Dan Gillmor, who we’ve mentioned here a number of times, has an article in the UK paper The Guardian about high American e-book prices, and how they have helped him rediscover his local library and used bookstores. When new ebooks were $10, I was buying them all the time. In almost all cases, book purchases are impulse buys – something you want to have, right now. I was buying new best-sellers at a rapid rate, and happy to do so. (The books I bought this way tended to be mysteries and thrillers – the kind...

The Bookseller reports that Theresa Horner, vice-president for digital content at Barnes & Noble, has announced that the Nook will be coming to the United Kingdom in the “not too distant future.” Though B&N hasn’t determined whether it will be partnering with a UK company or creating its own UK presence, it is seriously considering expanding now that it has created “a successful platform in the US to work from.” There has been speculation B&N might partner with the Waterstone’s chain, since having a print bookstore to work from would be beneficial to an e-reader. However, the company has...

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...

The Bookseller has a long feature article about the plight of independent bookstores in the UK. Their numbers have been dropping over the last few years, from 1,483 in 2006 to 1,099 in 2011. The article puts this down not only to Amazon and e-books, but also supermarket competition and the down economy in general. But even so, most of the remaining booksellers don’t seem to subscribe to the gloom and doom going around that e-books are going to kill bookstores altogether. They think they have at least a good chance of sticking around for years to come....

On FutureBook, Steve Emecz wonders why Barnes & Noble still hasn’t made the Nook devices, Nook Reader apps, or Nook e-books available outside the US and Canada. Amazon and Kobo, he points out, have readers and software available in the UK. Why not B&N? An excited author of mine downloaded the Nook PC app and bought a copy of his e-enhanced book this weekend and was hugely impressed (The London of Sherlock Holmes hyperlinking to Google Maps). I tried to do the same, and indeed also tried to download the exciting new Nook iPad app too...

FutureBook’s Robin Harvie has a post speculating on whether e-books will soon be more widely adopted to send review copies. The costs for sending review copies of physical books can run into the hundreds of pounds for just a single book, and this would seem to be an area where e-review copies could save publishers a bundle. However, there isn’t a system in place yet to allow this. At the moment there is no structure in place that allows review copies to be delivered directly to the reviewer as an eBook. Publishers rightly furrow their brow...

The Media Briefing has an interesting article looking at some recently-released statistics about Internet use in the UK. Only 77% of British households have Internet access, and half of those who don’t have it don’t feel they need it. And only a little more than half of those who do have it say they regularly read news on it. To put this in context, 57 percent of internet users and 91 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds used social networking sites in the same period. The people who are soon going to be your ad manager’s target audience already...

Futurebook is carrying a brief piece by a British publisher pointing out that Barnes & Noble’s e-publishing system still has a major drawback that makes it less useful for publishers outside of the United States: it requires a U.S. bank account. This restriction is not exactly new—Diane Duane mentioned it in a post to her blog—but it is a bit surprising that Barnes & Noble still has it after all this time. Amazon certainly doesn't. As the Futurebook piece points out, this makes Barnes & Noble’s neat new touch-sensitive Nook a lot less useful to British readers. If Barnes & Noble...

The Bookseller reports that some serious discussion is going on in the UK between publishers and librarians over rules for e-book lending at libraries. Back in October we reported on the UK Publishers Association setting down restrictive ground rules to prevent library users from downloading e-books outside of library facilities—a move that would eliminate one of the biggest advantages e-books have. (It turned out that these restrictions had apparently been brought on by people from China “joining British libraries and plundering their virtual collections for free.”) At the moment, some British publishers do permit library lending (via e-book lending...

On The Bookseller, Philip Stone looks at the sales performance of a novel, Those in Peril by Wilbur Smith, that was sold in e-book form by Apple and Amazon for £5.99 ($9.79) while bookstores sold the hardcover for £13.30 ($22.07)—30% off its list price of £19 ($31.07). The novel sold remarkably well in paper, becoming Smith’s seventh consecutive hardback number one bestseller. One would think, Stone remarks, that such an inexpensive e-book should surely cannibalize the print sales—but that does not seem to be the case. Stone suggests that Smith must have gained more print readers than he lost...

On Independent.ie, Shane Richmond has interviewed Amazon’s voice president of Kindle Content, Russ Grandinetti, about the purchasing habits of Kindle customers. The article has some interesting insights into the way Amazon looks at its users, and the way its users look at the Kindle. Grandinetti attributes the Kindle’s success to its users’ love of reading, rather than just wanting to get their hands on a neat gadget. When Amazon compares the six months before a customer bought a Kindle to the six months after, it finds that, on average, Kindle owners buy three times as many books. ...

The Guardian reports that a new format of book has come out. It’s small and light, and of a size to slip easily into a pocket. People read it from top to bottom, then flip down to the next page. Oh, and it’s not electronic—it’s paper. This is the new “flipback” book—originated in Holland, and now spreading to Spain, France, and soon the UK. It seems to be modeled after paperbacks, except smaller—approximately Gideon New Testament size, and with the same sort of extremely-thin page. But instead of turning pages from side to side, you hold it vertically and...