Digital Book World has been compiling weekly e-book bestseller lists for some time, and in the latest analysis they've made on them, Jeremy Greenfield alleges to have found an e-book pricing "sweet spot." What he means by this is that in looking at data over the last four months, very few books have made the best-seller chart whose price exceeded $8."The literal translation of this observation is that readers aren’t buying many books at that price point. It could suggest that there are few popular titles being priced in that range," Greenfield concludes But is this a fair conclusion? My experience has been...

  Time magazine has revealed that it will publish a tablet-only edition on the Boston Marathon attack tomorrow. The digital magazine will be available free on iPad, Nook, Android and Kindle devices. The publication will feature stories and exclusive photographs from Boston, as well as... Read Full Article... Source: Tab Times...

* Note: Click here to read Mobile Magazines, Part I — Google Play Magazines, here for Mobile Magazines, Part II — iOS Newsstand and here for Mobile Magazines, Part III — Next Issue So far this series has exclusively covered periodicals on tablets. But what if you have an e-reader? Yes, magazines and other periodicals are available for your devices as well. Of course, if you have a tablet-style device (Kindle Fire, Nook tablet line, etc.), you have access to a wide selection of magazines, similar to what you can access in the apps I've discussed earlier. However, there are even magazines and newspapers...

The New York Times has a fascinating preview up of a forthcoming tell-all from Jason Merkoski, formerly of Amazon and one of the developers of the first Kindle. Merkoski has a lot to say about both the benefits (a complete library; accessible using your phone) and drawbacks (sadness for paper fetishists) of the revolution he helped to spawn. I may change my mind once I've read a bit of the book, but the impression I got from his interview surprised me. Merkoski is ever-practical. "We can lament the older experience of reading, because that’s what we were raised with," he says. "But there’s...

This is the era of bits and bytes and multimedia and 3D printing, not just books and other texts. But Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science would still apply today in spirit even after more than eighty years. Educated originally as a mathematician, S.R. Ranganathan was a library-science genius who studied librarianship in Great Britain and worked as the librarian at the University of Madras. Accurately or not, he is said to have beaten out 900 competitors for the job. He peppered his writings with Indian philosophy, dressed Ghandi-simple, and avoided coffee and tea. His laws, spelled out in a 1931 book available from the Hathi Trust in full text, are: 1....

By now, we've all heard about Amazon's acquisition of Goodreads, the popular social media hub for book fans. I've seen a lot of speculation--including here at Teleread--about what this means for the future of Goodreads. This article at Paid Content is the first to answer that question straight from the horse's mouth, by posing it to Otis Chandler, Goodreads' CEO. Some highlights: • You can expect to see "customizations and better integrations for people who do use Kindle," but for everyone else, the site will "largely remain as it is." • Goodreads will be a subsidiary of Amazon, so 'on one level' Amazon will have access to the site's...

Hat tip to an alert reader on The Digital Reader for this one. As far as we knew, when the Kindle Paperwhite came out last year, Amazon retired the Kindle Touch. But now it looks like they plan to continue selling it, at least for a while. You can only find it through a search. It's not listed on the Kindle comparison page, but if you're interested, you can find it here. I'm guessing they brought it back some time this month. I did a search back through reviews, and reviews from February and January were primarily for "Certified Refurbished" Touches....

You may have already seen that Penguin is going to stop the windowing of library book titles. That's a good thing, and I applaud the decision. I'd be more excited if my library was part of the 3M system, and if Penguin wasn't having books "expire" and require a repurchase every year, but some library books is better than none, I guess. What's going to be interesting to watch is how the merger of Random and Penguin handle library books. Right now the two companies have completely different policies and pricing, and Random House is in Overdrive, where Penguin isn't. We'll keep...

We’ve discussed ‘read later’ apps before. Personally, I like the simplicity of Pocket, as Evernote is so overly-capable that it seems daunting to dive into head-first. Perhaps in due time, I suppose. Another nice option I’ve used is Google’s ‘Read it Later’ feature on its Reader service, but well, yeah, we all know where that’s headed. Anyway, Amazon has been on the offline reading tip for quite some time now. And their latest Kindle update makes it even easier to store Web content for later perusing. Introducing a “Send to Kindle” button to several popular media websites and blogs on Wednesday, Kindle users can now easily and...

Amazon Publishing Announces Two New Imprints (Good e-Reader) eBooks are Not Actually Books (Digital Book World) My Amazon Bestseller Made me Nothing (Salon) Author Lamentations: eBook Week Sales (An American Editor) Kindle Daily Deals: The Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake (and 3 others)...

It's interesting to me how often people misunderstand the appeal of Amazon and its products. Over at Digital Book World today, Beth Bacon asked, "When will Kindle's become free?" While it's not a bad question—and I do think the day of the free Kindle (or another brand of e-reader) is coming—I think she missed an important point. Consumers who think about their hardware purchases this way (do I want an e-reader, a tablet, or both?) are probably more likely to spring for a tablet with an Android, MacOS, or Windows OS if they can possibly afford it. Those who are looking for...

  If you had a pile of 300 books in your house waiting to be read, what would you do? Would you go out and buy any more books? I doubt it, even if you could battle your way to the front door. Yet if you’d got 300 books on your Kindle/iPad/other e-reader, would you stay in and click on any more ‘Buy It Now’ logos? More than possible. Because you probably wouldn’t even have noticed how many books were on there. Never mind 300, you can put 3,000 books on an e-reader and it’ll look and weigh just the same as if...