Much publicity has surrounded the record prices fetched for poetry manuscripts at an auction held by Bonhams in London as part of The Roy Davids Collection of Poetry, Poetical Manuscripts and Portraits of Poets. The sale made a total of £750,000 ($1,141,550). The draft of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember me when I am gone’ fetched £33,650 ($51,217), almost ten times its presale estimate and over twenty times the previous record for her drafts. Modern Brit Philip Larkin’s ‘Love’ fetched £7,500 ($11,415) in his first outing at auction. The news aired on Seattlepi.com—the website of what was once the Seattle Post-Intelligencer daily newspaper—under the headline ‘Digital Backlash’: “If we need any...

I've written plenty on this site about e-book conversion (most recently here and here), and I almost skipped over the Bowker press release. I'm glad I decided to investigate further. Okay, quick details first. From the release: Once an author has decided to self-publish, the next step of creating an eBook alongside print is obvious – it is too big a market. Not too far in the future I believe we’ll drop the “e” and we’ll just have books,” stated DCL CEO Mark Gross. “We applaud Bowker for recognizing the need for trustworthy conversion services for its customers, and are honored to...

Important news.  Mobi, which is what Kindle uses now, is a pretty limited format, but HTML 5 opens up the world to the Kindle.  Here's the announcement from their Kindle Format 8 page. Announcing HTML5 Support in Kindle Format 8 CSS3 support Floating elements Fixed layouts Text on background images Embedded fonts Numbered and bulleted lists Drop caps And many more! We’re pleased to announce a wide range of new features and enhancements – including HTML5 support – coming in Kindle Format 8 (KF8). KF8 is the next generation file format for Kindle books – replacing Mobi 7....

That's, indeed, what the Good E-Reader blog is claiming.  Here's a snippet. Check out the full story at the site: ... It seems many publishers have been told by the company that in the near-future, they should be submitting their books to Amazon in EPUB format and not exclusively MOBI. This news has been confirmed by at least 4 publishing companies we have spoken with during the last few days. ... Four publishers in the last week have confirmed that Amazon has indeed told them they now have an option to submit eBooks to be listed in the Amazon store in ePub format....

I'm not personally familiar with this program, but my ears (or should I say eyes) perked up when I saw a tweet from Liza at Threepress Consulting that said: I did some preliminary test[sic] of its EPUB export & was impressed. It costs $45 and is for the Mac and bills itself as a content-generation tool that "... allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents". You can find it here. I note that it can export to ePub and to mobi format, as well as a lot of others. If anyone has any experience with...

Received the following question. I certainly don't know the answer. To paraphrase the email: One can read a Gutenberg mobi ebook on the Kindle by simply emailing it to the Kindle's address and having it sent to the machine. However, you can't use this method to email a Gutenberg mobi ebook to the Kindle software on your iPhone or iPad. How can you get the Gutenberg ebook to the Kindle software on the iPhone or iPad - other than by buying the book from Amazon. The reason for this is to be able to keep the book in...