According to the Huffington Post, three independent bookstores are filing a class action suit against Amazon and the "Big Six" publishers. Alyson Decker of Blecher & Collins PC, lead counsel acting for the bookstores, described DRM as "a problem that affects many independent bookstores." She said the complaint is still in the process of being served to Amazon and the publishers, and declined to state how it came about, or whether other bookstores had been approached to be party to the suit. "We are seeking relief for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores so that they would be able to sell open-source and DRM-free books that...

  By Brian Howard and James Sturdivant I own a Nook Simple Touch. Maybe it's because I root for underdogs or maybe it's because I chafe at platform lock-in and proprietary file formats, but I've been quite happy with life on the B&N ebook platform. Then, on Friday, Amazon announced its Stephen King Kindle Single exclusive, "Guns." In the short essay, King, whose book Rage had been linked to several instances of school violence, weighs in on the gun control issue. (King penned Rage as a high schooler. The book was published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym and has since been taken out of print  at the author's request.) I forked over the 99...

Those of you who work professionally in the publishing biz have probably been reading, hearing and talking about the art and science of 'e-book discovery' for years now; it's been a slowing growing industry trend for as long as I can remember. But unless I've suddenly been stricken with a nasty case of Baader-Meinhof Syndrome, the so-called 'discovery' concept has absolutely exploded lately: Everyone in the book world, it seems, is talking about it. Why is that? The best explanation, as far as I can tell, is that book publishing itself has exploded—e-book publishing especially—now that we all live in the Age of...

On IndieReader, Terry Giuliano Long has an interesting, long post about how self-publishing’s stigma has decreased over the last few years—leaving some traditional authors feeling threatened. Long notes that a number of brick and mortar booksellers are starting to make room for self-published authors in their stores, leading to traditionally-published authors complaining about the effects this is having on their income. One author even referred to it as “literary karaoke.” This comes at a time when the rise of the e-book is threatening paper sales. Industry leaders are concerned that publishers may ditch paperback sales altogether in favor of...

How are newspapers going to survive the e-revolution? Dan Pacheco of BookBrewer thinks he has the answer: e-books. He points to the recent Huffington Post decision to start organizing and curating years of journalism work on particular subjects and releasing it in the form of e-books. E-book revenues, he suggests, could supplement flagging on-line ad revenues by targeting people who would like to read on given subjects in depth with materials that probably already exist in many newspaper archives. Why settle for a paywall when you can aim specific stories at target audiences who might never bother trolling...

From The Bookseller: The Huffington Post has turned digital publisher, releasing its first e-book, A People's History of the Great Recession by reporter Arthur Delaney, yesterday (7th September). The title is available on the UK Kindle store priced £3.51, and available for $4.99 on the Amazon.com Kindle store, the Barnes & Noble site, Nook Bookstore, Kobo, and Apple iBookstore. It is also for sale on the German Kindle store. The e-book is a compilation of Delaney's articles about the financial crisis, which have all previously run on the news and opinion site. ...

A few days ago, NPR carried an interesting story looking at the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL. As David Carr pointed out, much of the value of the $315 million sale was created by bloggers working for free. When you look at personal blogs and social media, you might see random people telling the rest of the world trivial things like what they ate for breakfast—but altogether, what this mass of personal creativity represents is content. "As we all twitter away and type away and update our Facebooks, we're creating the coal that sort...

On the Huffington Post, writer Steve Leveen (co-founder and CEO of Levenger, a company that sells “Tools for Serious Readers”) has written a column about the ways that e-books can improve the reading experience. Of course, it’s not exactly news here that e-books can represent an improvement—some of us have known that for ten years now. But Leveen looks at e-books in the light of a book on reading he wrote five years ago, called The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life. (Which, ironically, apparently isn’t itself available as an e-book yet.) The specific behaviors that Leveen recommended...