We might have made a big deal out of the FTC’s guidelines for review blogs back when the commission imposed them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t necessary. The New York Times reports that one vendor gamed Amazon’s review system by offering customers full refunds if they posted reviews of its products—including a case for the Kindle e-reader. While it didn’t specifically demand 5-star reviews, there was a strong five-star subtext in the offer letter. By the time VIP Deals ended its rebate on Amazon.com late last month, its leather case for the Kindle Fire was...

Today until 8pm ET, self-published authors who are using Barnes & Noble's PubIt! digital publishing platform can visit the PubIt! Facebook page and pitch their novels to participating book review bloggers. Here are the details: On Friday from 9am EST-8pmEST, stop by the PubIt! Facebook page. We'll post as status updates the blogger's call for submissions. Under each blogger that's a good fit for your work, post 2 sentences describing your book. Be sure to include your genre, length of work, and your pen name if it is different from your Facebook identity. Please note that you can only pitch books already...

We've featured several stories about the web-connected print-on-demand Espresso Book Machine (EBM), which can access millions of digital books and create print versions in minutes. Most of those stories, however, are light on actual user reviews, so I was happy to stumble across this detailed summary of "the good, the bad, and the sexy" qualities of the EBM from librarian Rick Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen. His library at the University of Utah has had an EBM for two years now, and he's put together an insightful list of what works and what still needs work. You should read the full...

My father-in-law, Bob—a Marine and decorated Vietnam veteran—recently surprised us all by bringing a slender box along with him on his latest visit. Inside the box lay a Nook Touch Simple. "This is a good one, right?" he asked. "The ad online said it can hold 1,000 books..." I told him I had heard good things about the Nook in general, but was not familiar with how a 'Simple' operated. "Well, you can't go wrong with the name," Bob replied. "But, help me get that free book off there, the one it came with... Dracula. I don't wanna read that." After I removed...

Andrew Liszewski at the gadget blog OhGizmo! has published a long review of the new Kobo Touch, and in it he concludes that it's the first ereader device he'd actually consider buying. He doesn't mention Barnes & Noble's competing Nook Touch, so I don't know if he'd still feel so strongly about Kobo after a side-by-side comparison. Still, if you want to see lots of great detail photos of the new Kobo device then head over and check it out. Liszewski also explains how you can access the hidden sudoku game: If you go into the 'About Kobo Touch' section of the...

Long has my inbox-on both LinkedIN and Facebook-been filled with inquiries on various ePub creation software, especially regarding two specific platforms: Sigil and Calibre. Both are free, open-source creations of unselfish and brilliant folks that saw the eBook industry coming a long time ago. I've fiddled around happily with Calibre for over a year and been fairly happy, but only just this week did I pay heed to the various forum posts praising Sigil. After watching a few video tutorials and scrolling through the basic crash course I downloaded the open source system in less than a minute. The pros of...

Publishing Perspectives is carrying a column by Patti Thorn, former books editor of the Rocky Mountain News and co-founder of BlueInk Review, a fee-based book review site. In this column, Thorn makes the case for fee-based reviews as a solution to sorting through the avalanche of self-published titles. Drawing on her experience at the Rocky Mountain News, Thorn writes that there are already too many professionally-published works for free reviewers to handle, let alone self-published titles. She points out that, in the era of social networking and Amazon reviewer fraud, it can be hard to trust crowdsourcing—and going...

Earlier this week we posted Andrys Basten's overview of current iriver Story HD reviews from various sources, which together provided a good look at what the device is capable of and how it stacks up to the Kindle, its closest competitor in design. Now Ars Technica has published its own detailed review, along with several close-up photos. Among the good things Ars Technica found: The keyboard is easier to type on than the Kindle's, because the "Symbols menu recasts each letter key as one of the symbols, meaning you don't have to scroll around to include a period, comma, or exclamation...

Within a week after Amazon ended its Affiliates Program here in California, I received this rather disquieting email from one of my freelance employers, 1776 Productions (they run online reputable book review websites and some of the last book review paper publications in the country): Amazon.com has decided that Sacramento Book Review and San Francisco Book Review can no long post reviews books in the customer review section of Amazon.com and have removed three years of book reviews we’ve provided to authors. They feel it is a violation of their terms of service. We’re sorry for the inconvenience this causes you. We’ve...

Teleread's frequent contributor Joanna, aka Ficbot, has made her various ebook resources easier to find. She writes, "I have consolidated some of my on-line projects into a single handy website: the e-Finds Book Pages! It's your central gathering place for The Indie eBook Hall of Fame, the eBacklist Collection, the best of my Teleread Articles and more! The site comes in two flavours: The Author Page has info, articles, books and web links of interest to indie ebook authors The Reader Page has links to reviews, curated collections and blogs of interest to readers Via E-Finds...

I’ve talked about scan-induced typo problems in e-books before. For whatever reason, a lot of publishers don’t seem to have the manpower to devote to making sure their scanned e-books properly mirror the quality of their printed books. But they could take a lesson from on-line retailer Zappos, who determined that having higher-quality reviews of products on their site led to more sales of those products. So Zappos used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system of distributed low-cost labor to examine and edit five million reviews on their site, having the Turk workers correct spelling and grammar errors they found while...

Lately I’ve been pondering reimmersing myself in Tolkien: I’ve been rereading The Hobbit in e-book form, and am considering going on to Lord of the Rings—it’s been a while. Perhaps after that I’ll watch the twelve-hour extended-length movie adaptations again, by way of getting ready for Peter Jackson’s prequel, which just recently began filming in New Zealand. Out of curiosity, I peeked at the listing for the Blu-Ray versions of the movies on Amazon, and noticed something rather interesting. It seems that the 1-star protest review has spread beyond the realm of overpriced or windowed e-books, and is...