Tim Waterstone is embarking on a new e-book project. It kind of involves owning a bookstore again. Sort of. Waterstone talked about his new venture, Read Petite, with The Guardian this week. It will be officially announced to the public at the London Book Fair next week. Read Petite is a digital imprint for short-form e-books. It will include fiction and non-fiction titles, according to The Guardian. The site will use a monthly subscription format and have unlimited access to all the work, which will be about 9,000 words or fewer. Here's Waterstone, as quoted in The Guardian: A lot of the best short fiction has...

Along with the Financial Times, The Telegraph, and The Guardian, just about every UK-based newspaper that covers the publishing industry ran the sort of 'E-Books Will Save Us!' story yesterday that seems forehead-slappingly obvious at first glance ... and yet is nevertheless rather comforting to read—especially considering that the good news has been officially confirmed with real figures. Here's the deal: Bloomsbury Publishing, it seems, has just reported "a [two percent] overall decline in [print] title sales" for the last four months of 2012. However, due to the fact that the company's e-book sales jumped 58 percent year-on-year in the same period, Bloomsbury's year-on-year operating...

FAA Facing More Pressure to Change Rules on Electronic Device Usage (Techdirt) Authors Benefit from Teamwork on Promotion (Good E-Reader) The Guardian Reveals an Important Truth About Article Comments (Scholarly Kitchen) OverDrive, 3M Kick Off 2013 With Promising eBook Developments (The Digital Shift) Kindle Daily Deals: The Devil's Waters by David L. Robbins {and 3 others} * * *  ...

It's one of those questions that those of us who work in the publishing industry could easily lob back and forth between us forever: Does the publishing industry need to be saved?  Maybe. Probably. Certainly, to some degree, something needs to happen. But when it comes to deciding what needs to be done, or how to do it, or why or when, that's when conversations begin to get complicated, and even heated. In mid-October, Colin Robinson wrote an op-ed-style ten-point manifesto of sorts about the issue for the Guardian. I doubt that anyone will agree or disagree with all ten points (number two, for...

Earlier this week, the Chair of this year's Man Booker prize judges, Peter Stothard, made headlines when he suggested that the overabundance of book bloggers today "is drowning out serious criticism, to the detriment of literature," according to an article in the Guardian. From the article: "Although Peter Stothard, who is editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is a blogger himself – and praises literary websites such as the Complete Review – he expressed fears that the burgeoning amount of online opinion about books could be damaging to the future of writing. "'If the mass of unargued opinion chokes off literary critics ... then literature will be the lesser for...

Yesterday, The Telegraph reported that digital sales of fiction titles in the UK were up an impressive 188 percent (by value) in the first six months of 2012, when compared to the same period last year. As for digital sales of nonfiction e-books, they've raised 128 percent in the UK. Sales of children's e-books, meanwhile, have increased 171 percent.           Also yesterday, The Guardian published an interesting piece about the e-book price war currently underway in the UK. Some ebook discounts from Sony and Amazon have reached as high as 97 percent, including digital fiction titles from authors including Jeffrey Archer and James Herbert, which...

There's a fantastic news story brewing in England at the moment, and if you're a fervent supporter of public libraries, you'll love this one: Following a series of budget cuts, a North London library that was known locally as a beloved community resource had to close its doors recently. Eight resourceful members of the Occupy London movement, however, decided to rectify that situation: They gained access to the shuttered Friern Barnet library by crawling through an open window, and have since reopened it and proclaimed themselves to be "caretakers" and "community librarians." According to a BBC News article, the "squatters have been sleeping on the main...

There was an interesting overview of reader privacy issues in this week's Guardian. I wonder if most e-book readers have given any thought to the issue. I bet it hasn't even crossed their minds that the customer profile Amazon or Kobo or Sony might have on them—detailing what they've purchased, and when—would be valuable to someone. And if they did see the value (I myself find Amazon's recommendations engine both useful and surprisingly accurate), I wonder if it's crossed their minds that this information could potentially be shared once Amazon has it. As the article points out: "Retailers and search engines, most notably Amazon...

PaidContent reports that the UK newspaper The Guardian is using an intriguing bifurcated strategy for its mobile apps. The Android app for the paper will be free (subsidized by advertising), whereas the iOS version will cost “the equivalent of four daily print copies [£3.99] for an entire year’s mobile app access.” It’s tempting to wonder why anyone would want an app dedicated to only one newspaper taking up room on their tablet or smartphone at all, let alone one you have to pay for. But the Guardian seems to be aware of that, too. The article indicates that...

Wikileaks, emblematic of the changing face of on-line journalism, is in the news again lately as a huge load of files have leaked—but this time they were leaked despite Wikileaks instead of (directly) because of it. The controversy arises because these leaked cables haven’t been redacted to remove the names of sources who could potentially be targeted by their countries’ governments. A lot of newspapers are crucifying Wikileaks for this new leak, but as nearly as I can tell most of the blame seems to lie squarely on The Guardian, the newspaper that was partnering with Wikileaks in an...

I wonder how many of them are in ebook format. I guess I'll find out as I go searching. Here's part of the list. You can find the full 100 here. Travel The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta (1355) The Arab world's greatest medieval traveller sets down his memories of journeys throughout the known world and beyond Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869) Twain's tongue-in-cheek account of his European adventures was an immediate bestseller Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (1941) A six-week trip to Yugoslavia provides the backbone for this monumental study of Balkan history Venice by Jan Morris (1960) An...

Russell Davies has a piece in the Guardian reacting to the Metro’s somewhat breathless denunciation of piracy as a “colossal threat” last week. The Metro piece frets that piracy could cost authors and publishers millions of pounds, and “be as devastating as illegal file-sharing was for the music industry.” (Because we all know how bereft and bankrupt the music industry now is, what with no new music being recorded anymore since Napster turned every recording artist out on the street to busk for a living. Alas, if only consumers had been willing to pay for digital music sold...