From Digital Book World comes this: A mini-wave of middling news has hit the e-book world in the past several weeks in contrast to the usual positive narrative about explosive growth and boundless opportunity. Is it a dark cloud on the horizon or just a blip on the radar? Mixed metaphors aside, what’s really going on with e-books right now? Despite the “bad” news, experts and observers say that e-book publishers have little to worry about. Profits are down at romance-book publisher and e-book vanguard Harlequin due to print declines that were not offset by digital gains. The Association of American Publishers announced...

The New York Times has an interesting piece by Julie Bosman positing that, thanks to the ease with which e-books now allow authors to publish and self-publish, and let readers buy instantaneously, authors are now feeling “obligated” to write more, faster. Rather than publish the “usual” one book per year, authors are pressured to “[pull] the literary equivalent of a double shift” and write more frequently. “It used to be that once a year was a big deal,” said Lisa Scottoline, a best-selling author of thrillers. “You could saturate the market. But today the culture is...

Great piece. And one that warrants a solid response, which I will think on before I write anything else: So when digital evangelists prognosticate about the future of publishing, as they love to do, and about what ‘needs’ to go away, serious nonfiction is now one of the first things I think about. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and want to read more of it and notice twentysomethings have little perceived patience for weighty tomes. Maybe it’s because I’d rather have pragmatic conversations about what categories are best suited to digital — genre fiction obviously, certain commercial strains of literary...

From the Amazon press release: Owning a Kindle just got a whole lot better for magic-loving Muggles. StartingJune 19,Amazon.com(NASDAQ:AMZN) is adding all seven Harry Potter books (in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish) to the Kindle Owners’Lending Library(KOLL). Harry Potter is the all-time best-selling book series in history, andAmazon has purchased an exclusive license from J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore to make the addition of these titles possible. The Kindle Owners’Lending Libraryis a benefit of Amazon Prime membership—Prime members also enjoy free two-day shipping on millions of items and unlimited streaming of more than 17,000 movies and TV episodes. The Kindle Owners’Lending Libraryhas now...

Michael Agresta has an article with this title in Slate.  It's far from the usual repitition of cliches we see in articles of this type and is well worth reading.  Here's a typical example: As e-books overhaul and re-present many long-standing paratextual categories, we trade off layers of established meaning. The typescript page shown here, from James Joyce’s Ulysses, is a famous example of a paratext with clear authorial intent. Joyce asked the printer to enlarge the final, redundant period at the end of the “Ithaca” chapter. On a Kindle, the reader can adjust the font size herself. Joyce wanted his free-floating...

Here we have a common perception among would-be readers of self-published fiction: Yeah, $2.99 books have been, in my experience, not worth the electrons it took to produce them. Aghast at the cost of ebooks when I got my Nook 2 years ago, I turned to those cheaper price points and time and again was disappointed. There is a reason these books are not picked up by the publishing houses. Let’s face it. The major publishers have been doing literature for a while – they know what people will read, recommend and most importantly, pay money for. Ms. Reed [the successful...

That's the title of an article by Jason Pontin, the editor in chief of MIT's Technology Review.  He discusses how publishers were seduced into doing apps by the iPad and how they became disappointed with the results.  But the real problem with apps was more profound. When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn't really link. The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, "walled gardens," and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens. For readers, none of that beauty overcame the weirdness...

From the press release: Alberta (I-Newswire) May 7, 2012 - A new book publisher, Bookkus Publishing, opened its doors with a new way of acquiring books for publishing. It accepts submissions from any author with a focus on using a group to judge the best books in order publish. The people who edit the books are normal everyday readers who have no special training other than they enjoy to read. For each book they read, they give a rating. If the rating is high enough the book will be edited, distributed, and marketed, first in eBook form and later in paperback....

This is from contributor Richard Herley's blog.  I've tead the book and can recommend it highly: This was my first published novel; it won the prestigious Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, administered by the Royal Society of Literature in London. Download a copy in the format of your choice from any of the bookstores listed in the panel on the right. For more information about The Stone Arrow, including improbably enthusiastic (but entirely authentic) contemporary press reviews, please go here. (Via Richard Herley's blog)...

From the Taipei Times: Taiwan’s e-book market will grow dramatically in the next three years as a large number of e-book readers and tablets are made available, a local publisher said. “By 2015, the number of e-book readers and tablets is expected to exceed 2 million units in Taiwan, a figure that is big enough to drive the e-book industry forward faster,” said Yu Kuo-ting (俞國定), chairman of the Taipei-based Taiwan E-book Association (台灣電子書協會). Taiwan’s e-book industry lags behind the US by three to five years, so 2015 is likely to be the turning point, said Yu, who is also the managing director...

They’re nowhere near as big as Tor, but the Bookseller reports that Duncan Baird Publishers, a UK publisher of illustrated mind, body, and spirit and cookery books, has announced it will be removing restrictive digital rights management (DRM) from 150 of its current and 80 future e-book titles in order to provide a better experience for readers. It is not clear from the Bookseller piece what percentage of Duncan Baird’s overall catalog this represents. Duncan Baird is writing to authors to tell them of its decision, which has met with mixed response. “There are some authors...

From the summary of the UK Publishers Association Statistics Yearbook 2010: The PA Statistics Yearbook 2010 shows that total book sales in the UK amounted to £3.1bn in 2010. It also reports that: Total consumer digital sales (including consumer ebooks, downloads and audiobooks) showed the most rapid growth, having increased by 318% since 2009 from £4m to £16m.  Combined digital sales have increased by 38% on 2009 figures. The digital publishing market is now 6% of the combined physical and digital sales of UK publishers. The overall size of the digital market stands at £180m. Consumer digital sales of ebooks and downloads increased from 2%...