Monday through Wednesday is O’Reilly’s Tools of Change. I’ll be there and covering it for you. According to a press release I got today, the event is sold out and has over 1,300 registrants. That means that, from what I saw at Digital Book World which was at the same venue, the space is going to be extremely crowded. All the keynotes will be live streamed by O' Reilly and I’ll post a live stream link on Tuesday. This is something new and we’ll see if it works. Monday is devoted to workshops and I'll be covering: Designing iPad Apps: Jennifer Brook (The...

Monday through Wednesday is O'Reilly's Tools of Change. I'll be there and covering it for you. According to a press release I got today, the event is sold out and has over 1,300 registrants. That means that, from what I saw at Digital Book World, which was at the same venue, the space is going to be extremely crowded. All the keynotes will be live streamed and I'll post a live stream link on Tuesday. This is something new and we'll see if it works....

Jecopnn Webb of O'Reilly Radar has an interview today with Brian O'Leary. O'Leary is about the only person I know who has done any credible research into piracy and ebooks. Here's a one of the questions: Is piracy really a threat to the book industry? BO: I don't have enough data to say unequivocally "yes" or "no" to the extent of the piracy threat. I think what leads to rampant piracy is not meeting emergent demands. The publishing industry should be working as hard as we can to develop new and innovative business models that meet the needs of readers....

From the press release: O’Reilly Media and the Bologna Children’s Book Fair today announce the first Tools of Change for Publishing event at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. TOC Bologna will be a one day conference held on Sunday 27 March 2011 in Bologna, focussing on digital and mobile technology. This new collaboration between O’Reilly Tools of Change and the Bologna book fair unites two well-known and professional event organisers to produce an inspirational conference. TOC Bologna will be a landmark event for children’s publishers, agents, writers and international book people who are looking for the best speakers and insight...

Almost 800 of these books have gone onto the store today. Best of all they don't have any DRM and are standard ePub files, so they can be read on any device with ePub support. From the press release: The more than 600 titles in the iBookstore from O'Reilly include Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks, David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual, J.D. Biersdorfer's iPad: The Missing Manual, and Mark Pilgrim's HTML5: Up and Running. Almost 150 Microsoft Press titles are also available, including Steve McConnell's Code Complete, Second Edition, Ed Bott's Microsoft Office 2010 Inside Out, and William R. Stanek's Microsoft Exchange...

Andrew Savikas of O’Reilly has posted a very interesting chart of the breakdown of format downloads by percentage of O’Reilly books for the last two years. The chart shows PDFs falling from around 90% of the total to around 50%. The sharpest drop in PDF happened around the end of 2008, and the decline has been more or less stady since then (save for a big spike brought on by an “any book for $9.99” promotion earlier this year). The biggest gain has been seen by EPUB format, which seems to account for about 25%, followed by Mobipocket...

From the Tools of Change blog comes important information for those with disabilities: For years we've supplied our digital files to Bookshare, a non-profit that provides accessible reading material to the print disabled. For qualifying readers, our books are made available worldwide, and we've really enjoyed working with Jim Fruchterman and the Bookshare team along the way (I'm also on their Advisory Board).   Although the DRM-free EPUB files in our ebook bundles are compatible with many reading systems for print disabled customers, many readers prefer the DAISY format that Bookshare provides, and either don't qualify...

The O’Reilly Tools of Change blog has launched a new weekly column covering at e-book news. This week’s column looks at the Samsung E60’s UK release by WHSmith, the $70 price cut for the Aluratek Libre (from $169 to $99), the new Laser EB101 device in Australia, the Pocketbook announcement we covered earlier, and a couple of brief notes about the Blio and the new Sony Readers. One reader that isn’t mentioned in the O’Reilly article is the new Sharp device (pictured above). Sharp’s President Mikio Katayama becomes the latest electronics exec to trash-talk the iPad, claiming the...

   (Not a geek? You might still want to check out this offer–there are at least a couple of titles that might make good ebook gifts for the geek in your life.) You may already know that I love O’Reilly Media, the company that publishes lots and lots of tech-oriented manuals and reference works. First, I love them the way you might love any company that collects knowledge, organizes it for easy access, and distributes it for mass consumption. More important (from an ebook perspective), I love them because they’re one of those few, smart...

I just received an e-mail from O’Reilly informing me of O’Reilly’s “Ebook Deal of the Day”. Today (Friday, May 21) only, O’Reilly is offering any e-book from its 2,000+ title catalog at a discount price of $9.99. To take advantage of this offer, enter the discount code FAVFA in the O’Reilly shopping cart. Remember, O’Reilly offers its e-books in multiple formats with no DRM for one purchase price....

How many books are there in the iPad's iBooks Store? How many of them are free? And is the total number growing or declining? I'm not sure how many ebooks there are, but for now at least, there's more than one story. It has been widely reported, since late March, that the iBooks Store would open, and did open, with a total catalog of about 60,000 books, of which about half (30,000) are free listings from Project Gutenberg. This has been the story from Apple's friends at Gizmodo, reported here: The official Apple way to get ebooks for the iPad, the iBooks store has...

O'Reilly Radar has some data on the 46,000 (paid and free) bnooks available through the iBooks app: 29.5% are fiction and literature, 6% mysteries and thrillers, 5.5% biographies, 3.7% history, 3.4% Christianity, 3.3% historical, 3.3% children's fiction, 2.6.5 sci-fi and fantasy. As far as publishers go: 23.5% Penguin Group US, 19% Simon & Schuster, 15.9% HarperCollins, 6.9% St. Martin's Press, 5.7% Grand Central Publishing, 5.2% unknown (Smashwords). The also give the mean price paid for books by category: fiction & literature $10.14, mysteries & thrillers $8.85, biographies $12.25, History $13.46. The posting has many more details....