We briefly mentioned The Reading Room back in April as an alternative to Goodreads. It’s closely resembles Goodreads, a popular social reading site bought by Amazon last month. The company is changing how it does some things. The Reading Room will now offer print brooks for sale, starting June 1, along with e-books that were already available on its site. “By combining the power of social networking with carefully curated content, recommendations and featured selections, and the ability to buy eBooks and soon print titles in the U.S. (followed later by other parts of the world), readers can now discover books much in...

After long campaigns carrying the fight for e-books to the print-only diehards, I’d like to turn back for once to something that can never be put into electronic format and will forever remain print. And for very good reasons. And yet it had to wait over a century until 2004 before appearing in the form its author originally wanted. And it is available online. The work is Un coup de Dés (A Throw of the Dice) , or in full, Un coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance), French Symbolist poet Stéphane...

As already noted in TeleRead, author Ted Heller has recently been bemoaning his woes as a self-publisher in Slate. He's now followed up with a further bulletin on his tribulations as an e-reader, first run on The Weeklings and also aired since on Slate. In particular, he cites the demise of that mobile billboard, the book jacket. Heller takes issue with the fact that Kindles and their ilk never show others your reading choices. "The Kindle tells you nothing about the book that’s being read and therefore nothing about the person reading it," Heller observes—though I'd object that this comes down...

By Gloria Quintanilla 2012 felt like a decisive year for print. E-Book sales surpassed print book sales on Amazon for the first time, and widely-read publications like Newsweek decided to give up on print media altogether, and instead to transition fully into digital publishing. All the while, pundits are still debating if there is a future for print in a world dominated by digital formats. Similar discussions are going on between book lovers and authors, who are worried about the publishing industry being ill equipped to respond to their demands. So here's the question: Is it possible to have the best of both worlds? Can...

  'Tis the season for reading -- both print and e-books. But can the two really coexist? For this video report, I checked in with three bookstores in Chapel Hill and Durham, N.C., and asked store managers and customers whether they preferred print or e-books. Some of their answers were expected, such as people's love of the smell of print books, and how they enjoyed having a break from staring into a screen. E-book users praised their devices for their portability, and enjoyed being able to carry multiple books with them without being weighed down... Read Full Article... Source: Media Shift (PBS) * * *  ...

A post by Robert McCrum on the Guardian books blog on “the power of paper in the digital era” didn’t turn out the way I thought it was going to from the headline. I expected it to be another one of those “paper books rule, e-books drool” stories we’ve been seeing with increasing frequency lately, but instead it took quite a different approach. McCrum discusses the dichotomy of paper archives and digitization. Thanks to digital copies of records, author Sarah Thornhill was able to do much of the research for a historical novel based on her ancestors without ever...

FutureBook’s Philip Jones had the chance to talk with self-publishing star Amanda Hocking, whose move to a $2 million traditional publishing deal with St. Martin’s Press caused some controversy in self-publishing circles last year. In the interview, she confirms that Amazon actually made a higher monetary bid to publish her books, but she was concerned that the company would not be able to convince other bookstores to carry the printed versions. Hocking discusses the reasons for her switch—mainly that she wanted to be able to devote more time to writing rather than to all the fiddly little things that...

FutureBook carries a review of a BBC program on that old e-cliché, the Death Of The Book. Called “Books – The Last Chapter?”, the program is available on BBC’s iPlayer, but only for people in the UK. Judging from review writer Philip Jones’s description, it doesn’t sound like I’m missing very much. Jones notes that the show started from the position that it was a sad thing that print books were on the way out, and went on from there. It seems to have some rather odd blind spots, such as not really looking at why readers were...

Joseph Esposito of Scholarly Kitchen has a post looking at the demise of Borders and what it means for the publishing industry. Yes, I know, we’ve posted plenty of those looks before, closer to the time the demise actually happened, but this one brings a perspective I hadn’t thought so much about before. When we think of Borders going away, a lot of people tend just to think of 10% of the print book market evaporating, as if the number of books sold is all that matters. But Esposito points out that the closure points to a matter...

Wired.com’s New York editor, John C. Abell, has posted what at first glance looks like another one of those "why e-books aren't all that great" articles that e-book fans either point and laugh or gnash their teeth at. But actually, Abell explains, he likes e-books himself—he hasn't bought anything in print since getting his iPad. Still, he sees five areas where e-books don't quite live up to their print counterparts. Some of these “problems” are more compelling than others: An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it. You can’t keep your books all in one place. Notes in the margins help you...

Amazon has a press release out (found on Engadget) indicating that it is now selling 105 Kindle e-books (not counting freebie downloads) for every 100 print books it sells in the US. It also reports that the ad-supported Kindle With Special Offers is the current best-selling Kindle device. Meanwhile, FutureBook reports that for every 100 hardback books Amazon has sold in the UK, it has sold 242 Kindle e-books. (There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent comparison to all print titles such as the one on the US press release, however, making it hard to make a comparison.)...

USA Today reports that its next best-selling books list is going to show a milestone in the field of e-books: the e-book editions of the top six books on the list (and 19 books in all out of the top 50) outsold the print editions. This is the first time that the entire top fifty list has had more than two titles in which the e-book outsold the print. The surge in e-book sales is largely due to a Christmas in which more e-book readers were gifted than ever before, and is not expected to last (a number of...