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...

It seems that without exception, any time someone notices e-book piracy, it’s suddenly a huge problem, instead of having built over nearly twenty years during which most publishers and authors who were not Harlan Ellison did not find it worth their time to bother doing anything about. An article in the Guardian today is no exception. UK writers think that a new publicity campaign is needed to educate people on why “stealing” books is wrong. (Clearly they’ve observed the success that those obnoxious, patronizing PSAs Hollywood has tacked onto theatrical movies have had—because naturally the people who pay to see movies...

In 2008, we reported on a UK program called Bookstart, through which United Kingdom residents could send text messages to get free storybooks for their children. David Rothman compared the program to the American program Reading Is Fundamental, which was imperiled by budget cutbacks. It has been no secret that funding for libraries and similar programs has been under siege in the UK as well as the US during the last year or so, and just now Neil Gaiman retweeted this unpleasant news from the website of Booktrust, the foundation behind Bookstart: Booktrust had...

With Black Friday coming up, EBookNewser has written out a holiday gift guide to e-readers that is definitely worth a look. It lists, prices, and blurbs almost all of the e-readers currently on the market, plus the iPad. (It does leave out the Sharper Image Literati, however, and also the iPod Touch.) Speaking of Christmas e-readers, UK retailer Waterstone’s has dropped the price of its Elonex 500EB color e-reader by 20% to £79.99 ($127.24), barely a month after it first went on sale, making it the cheapest color e-book device in the UK. The cheapest UK e-book device overall...

The Guardian has an article on the UK-based Publishers Association’s recent decision to restrict libraries from lending e-books remotely (which we carried Eoin Purcell’s blog post decrying a few days ago). This article goes into a little more detail about the basis of the decision. Apparently e-book readers in China were “joining British libraries and plundering their virtual collections for free,” which is of course an abrogation of the same territorial rights that have caused e-book stores such as Amazon or Waterstone’s to stop selling e-book editions outside their licensed countries. From that point of view, it’s understandable...

The Bookseller reports that UK publishers are continuing to move forward with the implementation of agency pricing for e-books, and expect Amazon.co.uk to capitulate to their terms within a matter of weeks. A few days ago Amazon posted a letter decrying the move to agency pricing, claiming that it was “damaging” to all parties involved (but suggesting by its very existence that Amazon knows it’s fighting a losing battle at this point). The statement prompted Penguin UK deputy c.e.o. Tom Weldon to defend the model in a letter to agents. He said: “We believe...

While e-music isn’t directly related to e-books, there are enough commonalities and similarities that it is often instructive to look at developments in one industry in light of the other. Yesterday, Ars Technica had an interesting report looking at a controversial statement by the former head of Warner Music in the UK, Rob Dickins, Dickins made some serious waves when he suggested that new music albums should sell digitally for as little as £1 (about $1.59). The idea is to move albums into the realm of impulse buys, making it easier for people to buy all...

The Bookseller’s FuturEBook blog has an email interview with Andrew Robinson, the erstwhile leader of the Pirate Party UK. It’s interesting to note that the Pirate Party does not specifically endorse actual piracy—it inherited the name from the original Swedish party—though it is campaigning on a platform of pruning back what its members see as an increasingly out-of-control intellectual property regime. Robinson writes: Yes, we seek a fairer balance in copyright law, that takes account of advances in technology. A law that was written to deal with businesses running expensive printing presses isn't well suited...

The Bookseller’s FuturEBook blog has a piece by Philip Jones looking at ten conclusions about the way agency pricing is being introduced in the United Kingdom. Although Jones comes from a pro-agency point of view, he isn’t shy of pointing out that it is mainly aimed at keeping Amazon from taking over the e-book market and has been pretty badly implemented in the UK so far. Maybe there are reasons for this, mostly legal for sure, but retailers we've spoken to appear to be unclear why Hachette set a fixed 'D-day' for some, but not—most...

Independent French bookstores are eyeing e-books with fear, the Wall Street Journal reports (story behind paywall; to read the whole thing see this Google search). In France, as in much of the rest of Europe, laws forbid stores from marking down printed books much below standard cover price, to protect small bookstores from the greater economic heft of large chains that could otherwise undersell them quite easily (as Wal-Mart has been doing in the US with its $8 hardcovers). However, these laws don’t apply to e-books, which are routinely being marked down to 25% below cover. ...

With the launch of its UK e-book store, the controversy over Amazon’s pricing has finally jumped the Atlantic. The Bookseller reports that Amazon has priced a number of books at less than £3 ($4.67 at current exchange rates), sparking a price war in which retailer W.H. Smith dropped its own e-book prices drastically, too. [An unnamed] senior publisher attacked the pricing strategies of W H Smith and Amazon. He said: "It’s absolutely absurd to devalue our product but I’m not surprised because our industry is populated by nincompoops." This publisher thinks that the...

The UK e-book price of the last Twilight novel, Breaking Dawn, has been “defanged” by consumer protests. The Bookseller reports that publisher Little, Brown is dropping its e-book price from £13.99 ($21.79 at current exchange rates) to £4.49 ($6.99). Graeme Neill of The Bookseller writes: Publishers have said they want to see e-books priced at close to parity with the prevalent print edition, but the publisher has been criticised by customers on Apple's iBookstore for its pricing of Breaking Dawn, with the Kindle edition available for £3.59 [$5.59], and the hardback priced at £7.49...