Did you buy an ebook in the last two years? Amazon is notifying customers of the potential for a refund and other retailers will soon follow suit. The process is part of a long, complicated class action proceeding. Read more at paidContent »
Thirty states have bagged $52 million from publishers as part of a price fixing investigation involving Apple. More money is on the way. While state leaders say the money is for overcharged consumers, legal and antirust experts say the arrangement is unusual. Read more at paidContent »
Ray Bradbury was right about so many things that it almost hurts to write this: he was wrong when it came to reading. But then I also get to tell you this: he changed his mind. HarperCollins tells paidContent a digital backlist is in the works. Read more at paidContent »
In a new pushback over its role in an ongoing e-book controversy, Apple said that Steve Jobs’ widely reported quotes on Amazon and book publishers “will speak for themselves.” The company also denied again that it conspired to fix e-book prices. Read more at paidContent »
“If you buy a digital book you should be able to read it on anything you want to read it on”, said Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne at paidContent 2012. Read more at paidContent »
In a strongly worded opinion, US District Judge Denise Cote rejected requests by Apple and book publishers to throw out a class action suit that accuses them of price-fixing. Read more at paidContent »
Yesterday’s news about Flipboard on Android devices got me thinking. Not only is most of my content now viewed on a mobile but I’m now consuming far more content than I ever did prior because smartphones and tablets “free” that content to use anywhere, anytime. Read more »
Some e-book buyers embrace a little friction, says Joe Esposito at The Scholarly Kitchen. Read more at paidContent »
Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne joins us at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads.for a look at what it takes to take a beloved brand digital — and the DRM strategy for J.K. Rowling’s insanely popular Harry Potter collection. Read more at paidContent »
Book publishers argue that Amazon is a vicious monopoly that has too much power over them and their content. But they need to realize they gave Amazon much of that power themselves when they agreed to shackle all of their books in DRM chains. Read more »
The lawsuits over price-fixing in the e-book market took a new twist today after a HarperCollins lawyer predicted that three publishers could reach a settlement with all 50 state governments in the next two months. Read more at paidContent »
What’s happening in the e-book market is not fundamentally different from what happened in the music industry. The retail price of recorded music has plunged thanks to digital technology and the record labels lost market power. At the same time, innovation has flourished at the retail ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Our primer to today’s DOJ lawsuit against five publishers and Apple — how we got here and what comes next. Read more at paidContent »
At least two of the big-six publishers are refusing to sign new annual contracts with Amazon. While that could result in their “buy” buttons being turned off, it is more likely that the feud will result in less promotion of big-six publishers’ titles on the site. Read more at paidContent »
Days after paidContent reported that Amazon has indefinitely suspended its approval program for newspapers on Kindle, Amazon has relented and kickstarted the process for at least one publisher caught up in the backlog. Read more at paidContent »
Anti-trust investigations are supposed to be tight-lipped affairs in which all sides lawyer up until the case settles or goes to trial. Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work at least. But in the case of book publishers and Apple, people are tossing legal duties to the wind in the hopes that press leaks will shape a settlement. Read more at paidContent »
The majority of U.S. public libraries now offer e-books, but libraries’ relationships with book publishers are fraught, says the American Library Association in its 2012 annual report. Read more at paidContent »
In a move to build community and learn more about its customers, mid-sized publisher Sourcebooks is launching a romance e-book club that gives members e-books, discounts and access to online parties and live events for $9.99 for six months. Read more at paidContent »
By requiring retailers to encrypt e-books with DRM, big publishers are essentially banning online indie bookstores and increasing their own dependence on the whims of Apple and Amazon. Emily Gould and Ruth Curry of Emily Books look at the problem DRM poses indie booksellers. Read more at paidContent »
Google is reportedly ending its program that allows independent booksellers to sell Google e-books through their websites. Below is the full letter that the American Booksellers Association sent to members announcing the news. Read more at paidContent »
When Google launched the program, retailers, bloggers, book publishers and other website owners earned referral fees ranging from 6 to 10 percent of a book’s selling price, depending on the number of sales referred. That was a higher rate than the one offered through Amazon’s referral program… Read more »
Amazon has turned off the buy button on nearly 5,000 Kindle titles from distributor Independent Publishers Group after IPG refused to capitulate to Amazon’s demand for better terms… Read more »
Tablets represent the next evolution in the advancement of mobile computing, and by 2015 or 2016, the tablet will begin to replace the laptop and the desktop operating systems market will begin to level off or perhaps decline. Our latest forecast examines these trends in detail. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Barnes & Noble announced a $199 version of its Nook Tablet on Tuesday with half of the memory and storage of the current $249 model. B&N is taking aim at Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire, but it doesn’t have a full-featured ecosystem to compete with. Read more »
Almost a month after Apple introduced its own interactive e-book publishing platform, iBooks Author, iPad publishing startup Inkling is introducing its own version, called Inkling Habitat. It’s a free, cloud-based publishing platform aimed at professional publishers. Read more »
As more authors choose to do an end-run around the traditional book industry, publishers are going to have to try harder to defend their continued existence — self-published author J.A. Konrath says that most are tied to a “broken, outdated and increasingly irrelevant business model.” Read more »
As an avid e-book reader and lover of gadgets, I love the concept of this “virtual” book. Siglio Press is offering 250 copies of a print book that requires a webcam and computing device to actually be read. Read more »
Apple’s iBooks Author impressed Diesel Sweeties creator and artist R Stevens so much that he created an e-book with it during the course of a weekend and distributed it free to readers. On Thursday, Stevens shared some interesting details about that experiment. Read more »
Following Apple’s unveiling of e-book publishing platform iBooks Author Thursday, I reached out to Vook, the startup founded in 2009 by Brad Inman that provides a top-to-bottom publishing experience using a Software-as-a-Service model. Vook sees both flattery and opportunity in Apple’s e-book software. Read more »
Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue announced a revamp of iTunes U on Thursday, designed to help teachers create full online courses instead of just creating videos or lectures. The new iTunes U will have its own app, which is similar to iBooks. Read more »
Apple’s Roger Rosner, Apple VP of productivity software, showed off Apple’s new iBooks Author on Thursday at Apple’s special media event in NYC. iBooks author is a Mac app that provides tools to help anyone publish interactive digital books, complete with rich media features. Read more »
We’re here at Apple’s education event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The company is expected to launch a set of tools that allow self-publishing of textbooks and possible partnering with textbook makers to push a digital learning initiative. The event and our live […] Read more »
Apple’s plans for its Thursday media event have been the subject of considerable speculation. Now a new report released Wednesday adds a little more weight to recent suggestions that the focus will be on tools that help produce e-books and other educational materials on the iPad. Read more »
Chegg, a Santa Clara, Calif.–based startup that made its name in textbook rentals, has made its first piece of software that it says will aid the transition to digital learning for students by offering e-textbooks that act an awful lot like physical textbooks. Read more »
After publishing his first print book, photographer Trey Ratcliff started his own e-book publisher, FlatBooks. Why? Because the painful process taught him everything that’s wrong with the old model of publishing and opened his eyes to the near-limitless potential of e-books. Read more »
Amazon has now broken out its touch-friendly shopping experience for the iPad from its Kindle Cloud Reader product, in an effort to make it easier for everyone to buy books from the Kindle Store, and quickly read those purchases in Amazon’s native iPad Kindle app. Read more »
While some authors continue to remain aloof from their audience, others are discovering the benefits of connecting with readers via Twitter and other tools. And in a world where publishers are becoming less relevant every day, being comfortable with those tools seems like a wise strategy. Read more »
Digital recipes and cookbooks need to emulate the world of digital music. By creating a standard recipe format similar to the MP3, we could overcome the artificial barriers between cooking Websites, apps and our bookshelves. Only then could we be build truly comprehensive digital cooking libraries. Read more »
The Walter Isaacson biography of Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs has risen to the top of Amazon’s list of best-selling books for 2011, not even two months following its release in October. The Jobs biography had already reached the No. 2 spot in November. Read more »
The newfound popularity of the e-book is now raising questions over what exactly it will look like in the future, since digital formats allow authors and artists to offer much more than what was possible with the printed page. Social and interactive experiences within the e-book can include not only text but also audio, video or even a combination of all three, and these factors have a direct effect on the evolution of the overall e-book market. In this analysis, we identify six competitive areas of that market that will see large-scale shifts in the near future. Such rapid change will mean that in just four to five years, what a book is and what publishing is will — to many — mean something radically different than it does today. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google and Open Road. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
