Barnes & Noble's Thoughts About Its Future (Mike Shatzkin) If Kids Are Our Future, the Future is eBooks (Forbes) French National Library Privates Public Domain Materials (Techdirt) eBook Popularity on the Rise in India (GoodeReader) Kindle Daily Deals: Pirate Coast by Richard Zacks (and 3 others) ...

Remember how Amazon has based its European operations in Luxembourg due to that country’s lower value-added tax rate on e-books? And France has reduced its own rate? Today the European Commission served notice that it was launching an investigation into whether these countries had broken European Union law by reducing those rates. The first step involves sending the governments of those countries a letter asking them to explain themselves, and if they don’t provide a satisfactory explanation within one month the European Commission could ask them to change their laws, or launch "infringement procedures”. As Philip...

From an article in the Guardian: … But if he's like the general French population, he is more likely to be packing a stack of paperbacks... than a digital-reader.Ebooks in France have been slow to catch on, as readers overwhelmingly prefer the printed page. Reading habits were back on the political agenda in France this week when Hollande's government, vowing to protect the printed word and France's bookish reputation, announced it would roll back Nicolas Sarkozy's controversial VAT rise on books. In contrast to the UK's famous three-for-two deals, the French state fixes the prices of books and readers pay the same whether they buy online, at a high-street giant or...

In December, I mentioned the UK Parliament considering and then declining to lower the UK’s 20% value-added tax (VAT) on e-books. Lowering the VAT is technically against EU law, though that hasn’t stopped countries such as France and Luxembourg from doing it. Publishing Perspectives reports that the UK’s Publishers Association hasn’t given up, and is lobbying the European Commission to change its VAT rules so that audiobooks and e-books can be assigned the same (0%) VAT as printed books. While [Publishers Association CEO Richard Mollet] says that “considering the explosion of e-books across the...

Here's an interesting article from TorrentFreak.  I thought cutting down piracy was supposed to increase sales.  I guess not. A new report from the Hadopi office, conveniently written in English so it can be used by lobbyists all around the world, is claiming the following. “Benchmarking studies covering all of the sources available shows a clear downward trend in illegal P2P downloads. There is no indication that there has been a massive transfer in forms of use to streaming technologies or direct downloads.” The report goes on to cite a variety of statistics ranging from a 29 percent decrease in visits to “pirate”...

The Global Legal Monitor from the Library of Congress provides a summary of the recently passed legislation but writer/tweeter @BlankTextField (based in France) says the article includes a few inaccuracies. From the Global Legal Monitor This Law adds a new chapter to the French Intellectual Property Code, comprising articles L.134-1 to L.134-9. Article L. 134-1 provides that an unavailable book is “a book published in France before January 1, 2001, which is commercially unavailable and is not currently published in paper or digital format.” (Id.) The Law creates a public database specifically dedicated to unavailable books, accessible at no charge, which will list these...

From Digital Koans: France has implemented a new law on the Digital Exploitation of 20th Century Unavailable Books. Here's an excerpt from the Library of Congress' summary: This Law adds a new chapter to the French Intellectual Property Code, comprising articles L.134-1 to L.134-9. Article L. 134-1 provides that an unavailable book is "a book published in France before January 1, 2001, which is commercially unavailable and is not currently published in paper or digital format." (Id.) The Law creates a public database specifically dedicated to unavailable books, accessible at no charge, which will list these titles. . . . After a book has been...

The Bookseller reports that Google is about to launch an e-book store in France, as part of its Google Play entertainment portal. The search giant has emailed publisher partners of its Google Livres books search with an offer of a contract amendment that would give Google 48% of the price of e-books sold directly to consumers, as well as an unspecified share of a 52% margin on sales through retailers. 48%, huh? That’s quite a bit more than Apple and Amazon have asked for. I wonder if anyone will kick up a fuss about that. Regardless, this is Google...

From The Register (originally published on 29 February): Last week France passed a law that permits the state to seize authors' rights on out-of-print books published before 2001. Scribes have just six months to opt-out, or lose their moral rights and the ability to determine a price for their work. It's essentially a Compulsory Purchase Order for intellectual property - the author's work is no longer their own. Ownership is instead transferred to a quango answering to the French Ministry of Culture, which is authorised to make it digitally available. Publishers are the big beneficiaries. The...

According to Publishing Perspectives Feedbooks received this financing from A Plus Finance. Check out this article about Feedbooks in Publishing Perspectives: PARIS: Though just 27 years old, Hadrien Gardeur is a veteran of the war to win e-book readers. Gardeur co-founded his company Feedbooks -– a cloud publishing and distribution service for e-books -– during the summer of 2007 when he was in his last year of computer science engineering school. Three and a half years later, Feedbooks distributes some three million e-books each month to a growing community of readers on multiple platforms, in the US and...

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...

A new publishing house is going to take current French books, translate them and present them in English in digital form.  Here is the press release: France’s publishers are announcing 311 new French novels for the January/February 2012 Rentrée littéraire alone! That’s a lot of books, far too many of which will never reach readers outside of France. Le French Book, an independent, digital-first publisher specialized in good reads from France, was founded in December 2011 to bring more of these authors to English-language readers around the world. “If we love it, we’ll translate it” The company’s founder and CEO, translator...