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...

The news, released today, that the San Francisco-based Inkling has decided to give away for free its "collaborative digital publishing environment" known as Inkling Habitat was probably the e-publishing community's most eyebrow-raising story of the week thus far. As Laura Hazard Owen wrote today for Paid Content, the company "has spent three years and $30 million to build Habitat, a cloud-based set of digital publishing tools that let users create and collaborate on high-quality, interactive ebooks." That sounds like fairly exciting stuff. Although if Inking Habitat actually manages to get itself off the proverbial ground over the next few months with any sort...

By Arnold Zafra In a move to encourage more self-published authors to make their masterpieces available on the iBookstore, Apple has created an entirely new section, Breakout Books, where self-published e-books will be displayed prominently. According to Apple, Breakout Books is aimed at helping readers find the next reading sensation by way of this collection of books from emerging—and hopefully talented—writers. All e-books on Breakout Books are independently published and were rated and recommended by iBookstore customers. And as Leslie Kaufman opined yesterday in the New York Times' Media Decoder blog, this is clearly "yet another sign that self-publishing is making inroads into...

From Paid Content's Laura Hazard Owen comes this story about Scholastic Books and their upcoming re-release—in e-book form—of the hit 80's series "The Babysitters Club." What makes this story interesting is that the first seven books are, in fact, already available as e-books. But what Scholastic is doing with these new releases is marketing to the nostalgia crowd with original cover art and a relatively low ($5.99) price point. As the article explains: "Scholastic has printed over 176 million copies of the BSC books worldwide. The ebooks are being released with their original covers by Hodges Soileau — making it clear that Scholastic...

Paid Content's Laura Hazard Owen is currently in Germany for the Frankfurt Book Fair. Earlier this morning she filed a brief post about the changes Barnes & Noble and Kobo are experiencing as they continue moving their retail operations abroad. Apparently Michael Tamblyn, Kobo’s EVP of content sales and merchandising, had some interesting (and especially wise) tips to share with his audience: Partnering with local bookstore chains has been central to Kobo’s international strategy, he said. “The infrastructure of selling e-books is a global endeavor," he added, "but bookselling is fundamentally a local experience.” Here's another interesting tidbit about Kobo's international strategy; the following words...

If you're one of the many e-book customers who's expecting a payment or credit as a result of the 49 states' recent $69 million settlement with HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster, you should be aware that "the states have slightly modified the way those payments will work," according to Paid Content reporter Laura Hazard Owen. In a post filed this morning, Owen detailed two of the latest modifications to the payments that were filed by the states' attorneys. (Click here to view the six-page document on Scribd.) As for the changes to the way credits will be disbursed, those modifications are fairly minimal; they probably...

Yesterday, shoppers discovered that Barnes & Noble is carrying books from Amazon Publishing’s New York imprint in stores around the country, despite the company’s insistence that it wouldn’t do so. Following our story’s publication yesterday, I learned that Barnes & Noble headquarters sent an email to its branches around the country telling them to pull the Amazon titles (which are being published and distributed in print by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt under an imprint called New Harvest). This morning, a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman told me, “Our policy has not changed. We are not carrying Amazon titles.”... Read Full Article ... Source: Paid Content...