Earlier I wrote about the possibility that the new channels of e-book marketing might soon be saturated by the efforts of a new generation of publicists, agents and book promoters—once these had mastered social media and other techniques for getting their message in front of readers—to the detriment of indies or individual self-publishers. Now it seems this is happening before my eyes. To the right is a screenshot of my Hootsuite Twitter feed for the hashtag #pubtip, which as many self-publishers know, is a well-regarded search term for advice and tips for authors, originally started by literary agent Rachelle Gardner in...

In my grandfather's day, if you saw it on the front page of the newspaper, it must be true. My, how times have changed! A bizarre story is gripping my city this week, and nobody knows if it's true or if it isn't. The fact that somebody told it to somebody else is news enough! It's almost too bizarre to even begin explaining. Our mayor, Rob Ford, is, to put it in the kindest way, a character. His dislike for the Toronto Star, a major local paper, is legendary and well-established. Their dislike of him is as established. But when they...

After several weeks of teasing me for burying my head in the sand and stubbornly refusing to transfer my Google Reader RSS feeds elsewhere, the Beloved quietly confessed last night that he has given up on Feedly and moved himself back to Reader, too, for the time being. Once I was done milking the required apology for his weeks of mocking, I asked him why, and found that he had reached the same conclusion—that in the battle between interactivity and linearity, linearity is sometimes the better way. Here's what he didn't like about Feedly: It was too dynamic for him. Every...

What Should Twitter Do When People Exploit an Emergency? (Giga OM) Kobo Aura HD Review (Good e-Reader) Study Finds Newspaper Readers are Engaged, but Local Papers Need to do More on Mobile (Paid Content) Sourcebooks Partners with Berenstein Bears on Personalized Storybook Platform (Digital Book World) Kindle Daily Deals: The Night Lives On by Walter Lord (and 3 others)...

It's Time for (Many) Experienced Writers to Stop Blogging (Jane Friedman) A Book Is a Start-up: Lessons from Publishing Hustlers (The New Yorker) A used ebook market may hold more opportunity than risk (Tools of Change) Franklin commissioning e-books via Twitter (The Bookseller) Half of Americans to Read Ebooks by Year's End? (DBW) Kindle Daily Deals: The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut (and 3 others)  ...

Using an iPhone in Ireland to connect to the Internet? Get your passport out. The legislature of Ireland, the Oireachtas Éireann, is exploring the topic of Internet safety and cyberbullying, and the possible need for legislation and regulation of online comments. It’s going about as well as you might imagine, with one senator, Eamonn Coghlan, suggesting that people should pay to post online. Coghlan has also suggested that Internet users use a passport to register their IP address. According to this story in The Irish Examiner, Communications Minister Pat Rabbitte went on to suggest at the same meeting that American companies, such as Facebook and...

We've been writing quite a bit lately about book publicity tactics, which is probably why a recent tweet about a Pan Macmillan promo caught my eye this morning. The promotion couldn't be easier: You post a pre-written tweet about a new Richard House series called The Kills, and then the first book of the series (there will eventually be four, and the first is titled Sutler) is automatically downloaded onto your computer, tablet or smartphone. (I just gave the promo a test run myself, and was surprised when I was offered my choice of a Mobi or EPUB file.) The Kills, as the book's...

Kim Dotcom posts screenshots of upcoming Mega site (The Next Web) The End of Money: Selling e-books on Twitter (The Next Web) Special Report: Amazon's billion-dollar tax shield (Reuters) Tech industry history could inform bookstores' road to recovery (O'Reilly's TOC) Kindle Daily Deal: Restless by William Boyd {and} The Only One Club by Jane Naliboff * * *    ...

  By Colleen T. Reese As a social media manager, my content consumption habits tend to get wildly out of control if I’m not careful. And a lot of readers face this same issue. When we first started looking into TeleRead’s reading habits, we learned that a great majority of you continue to rely on word-of-mouth to find new e-books. In the digital age, weeding through the crowded muck can be overwhelming, to say the least. So to help ourselves—and yes, you too—we’ve curated a quick list (in no particular order) of our favorite heavy hitters on Twitter. We found this list to be...

"Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is a story about a young man who loses his job as part of the Great Recession of the early part of the 21st century, and gets a new one working a night-shift at a 24-hour bookstore in San Francisco. He quickly discovers that there's much more than meets the eye to this store. And before long, he's criss-crossing the country and enlisting all his friends in the quest to hack the code behind this mysterious place. "I actually wrote this book for myself—or for people like me—because I was tired of people asking the question, 'Books, or cool digital...

UK's Tesco Takes on Amazon (Good E-Reader) How Much Do Average Indie Authors Know About Their Pricing Options? (TDR) Why I have a Love/Hate Relationship with Twitter (GigaOM) Writer's Code of Ethics (Joe Konrath) Kindle Daily Deal: All God's Creatures {and} Zoe Sophia's Scrapbook...

The majority of you out there who follow this site on a regular basis have long been aware of the fact that TeleRead's once mighty Twitter account has sat sadly dormant for quite some time now. Sleeping, as it were. But thanks in no small part to the crackerjack social media team that toils late into the night inside a top-secret, restricted access bunker—which just so happens to be located three stories beneath the basement of NAPCO's World Headquarters building in North Philadelphia—we're back online once again. We'd be pleased and honored if you'd consider following our account, @teleread, where you'll find links to our stories, retweets from...