How many hours do you spend sitting at your computer for work and pleasure? How many hours are you willing to spend reading an ebook on your work computer? How many additional hours are you willing to spend to search through ebook websites to find an ebook to read? I find these latter two questions to be the ones that haunt me as I try to find an ebook to buy and read. I broached this topic in an earlier article, Finding the Needle in a Haystack of Needles (II): eBooksellers, but didn’t really delve into the problem of reading on...

Special to TeleRead The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights just finished meeting in Geneva. One of the main topics of discussion was a treaty proposal that would standardize copyright exceptions around the world to benefit blind readers. While there was strong support for the treaty by NGOs and many national governments, there were also competing initiatives put forth by the US and the European Union. Apparently the meeting ended in something of a stalemate. While the stated goal of the treaty is laudable – readers with disabilities should have equal access to the written word...

I came across this video by Kevin Rose, a founder of Digg, with some suggestions for future enhancements for ebook reading devices. I think his suggestions are excellent. The question now is whether they can be implemented at what seems to be the new price levels for e-ink readers. Barnes & Noble has introduced a new $149 wi-fi version of its nook and has lowered the price on its 3G nook to $199. Amazon has lowered its price for the K2 Kindle to $189 and Sony has lowered the pricing on its line of readers: Pocket Edition (PRS-300) $169.99, Touch Edition...

Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin made an interesting observation yesterday in an exchange that he and I had on his IdeaLog blog: We should long remember that in the Spring and early Summer of 2010, prices of ebooks actually went *up*. I don't think we'll look back five years from now and see that as a frequent occurrence. He and I agree that rising ebook prices probably won't be "a frequent occurrence" over the next five years. But even though he was basing the comment in part on my data showing that the number of Kindle store bestsellers priced above $10 had grown...

Thanks to a tweet by edejager, I picked this up on the eReaders website. The original text is in Dutch and here is a Google translation: The Dutch company iRex Technologies has applied for suspension of payments, reports the FD. Disappointing sales of the DR800, the last descendant of the iRex ereaderfamilie have led to financial difficulties which the company has been trapped, said Hans Brons CEO iRex-. Philips spinoff iRex Technologies was the foundation of electronic paper as currently applied in many eReaders. The company launched in 2006, the iLiad eReader, one of the first commercially available eReaders which...

Total first-week ebook sales for Steig Larsson's instant bestseller The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest amounted to nearly 30% of all units sold, according to a report today from Publisher's Marketplace. The popular subscription-based book industry website's mid-day newsletter is reporting that "Knopf Doubleday spokesman Paul Bogaards says their internal figures show an approximate first week sell-through of 425,000 units--which includes 125,000 ebook editions." If we do the math for ourselves, this translates into a 29.4 percent ebook share of the title's total sell-through, which would be by far the largest percentage yet reported for ebook sales of a major trade...

The long-delayed march of the Penguins? It wasn't worth the wait. After its agency price-fixing model co-conspirators came quickly to agreements with Amazon so that their ebook titles would remain in the Kindle Store right through the April Fool's Day transition date, the Penguin Publishing Group held readers hostage for about 8 weeks before finally reaching the end of the impasse, reported here moments before it was announced last week. Penguin has a terrific backlist and plenty of popular bestselling authors, and Kindle owners were waiting impatiently for an opportunity to purchase and download various among about 150 of the company's new...

By Stephen WindwalkerOriginally posted to Kindle Nation Daily 5.31.2010 Potentially big news for international readers here. Although Amazon has yet to make an announcement about it, the Kindle for PC and Kindle for Mac apps now render the Japanese language and alphabet. And thanks to an email that I received overnight from Mr. Toru Suzuki with my Japanese publisher Nikkei Business Publications, I'm happy to announce that one of the first Japanese language texts available to read with the Kindle for PC and Kindle for Mac apps is a lengthy free excerpt from the Japanese translation of my bestselling Kindle guide.   So,...

It has been only 15 days since our last systematic look at the population of ebook price points in the Kindle Store, but there are two reasons why it makes a lot of sense to take a fresh look today: first, Amazon fulfilled its plan to restructure its Kindle Store bestseller lists and divide them into "paid" and "free" listings overnight last night; and equally important, during the past 15 days the Kindle Store catalog has experienced its most explosive growth ever, averaging over 5,000 new titles per...

Received the following email from reader John Hagewood. Anyone got any insight into this? I purchased many many books from ereader.com from 2000 until 2009, going way back to the palm digital media and peanut press days. For years, they were my favorite seller...loved the format, the reader, and the social DRM. A lot of what I purchased were Star Trek books. I was just revisiting my library there today via the PC and the iPhone, updating my expired CC and trying to reset my unlock codes. Then I started clicking through from my bookshelf to...

As we all know Palm has been sold to HP. Normally I would not consider this a TeleRead subject, but I'm quite a Palm fan and have been since their earliest days. As a matter of fact I still write for the oldest Palm blog on the net PalmAddict. As we see the passing of Palm, I have been following all the articles I can on the subject - after all I knew, and wrote about, most of the major Palm players before the Apple crew moved in (Ed Colligan never did get it when I told him...

Dear Publishers, Now that you have your 'agency' contracts (such as they are) in place and are moving on, in your own heads anyway, to Ebook 2.0, can we please start tightening things up a little with some standards? Customers need to know that they can have a reliable, consistent experience in getting the content they want to pay you their hard-earned money for (and at over 1 billion downloads, the iTunes music store has proven people will pay for their content!) They don't have that now, and it needs to happen fast. Here are the first two areas you should work...