eBook News and Headlines

Gaby Wood, the Telegraph’s Head of Books, has an fairly lengthy article on The Telegraph pondering what e-books mean for the future of literature. Wood considers Jonathan Franzen’s much-remarked-upon comments about how e-books are damaging society, and ponders the question of whether they really are. Though Wood found she did not care for the Kindle [...]

Here’s another one of those webcomics that calls attention to the issue of piracy as service problem. (Note: not really worksafe due to some R-rated language.) Although the strip concerns a television series, anyone who has ever wanted to buy an e-book that is not sold in his particular country or format will recognize the [...]

Should we learn to stop worrying and love the Amazon? That’s the position espoused by writer/publisher Bob Mayer in a post to his blog “Write It Forward”. Mayer co-founded independent publishing house Who Dares Wins Publishing in January 2011, and “went from selling a few hundred eBooks that month to earning seven figures.” He doesn’t [...]

How to get kids to read? Lauren Grossberg has a suggestion: Find young-adult books that are being adapted into movies, then encourage the kid to read the book first, then see the movie and compare. There are plenty of such books around—the Harry Potter and Twilight series are obvious choices, as is The Hunger Games. [...]

From the press release: Santillana USA, the world’s leader in Spanish language publishing, announced a 78% increase in e-book sales for the November 2011-January 2012 period. This increase, which corresponds to the United Sates and Puerto Rico alone, has been the biggest recorded by the company since it started offering titles in a digital format. Record breaking [...]

Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Kindle Store, iBookstore and almost any ereader - and it all can be done within minutes. This slick video is the introduction to Booktype. You can create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface. You can [...]

The Lamar Soutter Library has launched the Journal of eScience Librarianship. The first issue’s “full-length papers” are: “DataONE: Facilitating eScience through Collaboration“ “An Assessment of Needed Competencies to Promote the Data Curation and Management Librarianship of Health Sciences and Science and Technology Librarians in New England“ “Tiers of Research Data Support Services“ | E-science and Academic Libraries Bibliography [...]

From the Daily Iowan: Authors want electronic publishing, and the University of Iowa Press is following with the trend. UI Press Director Jim McCoy said the press has approximately 800 books in print, with around 75 percent of those books digitized. Around 5 percent of total book sales is from e-books, he said, whereas two [...]

That’s the title of a most interesting article in ReadWriteWeb.  Written by someone in the trenches.  Here’s an excerpt: If you were to visit the library on the campus where I teach, you would see students waiting to use outdated desktops in the computer labs and library, particularly around midterms and finals week. It seems [...]

  The press release says it all: Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today expanded its portfolio of bestselling NOOK® devices with the introduction of NOOK Tablet – with 8GB of memory, a tremendous value for the company’s fastest and lightest tablet at just $199. [...]