PaidContent reports that the Wall Street Journal is going to begin running e-book bestseller lists. The lists will cover combined e-book and physical sales and e-book sales only for both fiction and non-fiction books. This will include self-published titles. The most interesting thing about this move is that the lists will be based on data from Nielsen BookScan, which has tracked paper book sales but has not publicly tracked e-book sales before now. The New York Times runs a similar set of print plus e- and e- only bestseller lists, but they use data from a different...

The Wall Street Journal has covered Amazon’s much-rumored plans for a tablet, with a long and thoughtful article considering how such a device might affect the sales of Amazon’s Kindle, and what Amazon’s competitors in the e-book and digital media marketplaces are doing. The piece has some interesting information from anonymous inside sources about what features the tablet will offer: Amazon's tablet will have a roughly nine-inch screen and will run on Google's Android platform, said people familiar with the device. Unlike the iPad, it won't have a camera, one of these people said. While...

I haven't been posting a lot, lately—partly because it takes so much longer to write an article by speech than it does by typing it, and partly because I seem to be sleeping a lot more lately. This broken arm is sapping a lot of my energy. I will be having an operation next Tuesday to put a plate and screw in, and after I recover from that I should be somewhat more active. With that in mind, when I do post something, it's either going to be something that I can write very quickly, or something that I...

Nieman Journalism Lab Editor’s Note: Each week, Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of news for the Lab. We could call this week a paid content free-for-all, but that’s self-contradictory. So let’s call it a pay-for-all, a fray of still-developing schemes that are certain to keep morphing as both competition and publishers’ heads spin ever more quickly. It’s a head-banging adventure to figure out what’s unfolded just this week. Apple offered a proclamation of policy, and given its aversion to talking with the press...

The Wall Street Journal is weighing in on Apple’s decision to enforce in-app-purchase availability, and publishers’ reactions, as well as discussions with Apple representatives at yesterday’s The Daily launch event. It sketches out the overall issues involved, but also comes out with some new tidbits of information, such as a new March 31 deadline for newly-submitted newspaper and magazine apps offer an iTunes store purchase option. Yudu, a UK digital periodical publisher, reported being alerted to this change in an email when it applied for a new app. His company already processes all transactions...

Crain’s New York Business has a story by Matthew Flamm about how the Financial Times continues to thrive despite Rupert Murdoch’s vow to “crush” the paper with his newly-acquired Wall Street Journal. The article credits the Times’s survival with its tight focus (whereas Murdoch has expanded the Wall Street Journal to become a more general-interest paper) and “snob appeal”. Another key to the Times’s success, Flamm reports, is its paywall system: FT.com's metered access system, which allows readers 10 free articles each month, has done such a good job of converting visitors to paying subscribers...

The Wall Street Journal has an interview with Chang Ma, vice president of marketing for South Korean electronics company LG, in which he talks about his company’s smartphone plans, and the Android tablet LG plans to launch globally by the fourth quarter of 2010. Ma boldly claims that, “Our tablet will be better than the iPad.” The tablet will include content focused on creation such as writing documents, editing video and creating programs. It will also have "high-end features and new benefits," many of which will focus on productivity, Mr. Ma said. The...

 NOTE: The full text is not available via the WSJ.com BUT if you run this search on Google News, the first result should provide the full text of the article. From the Article: Google has taken the first steps in this direction. Its Google Books archive—a collection of over 10 million scanned books from the world’s largest libraries—displays advertisements next to search results. It’s a small step to imagine Google including advertisements within books, especially since its 2008 settlement over copyright violations with the Authors Guild. For its part, Amazon filed a patent for advertisements on ...

David Rothman pointed me to an article in the Wall Street Journal about Openlibrary.org, a new cooperative initiative between the Internet Archive and a number of public and other libraries. They are creating a digital library containing “more than a million scanned public domain books and a catalog of thousands of contemporary e-book titles” that will be available at member libraries. And a couple of libraries are contributing scans of a few hundred older works that are still under copyright—which is what got Google in trouble. For books that are still under copyright, the library will treat a...

Starting July 1, Starbucks is joining fellow AT&T-wifi-hotspot-users McDonalds and Barnes & Noble in offering free wireless Internet access to all comers. Presently, the AT&T hotspots at Starbucks locations require that users pay a fee for access (except for AT&T iPhone subscribers, who get access free) or else register for a Starbucks card. But its plans go farther than just free wifi—in the fall, Starbucks is also rolling out free access to paid content such as the Wall Street Journal, and other exclusive material, for those who surf the Internet from its locations. Wi-Fi Net...

The Wall Street Journal reports that Barnes & Noble is launching an advertising campaign for the Nook, featuring a television commercial showing a girl reading as she grows up (as well as radio, print, and Internet ads). This will mark Barnes & Noble’s first television commercial since launching the BN.com website in 1996. Barnes & Noble seems to be shelling out some serious cash outlay on this, as the Journal article notes the TV ad will be airing during such popular fare as American Idol. The article then goes into further detail about the advertising and other...

TechCrunch reports that the New York Times is raising its rates for electronic delivery. The “E-Edition” of the paper is going from $14.99 to $19.99 per month, and the Kindle version is going from $13.99 to $19.99 per month for new subscriptions and starting in 6 months for existing subscriptions. Presumably, the iPad edition will be at the same $19.99 monthly rate. PaidContent points out that this is still less than half the cost of having the print edition delivered ($46 per month), but it’s still a hefty bump for people used to the older pricing. ...