The bestselling 50 Shades of Grey trilogy is set to rake in even more cash: The books will be released in hardcover in time for Valentine’s Day. With their availability in that format, the trilogy will have completed a traditional publishing cycle almost entirely in reverse. Read more at paidContent »
A new iPad magazine called Paragraph Shorts curates the “best short stories” from across the web and presents them in a Flipboard-like interface. The free app aims to add value through curation, introducing readers to authors and publications they might not have known about otherwise. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon may have discontinued the Kindle Touch last October in favor of the front-lit Paperwhite, but on Wednesday the Touch still got several nice new features through a software update that makes it more similar to the Paperwhite. Read more at paidContent »
Self-publishing site Lulu will stop offering DRM as an option on ebooks created through its site. But ebooks created on Lulu and sold through other retailers, like Amazon and Apple, will still be subject to DRM. Read more at paidContent »
Macmillan announced two new distribution and publication partnerships with Entangled, the independent romance publisher behind bestsellers like Jennifer Probst’s “The Marriage Bargain.” The agreements give Entangled a broader reach for its books, and Macmillan gains an entrance to the hot indie market. Read more at paidContent »
A new partnership from txtr and ReaderLink will let retail chains and outlets like Target, Walmart, Costco and Stop & Shop sell ebooks through their websites. txtr says the partnership could provide an alternative to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Read more at paidContent »
In my quest to create a paperless home, I recently decided to digitize my recipe file. My goal was to create something easily searchable but also, hopefully, fun to browse, just the way a physical recipe file is. Here are the tools I’m using. Read more »
Amazon has signed a licensing deal with A&E to make shows from the A&E, Bio, History and Lifetime channels available for streaming on Prime Instant Video, the company announced Friday. Netflix lost streaming rights to many of those shows in September. Read more at paidContent »
Berlin-based ebook company Txtr expects its no-frills e-reader, the Beagle, to retail at €9.90 or less, subsidized by mobile carriers. The five-inch Beagle runs on 2 AA batteries and has no WiFi. The device hasn’t yet launched, but here’s a video review from the blog Good E-Reader. Read more at paidContent »
Andrew Sullivan announced yesterday that he is taking his popular politics blog The Dish independent and charging $19.99 a year under a metered model. Since then, the blog has raised $333,000 from about 12,000 readers. Read more at paidContent »
As it had warned investors last week, Barnes & Noble announced disappointing holiday sales Thursday. Nook device sales, in-store sales and BN.com sales all fell, with a particularly large decline in Nook device sales. Read more at paidContent »
BuzzFeed announced Thursday morning that it raised $19.3 million in a fourth funding round. The round was led by VC firm NEA, with participation from Hearst, Lerer Ventures, RRE, SoftBank and Buddy Media cofounders Michael and Kass Lazerow. In total, BuzzFeed has raised around $46 million. Read more at paidContent »
Andrew Sullivan announced Wednesday that his immensely popular politics-and-other-stuff blog, The Dish, is striking out on its own and leaving the Daily Beast, which has owned it since 2011. The new site will charge $19.99 per year. Read more at paidContent »
Hearst Magazines president David Carey says the company has nearly 800,000 monthly digital subscribers in the U.S. across platforms, and over 80 percent of the digital subscribers “are new to our files.” Read more at paidContent »
Apple will launch a fully fledged iBookstore in Japan this year. Kobo, Kindle and Google all launched Japanese ebookstores in 2012 — greasing the wheels for Apple’s launch in a country that has been slow to embrace ebooks. Read more at paidContent »
The Tribune Co. officially emerged from bankruptcy Monday with a new board including former Yahoo exec Ross Levinsohn and former Disney exec Peter Murphy. The company plans to sell off its 23 television stations, eight daily newspapers and stakes in websites like CareerBuilder.com. Read more at paidContent »
Instagram has been sued over the revised terms of service that it announced last week. The class action suit alleges that the Facebook-owned company’s new terms are a breach of contract, despite the clarifications Instagram offered. Read more »
A piece in the New York Times says ebook prices aren’t falling rapidly because the growth rate of ebooks isn’t as rapid as it once was and e-readers are falling in price. But that explanation doesn’t tell the whole story. Read more at paidContent »
E-singles — stories somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 words, usually nonfiction, and sold as inexpensive ebooks — are the format for our time. Here’s why. Read more at paidContent »
RCS Libri, the second largest book publisher in Italy, has partnered with Italian train company NTV to make ebooks available for free to passengers. The ebooks can be read through devices installed on the trains, or on personal laptops, tablets and smartphones. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon is bringing Kindle Singles — “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length” — to the United Kingdom. The U.K. store will include new e-singles from popular British authors, as well as many from U.S. authors. Read more at paidContent »
In a holiday promotion, customers who go to a Barnes & Noble store and buy an ebook from a list of 20 qualifying ebooks can “instant-gift” another ebook on that list for free. The list includes new and bestselling titles from big-six publishers who settled in the DOJ’s ebooks case. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon Studios, Amazon’s film production division, will produce pilots for six original comedy series, the company announced Thursday — including shows from the Onion and “Doonesbury” writer Garry Trudeau. Read more »
Macmillan CEO John Sargent said Wednesday that the publisher does not plan to follow Penguin’s lead and settle with the Department of Justice in the ebooks lawsuit. However, Macmillan voluntarily entered new retailer contracts that conform with many of the requirements in the original settlement. Read more at paidContent »
For every high point of 2012, there were also a few forehead-slapping moments. From Apple Maps to HP’s Autonomy to the Facebook IPO, here’s the best of the worst. Read more »
Publishing industry newsletter Publishers Lunch has opened an online bookstore in partnership with Random House. Bookateria’s goal is to aid discovery of new titles and “merchandise the daily book publishing news.” It includes over 2 million titles with affiliate links to bookstores. Read more at paidContent »
Penguin, which is merging with Random House, has settled with the Department of Justice in the ebook pricing lawsuit, which alleges that Apple and publishers conspired to set ebook prices. Penguin had planned to fight the case in court, but the pending merger has changed that. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon’s audiobook company, Brilliance, is expanding with the launch of Grand Harbor Press, a self-help and inspirational publishing division that will release books in print, digital and audio formats. Its first title is by Will Bowen, who previously published two books with Random House’s Doubleday. Read more at paidContent »
As newspaper book sections shrink or disappear, the Guardian is teaming up with the Amazon-owned Audible.co.uk to sponsor much of its books content in print and online. The companies are also launching “The Guardian Audio Edition,” a free weekly selection of articles read aloud. Read more at paidContent »
A new survey from the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations) finds that newspaper and magazine publishers’ digital businesses are gradually becoming profitable, and 63 percent say “tablets are the most important digital channel for their publication’s future.” Read more at paidContent »
Amazon released its list of the bestselling books of 2012 on Friday morning. The list is a great summary of one of the key themes in book publishing in 2012: Self-published authors and traditional publishers need each other. Read more at paidContent »
The Huffington Post is moving into Asia. The company will publish a Japanese-language edition in partnership with Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, and is also in discussions with publishers in South Korea and India. Read more at paidContent »
The New York Times is launching an ebook publishing program with the e-singles startup Byliner, and will also publish curated article selections called “TimesFiles” with publishing platform Vook. The new partnerships mark the paper’s first real foray into ebook publishing. Read more at paidContent »
The European Commission has officially reached a settlement with Apple and four publishers on ebook pricing. The terms of the settlement mirror those in the U.S., but will primarily affect only the U.K. since other European countries have fixed price laws for books. Read more at paidContent »
Ganxy, a New York-based startup that helps authors and publishers sell and market ebooks through a set of online tools, has added the option to sell bundles of ebooks online. Users can adjust the bundles’ prices in real time; bundles can also be gifted to others. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon has launched a Chinese Kindle store with Android and iOS apps for reading ebooks. The store contains around 25,000 ebooks, most priced vastly lower than ebooks in the United States and Europe. Read more »
Simon & Schuster will publish the print editions of self-published author Hugh Howey’s bestselling science fiction title Wool, and Ingram will sell e-singles publisher Byliner’s titles in print. Read more at paidContent »
A very dramatic new iSuppli report announces that the e-reader market is “on an alarmingly precipitous decline,” experiencing a “virtually unheard of” collapse as tablets grow in popularity. But don’t count out e-readers just yet. Read more at paidContent »
Time Inc.’s MyRecipes.com is launching a new digital cookbook series. The cookbooks, at $3.99 each, pull together recipes from Time Inc.’s lifestyle magazines, like Real Simple, Food & Wine and Cooking Light. Read more at paidContent »
FORA.tv’s new paid membership model, Front Row, gives subscribers streaming access to conference and event videos from companies like The New Yorker and The Economist for a flat fee of $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. Read more at paidContent »
