Amazon Capitulates In E-Books Battle As It Gives In To Macmillan's Pricing Demands

'Does this make me cool?': Political satirist Stephen Colbert whips out an Apple iPad during his opening speech at the Grammy Awards last night

From The Daily Mail:

Amazon has given in to publisher Macmillan's pricing demands that will lead to the online retailer raising prices on some of its e-books.

Following Apple's iPad launch last week, Amazon's Kindle has entered into a battle of supremacy with the new gadget.

Apple has said publishers can set their own price for e-books - although it will take 30 per cent, while Amazon currently charges $9.99 for the e-book version of most new releases and bestsellers.

Macmillan wants Amazon to increase their charges to nearer $15.

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500-Year-Old Nostradamus Prophecies Become First French Book To Be Archived On Google

Preserved: A 16th-century edition of predictions by Nostradamus has become the first French book to be digitally archived by Google

From The Daily Mail:

A sixteenth century edition of predictions by Nostradamus has become the first book from France's vast archive of literature to be digitally preserved by Google.

The collection of prophecies is from a vault containing 500,000 classic French books stored at the Municipal Library of Lyon.

Nostradamus is best known for The Prophecies, the first edition of which appeared in 1555 and has rarely been out of print since his death.

France has a 750million euro (£650million) scheme in place to digitise its libraries and museums.

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Skiff E-Reader Has Some New Tricks

From Popular Mechanics:

LAS VEGAS—The barrage of new products from CES includes a number of e-Ink devices, all lining up to dislodge the Kindle from its perch at the top of the market. Among the double fistful of readers for sale in 2010 will be the Skiff Reader, a sleek 11.5-inch device that has received a healthy share of buzz in the past few days. We've refrained from writing about Skiff until now because it's backed by Hearst, Popular Mechanics' own parent company, and because over the past year we've been sharing ideas on the device with the company's development team. (As you can see from the photo, we've created sample content for Skiff that will be shown this week in Las Vegas.)

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Slim, Large Screen E-Reader Skiff To Debut On Sprint

From Gadget Lab:

E-readers are likely to get hotter with the next generation of devices sporting color screens and large displays expected to launch through the year.

One of the first products to announce its arrival is the Skiff e-reader, a lightweight device with a 11.5-inch full flexible touchscreen that makes it the largest e-reader on the market, beating the 9.7-inch display Kindle DX.

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Have Books Turned Their Last Page?

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From CBS News:

Industry Experts Weigh In on How the Rise of E-Readers and E-Books Will Change the Publishing World.

(CBS) The era of the physical "book" may be ending.

This holiday season, Amazon.com says its E-reader, the Kindle, was its most-gifted item ever. And on Christmas Day, according to Amazon.com, E-books actually outsold physical books on the site.

Craig Berman, vice president of global communications at Amazon.com, said, "The best-selling, most wished for, most gifted product across the millions of products we have on Amazon is Amazon Kindle, our wireless e-reader."

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Amazon E-Book Sales Overtake Print For First Time

In the US, Amazon says its Kindle e-book reader is its most gifted product.
Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

From The Guardian:

Online retailer may be on target for sales of 500,000 Kindle e-readers over Christmas.

Spare a thought for the humble hardback this Christmas. It seems the traditional giftwrapped tome is being trumped by downloads, after Amazon customers bought more e-books than printed books for the first time on Christmas Day.

As people rushed to fill their freshly unwrapped e-readers – one of the top-selling gadgets this festive season – the online retailer said sales at its electronic book store quickly overtook orders for physical books. Its own e-reader, the Kindle, is now the most popular gift in Amazon's history.

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Amazon: Kindle Is Most Gifted Item Ever

From PC World:

Amazon's Kindle e-book reader hit a watershed moment on Christmas Day, when, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books. The company also claims the Kindle is the most gifted item in Amazon's history. These two facts were part of the online retailer's recently announced holiday sales activity.

But in typical Amazon style, the company did not provide any sales figures to back up its claims. Although Amazon did say that if you placed side by side all the Blu-ray disc players the company sold this season, the line would stretch for more than 27 miles. A mile has 63,360 inches, so I'll leave you to make your best guess.


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How Book Publishers Could Clobber Amazon

From The Raw Feed:

Walk into your local bookstore, and all is peace and order. But the tranquility masks an industry on fire. The traditional book business is being burned to the ground by technology, by recession, by the Internet -- but mostly by Amazon.

Amazon is the best thing that ever happened to self-published authors. They offer a complete publishing service that includes editing, design, and distribution -- even into brick-and-mortar bookstores. Meanwhile, they're getting ready to dictate terms over the fast-growing eBook market. Traditional publishing is being decimated, and the future looks bleak.

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Kindle Is Most Gifted Amazon Item, Ever

Amazon's second-generation Kindle
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)

From CNET News:

Amazon.com on Saturday released its annual post-Christmas statement on holiday sales, and made one thing clear: the Kindle was king, perhaps fueled by continued shifts in plans for shipments of Barnes & Noble's competing Nook e-reader.

"We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history," said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

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The E-Book, The E-Reader, And The Future Of Reading

Members of a suburban Boston book group. Mary Knox Merrill / Staff

From The Christian Science Monitor:

As stone tablets gave way the codex, the future of reading is digital – but will the e-reader and the e-book change the nature of how we read?

Jeremy Manore, an 18-year-old from central New Jersey, subscribes to several magazines and reads books constantly – John Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald are among his favorite writers. When he came home from his elite Massachusetts boarding school for Thanksgiving, Jeremy brought three books to read, his mother, Sandy Manore, says. But he wasn’t carting heavy volumes in a backpack.

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Will 2010 Be The Breakout Year For E-Book Readers?

Mike Erickson, of Webster Groves, checks out a Sony Reader an e-book at Best Buy, Friday aternoon. "I'm just waiting to see what other kinds of books will be available." Erickson said. Erickson is at the Best Buy in Brentwood. (Dawn Majors/P-D)

From Stltoday:

When Sheila Effan found a Kindle electronic reader among her gifts last Christmas, one of her first thoughts was whether she'd miss the smell and feel of real paper. She got her answer five months later.

That's when a friend lent her a paperback. She lugged it around for a couple of days before tiring of the burden.

"I got annoyed with it. So I just downloaded it to my Kindle," Effan said. "I thought I would miss books. But I don't."

Oh, how the folks behind Amazon.com's Kindle, Sony's Reader and Barnes & Noble's Nook love the sound of that.

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New Displays For E-Readers: Read All About It

Photo: Getty Images

From The Economist:

Display technology: Readers of electronic books must choose between long battery life or vibrant, living colour. Could they have both?

THE sudden surge in the popularity of e-readers—slate-like devices, such as Amazon’s Kindle, on which electronic books can be read—has been one of the big surprises of 2009. Recessions are often a good time to launch new products, as old certainties are questioned and consumer tastes shift. The iPod made its debut in 2001 in the depths of America’s recession, and e-readers may prove to be a similar success story this time. But today’s e-readers, like that first iPod, are technologically quite simple. Most of them have a monochromatic screen to display text and black-and-white pictures, and none can handle video.

Even so, around 5m e-readers will be sold worldwide in 2009, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm, and a further 12m in 2010. The Kindle is by far the most popular e-reader, but there are many others.

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The Publishing Disruption

From The Futurist:

What a unique thing a book is. Made from a tree, it has a hundred or more flexible pages that contain written text, enabling the book to contain a large sum of information in a very small volume. Before paper, clay tablets, sheepskin parchment, and papyrus were all used to store information with far less efficiency. Paper itself was once so rare and valuable that the Emperor of China had guards stationed around his paper possessions.

Before the invention of the printing press, books were written by hand, and few outside of monasteries knew how to read. There were only a few thousand books in all of Europe in the 14th century. Charlemagne himself took great effort to learn how to read, but never managed to learn how to write, which still put him ahead of most kings of the time, who were generally illiterate.

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Legal Battles Rage Over E-Book Rights To Old Books

From CNET News:

William Styron may have been one of the leading literary lions of recent decades, but his books are not selling much these days. Now his family has a plan to lure digital-age readers with e-book versions of titles like "Sophie's Choice," "The Confessions of Nat Turner" and Styron's memoir of depression, "Darkness Visible."

But the question of exactly who owns the electronic rights to such older titles is in dispute, making it a rising source of conflict in one of the publishing industry's last remaining areas of growth.

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DIY Book Scanners Turn Your Books Into Bytes

From Gadget Lab:

For nearly two years, Daniel Reetz dreamed of a book scanner that could crunch textbooks and spit out digital files he could then read on his PC.

Book scanners, like the ones Google is using in its Google Books project, run into thousands of dollars, putting them out of the reach of a graduate student like Reetz. But in January, when textbook prices for the semester were listed, Reetz decided he would make a book scanner that would cost a fraction of commercially available products.

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Dueling E-Book Readers

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From CBS News:

Natali Del Conte Compares Five Top Offerings of This Holiday Season.

(CBS) One of this year's hot gift items is the e-book reader -- portable digital devices used to read books and magazines.

They started taking off in 2001, but were very basic. Today, they're sophisticated, interactive and can perform more functions than just holding text -- and they're experiencing explosive growth.

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Will Gadget Revolutionize Our Reading Habits?

From San Francisco Chronicle:

Author Jeff Vande Zande was pleased when his latest book reached a digital milestone - it "went Kindle," formatted as an electronic book for Amazon.com's portable e-reader.

Although the college English professor from Michigan is hopeful about the new market his novel, "Landscape with Fragmented Figures," might reach, he isn't quite sold on electronic readers and still prefers the look, feel and "weathered page" smell of a printed book.

"Not all books are in Kindle edition, so for me, it was a big deal," Vande Zande said. However, he believes "the Kindle is not going to revolutionize books in the same way as the Internet and the iPod have revolutionized how we take in music."

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Barnes & Noble May Not Deliver Nooks Ordered Early in Time for Christmas

From Daily Tech:

B&N is trying "everything" it can to get Nook to buyers who ordered before Nov 20 on time

The eReader market is hot right now and the gadgets have become some of the most popular gifts to give this holiday season. That means some freshman offerings that are new to the market are very hard to find.

One of these new offerings is the Nook from Barnes & Noble. The Nook is an eReader that sells for $259 and sports the typical e-ink display for reading along with a color screen that is touch sensitive on the bottom for browsing the B&N digital bookstore.

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Color E-readers Inspired By Butterflies

The full grown morpho rhetenor butterfly, a native to South America.
Credit: University of Southhampton.

From Live Science:

Full-color displays for e-readers could really take off soon — on the wings of butterflies.

Qualcomm MEMS Technologies new Mirasol is the first full color, video-capable display on a prototype e-reader. Built on the concept of the iridescence of a butterfly’s wing, the new technology reflects light rather than transmitting light the way LCD screens do.

The display is readable in sunlight and offers unprecedented energy savings for longer battery life. E-readers may just be the beginning for Mirasol displays as consumers seek color in every device they use, better visibility in bright light, and days or even weeks worth of battery life.

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Universities Reject Kindle Over Inaccessibility For The Blind

Photo: Kindle DX. (Credit: Amazon)

From The CNET:

The National Federation of the Blind is applauding the decisions of Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison not to Amazon.com's Kindle DX as a textbook replacement.

The universities cited the Kindle's inaccessibility to the blind as the problem.

The federation said Wednesday that while it appreciates the Kindle's text-to-speech feature, the "menus of the device are not accessible to the blind...making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon's Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle DX."

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