform should go over and take a look.  I’m new to Android, myself, and so found it quite helpful.  I was unaware that so many apps were available.

Everyday more and more folks are getting Android based phones and tablets. For readers these devices can be a great way to read both on the go and in a more relaxed setting. The problem comes when looking for reading apps. There are so many out there and searching the Android Market often dosn’t give great results unless you already know the apps name (which doesn’t help if you’re browsing).

This is my attempt to catalog the multitude of reading apps available for the Android platform (and there are a lot more than I ever thought there were). I’ve tried to include a listing for every app available along with basic information such as the formats it supports and its system requirements. Hopefully this will give users looking for apps an easy way to see what’s out there since searching the Android Market can give mixed results.

This is just a catalog so there are no reviews, but I have done reviews of some apps that you can find here, here, and here. While all of the links go to the apps listing on the Android Market (where you can read about features and user reviews) many of these apps can be found at third party markets or direct from the developers website. If you don’t have the Android market and need info on sideloading and third party markets, I wrote about that here.

(Via Dear Author: Romance Novel Reviews, Industry News, and Commentary.)

The Consumerist has a cautionary tale today.

An Amazon customer bought a Kindle, but the package went astray in shipment.  Amazon immediately sent another one, however:

My suspicions were confirmed. Someone else had gotten their hands on the first Kindle lost in shipment and because the Kindle came preloaded with my name, email, address and credit card information, this person(s) was able to make purchases on this Kindle. I spoke with the customer service agents who after understanding did their best to help me. They refunded all the purchases that were made. By the time I discovered this, the fraudulent user had made several big purchases of entire TV seasons. They also deactivated the Kindle so the person could no longer use it. …

I love Amazon. They make my life so much easier. What I do not like is them sending out extremely critical information pre-loaded onto Kindles. No one should be able to simply open a box and begin purchasing items on someone else’s credit card. I am lucky the user of the lost Kindle seemed to not really understand this because they didn’t begin purchasing anything until they were 3 days into it.

I am usually quite careful with my personal information, and it really bothered me that it was so available to someone else. I just wanted to let the Consumerist know about this so prospective buyers of Kindles or other electronic products can be wary of what is being stored in the device before you ever get your hands on it. …

More details in the article.

New Features

• Allow calibre to be run simultaneously in two different user accounts on windows.
• Driver for Motorola Photon and Point of View PlayTab
• Add a checkbox to preferences->plugins to show only user installed plugins
• Add a restart calibre button to the warning dialog that pops up after changing some preference that requires a restart

Bug Fixes

• Fix regression in 0.8.36 that caused the remove format from book function to only delete the entry from the database and not delete the actual file from the disk
• Fix regression in 0.8.36 that caused the calibredb command to not properly refresh the format information in the GUI
• E-book viewer: Preserve the current position more accurately when changing font size/other preferences.
• Conversion pipeline: Fix items in the that refer to files with URL unsafe filenames being ignored.
• Fix calibre not running on linux systems that set LANG to an empty string
• On first run of calibre, ensure the columns are sized appropriately
• MOBI Output: Do not collapse whitespace when setting the comments metadata in newly created MOBI files
• HTML Input: Fix handling of files with ä characters in their filenames.
• Fix the sort on startup tweak ignoring more than three levels
• Edit metadata dialog: Fix a bug that broke adding of a file to the book that calibre did not previously know about in the books directory while simultaneously changing the author or title of the book.

(Via calibre Changelog.)

Presented at Digital Book World, Verso Advertising has posted the 46 slides from its 2011 Survey of Book Buying Behavior.  Note that Verso is an advertising agency, not a polling firm and we don’t have any information about the competence of the company to conduct such surveys.  However, it is still probably worth reviewing.

The ereaders/ebooks portion starts at slide 24 and here are some of the points made on their “Implications” slides, beginning at slide number 41:

E-reader owners reaching Early Majority with 15.8% penetration, double that of the 2010 Survey …

However resistance remains high and seems to be intensifying at 52%, higher than in the 2009 Survey at 40% (Undecideds seem to be grafitating to the “highly likely” or “unlikely” camps in considerable numbers.)

Among avid book buyers, e-reader ownership jumps to 22.3% yet the resistance level seems equally high at 49.7%.

Picture of future begins to solidify, with a high installed base fo e-readers/tablets in the 25-30% range within 3 years, but a large base of resistors at around 50% of the book-reading poopulation.  Consistent with our previous surveys.

Much, much more at the site.  Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the link.

Three schools in Illinois, Iowa, and South Carolina will be outfitting all their students with the devices—over 27,000 in all. The schools appreciate the advantages the device offers of constant updates, cloud storage, and “invisibility” in terms of booting and use—teachers can focus on instruction rather than technical support.

Students do like tablets such as the iPad, but they seem to be taking to Chromebooks just as well.

"Students love the tablet. I am not going to hide that from you," said Diane Gilbert, an English teacher at Kelly Mill Middle School in Blythewood, S.C., who’s taught with tablets in her classroom. She added, though, that Chromebooks have a place: "They will bow down and kiss your feet for a tablet or for a [Chromebook]. But I’m a language arts teacher. My goal is to have students publish their work–create and publish. The [Chromebook] is more alike to a laptop or a desktop in the ability to publish."

Which type of device is better for education? The iPad will allow for interactive textbooks, but there’s no reason that such textbooks couldn’t be used on the Chromebook as well—indeed, Kno’s textbooks can be accessed from any web browser. And the Chromebook’s keyboard and Google Docs word processor means that students can write papers and other creative works on it much more easily than they could on the keyboardless iPad. At a suggested retail price of $349.99, the Chromebook is $150 cheaper than the basic iPad, too—a big savings when it comes to schools buying tens of thousands of them.

From a MocoNews Article by Laura Hazard Owen:

Last year was widely perceived to be a year of outrageous e-book growth, but some new research suggests otherwise. According to new data from Bowker and the Book Industry Study Group, the number of book buyers who also purchased an e-book increased by 17 percent in 2011, compared to 9 percent in 2010 – well below the 25 to 30 percent growth that some had hoped for.

E-books now make up 26 percent of adult fiction purchases, compared to 11 percent of children’s book purchases and 3 percent of cookbook purchases.

Seventy-four percent of book buyers have never bought an e-book (and 14 percent of those actually own an e-reader or tablet but choose not to use it to read e-books).

Read the Complete Article

[Via INFOdocket]

Got an email from about his new interactive database.  It looks like a great idea, especially for those areas of the world where the big 3 have not yet driven out all the competition.  Here’s what he says about it (from MobileRead):

I was surprised to find that there are no websites that had all the ereaders in one place and allowed you to choose one by filtering/comparing.

As a result of my frustration, the ereaderlookup.com site was born (I launched it in early December and it’s been well and growing ever since).

The website is basically an ereader database and comparison engine. Its sole purpose is to allow people to quickly find and compare ereaders according to one’s needs. There is a fairly user friendly (according to feedback I’ve gotten so far) filter form on the home page that allows to play with various ereader parameters, and as you adjust it the list of ereaders that match is being updated below on-the-fly. You can then select the readers you like and compare them side-by-side.

I tried to keep the whole concept simple and concentrate on just one thing – making it fast and easy to filter and compare ereaders. And that’s one thing I hope this website does well.

I also spent countless hours researching various devices and collecting information. Currently there are 125 devices in the database, but that number continues to grow as I go through my daily routine. Eventually I hope to be getting more info directly from users/vendors.

Take a look.