It should be no surprise to anyone that some of the most popular people in history get a lot of books written about them. From autobiographies to biographies that range from humorist to scandalous books about the famous to the infamous books provide a look into the life and experiences of those people.

One of the most famous people in history of course would have to be Abraham Lincoln so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that there has been a lot of books written about him, one of the newest is a humorous look at him as being one of the first vampire hunters, but I’m willing to bet you don’t know how many have been written.

Well the people at Ford’s Theater Center for Education and Leadership decided to find out by building a tower in the lobby of the center with one copy of each book.

Three stories later the magic number of books written about the 16th president of the United States turns out to  be 15,000 titles.

Here are some images of that incredible tower of books about Abraham Lincoln thanks to the folks at Fresh Pics.

Just how many books about Abe Lincoln have there been written? Three stories worth. is a post from: The Inquisitr

Author’s and publishers will go to great lengths to publicize their books, even to the point of shipping a box of them to soldiers in Afghanistan it seems, the problem is that sometimes those books aren’t exactly what the soldiers need.

Such is the case recently when someone decided it would be a great idea to send some American soldiers stationed in some remote outpost of Afghanistan a box of Bill O’Reilly’s new book Pinheads and Patriots instead of something that they might actually need.

As one soldier said on their blog “some jerk sent us two boxes of this awful book instead of anything soldiers at a remote outpost might need, say, like, foo or soap”.

It turns out that their commanding officer figured that the books would be better served by warming up the soldiers and order them to burn the books, which apparently they gladly did.

No word on who was the thoughtful person who sent the books in the first place but just an idea for those of you thinking of doing something similar .. maybe include a chocolate bar or two instead.

via Gawker

Bill O’Reilly’s book makes better kindling than reading in Afghanistan is a post from: The Inquisitr

Brits, Aussies, Canadians: prepare to gorge on cheap (or even free) e-books. Though it’s taken a while, Google’s E-book Store has finally made it to the UK, Australia, and Canada, after a period of US exclusivity.

That means those with a Kindle or an Android handset (an Android app is already available, though version 2.1 or later is required) can choose from millions of e-books, plenty of which are free public domain classics.

Here’s Google blowing its own trumpet:

“Readers in the UK now have access to the world’s largest e-books collection, with hundreds of thousands of e-books for sale – from major UK publishers like Hachette, Random House and Penguin – as well as more than two million public domain e-books for free.”

So there you go, yet another way to read books. If you head to the Android Marketplace now, you’ll see a ‘Books’ section has been added, alongside the usual ‘Apps’ and ‘Games’ icons.

The books should work on phones, tablets, laptops, and e-readers. I severely questions the point of reading a book on a tiny smartphone screen, but then I’m clinging on to paperbacks for as long as I can manage.

So, who in the UK, Oz, and Canada is spending the day downloading the whole of Shakespeare’s back catalog later today then never read it? Let us know in the comments!

Google’s E-Books Store Finally Launches in UK, Australia and Canada is a post from: The Inquisitr

Banned Books Week runs from September 24th through October 1st, and is enjoying its 30th annual celebration this year. The event was founded in 1982 by librarian and director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom Judith Krug.

To celebrate the week, a tribute to the authors and literature that have been the targets of censors, colleges and libraries in the U.S. are hosting readings of banned works.

Across the nation, readers are tucking in to some of history’s most famous banned works, including Ulysses by James Joyce, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (challenged as late as 2009), The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Animal Farm by George Orwell, and The Awakening by Kate Chopin.

Since the creation of Banned Books Week, more than 11,000 works have been challenged, according to the American Library Association, the sponsor of the week. Few challenges lead to outright bans, but the act of challenging the appropriateness of books has not died out. Yahoo! notes the following texts were challenged in the past 12 months:

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Challenged for passages explicitly dealing with teen sex, homosexuality and bestiality.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Challenged due to complaints about sexual and homosexual themes.

Push by Sapphire (Ramona Lofton)
Challenged for the numerous adult situations described in the novel, including rape, incest and child abuse.

What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras and Dane Saavedra
Banned from 21 Buda, Texas, school libraries due to definitions of rape, incest, sexual assault and intercourse.

Are you planning on reading a banned book this week? Let us know!

Banned Books Week Celebrates 30th Anniversary is a post from: The Inquisitr

The team at BookLamp wants to make finding new books to read a much more simple process and to accomplish that goal they have created a book recommendation engine they call Book DNA which the company says provides far better personalized recommendations than other programs that rely on marketing data for their algorithms.

At this time 20,000 books are cataloged, a far cry from the millions of volumes available on the market, however the company is still relatively new and since they must scans texts of partner publishers the indexing of books is a cumbersome process.

Once scanned the program uses story components and writing style to offer suggestions, much like music provider Pandora uses various bits of data to suggest music based on a users thumbs up and thumbs down reactions to material.

The BookLamp program varies from other programs because it doesn’t simply look at books “people like you” bought to make recommendations.

The company’s CEO tells Mashable of the programs process:

“I’ll start off in science fiction, end up in fantasy, wander over historical fiction, wander over to some western,” while adding, “There’s this easy and smooth transition between genres and meta data that is hard to do in other systems.”

At this time the program appears to only offer an online database (no mobile apps) however the program is very easy to use, allowing users to search a specific book title, author or genre to find matching books they may enjoy, while drilling down further based on categories once books are displayed and ranked based on their specific information.

Check out the engine for yourself at: BookLamp.org

BookLamp Delivers Book Recommendations Based On User Selections is a post from: The Inquisitr

Neil Gaiman is probably best known for his graphic novel The Sandman but he is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers. As well as writing science fiction and working in films he is also a prolific blogger.

So it is unsurprising that at some point he would find his work being pirated in one fashion or another and when he came across such pirated works for the first his reaction was the typical those dirty rotten pirates are steal my work and money.

Then he noticed something – the piracy was helping to sell his work.

“Then I started to notice that two things that seemed much more significant. One of which was that places where I was being pirated — particularly Russia (where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading it out into the world) I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. And then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies.”

This video is of a conversation with Neil Gaiman, courtesy of  ORGZine, which is quite interesting.

Author Neil Gaiman no longer thinks of piracy as something to be feared [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Okay this is a really cool idea and whoever thought of it deserves a raise.

It seems that Polk County has taken a page from the Redbox movie rental vending machine playbook as the Polk Library Cooperative has setup two vending machines at the Outpost 27 Tourism Information Office on Florida’s Highway 27. One machine has DVDs in it and the other has best selling books.

Using the machines is as simple as swiping your library card.

“It just worked out great that we could help provide library services for people in this part of the county,” said tourism official Hank Longo.

The vending machines are actually monitored by computers at the Polk County Library so the workers there can know how to keep the machines stocked before they run out of selections.

via News 13

Here’s hoping that this experiment is a success and they do this in other areas as well.

Library on the go – library vending machines is a post from: The Inquisitr

There has never been any doubt that when you walk into a store and plonk down your money, then walk out with your purchase you can do anything you want with it. You don’t have to ask the store where you bought the item. You don’t have to ask the company that manufactured the item, and you don’t have to ask permission from the person who might have created the item in the first place.

This is because all physical goods fall under what is commonly referred to as first-rights doctrine which means you buy it and you can do what you want with it.

As much as we might want to believe that this applies to everything we buy the reality is that nothing could be further from the truth. We don’t and especially so with it comes to electronic goods like e-books, software, videos, or music.

This is something that I have mentioned many time before but it is sometimes hard to convince people that this is indeed the case. You don’t own the goods – you ‘own’ a bunch of legalese that can change at any time.

Ed Bott over at ZDNet’s Microsoft Report has an excellent post that breaks down and looks at the legalities of iTunes, Amazon, and eMusic when it comes to your rights when you buy music from their services.

If you buy a digital album from an online service such as the iTunes store, Amazon MP3, or eMusic, you have no legal right to lend that album to a friend, as you could if you had purchased a CD. If you decide after a few listens that you hate the album, well, tough. You can’t resell it. You can’t even legally give it away.

When it comes to software things become even more convoluted. Over at WinExtra I wrote a post about this back in November of 2009 where I talked about this:

The problem is that those EULAs are sneaky and on more than one occasion they have been found to contain more than one type of gotcha. With the exception of a rare breed of computer users who do indeed examine each and every EULA of every piece of software they install most of us just click on I Agree and carry on our merry way. It is only later we find out that maybe we should have read that EULA after all.

In this case however, unlike with things like music, books or movies, this post was about a piece of software you can download that will scan those nasty EULA that we never read. The point was, like Ed’s, that we are very quickly becoming a world were owning something is becoming a figment of our imagination.

If you don’t think so take a moment and read Ed’s post and as he says at the end:

The moral of the story? If you really want to own your music, forget about downloading and buy a CD. You might even save some money compared to a digital download.

Never has caveat emptor meant more.

So, You think you own that software, book, or movie you downloaded eh. Think again. is a post from: The Inquisitr

If there is one constant in our online world it is the whining and moaning from old media, and to a growing extent new media, about how they are losing money because consumers don’t want to pay the same price for electronic versions of goods as they do for the actual in-hand physical version.

In fact there is a post currently on Fast Company titled Internet Users Still Cheap, Spend Only $1 to $10 on Digital Content, and while it might be a great pageview grabbing headline I find it rather insulting. In the post Austin Carr writes:

The digital marketplace is the likely savior of most industries. That is, if consumers are willing to spend money on the web. Do we expect too much for free online?

Sorry but it’s not just a matter of wanting everything for free, even though that is still a driving factor, but rather, I believe, that the consumer understands a very fundamental difference between online electronic versions of physical goods and the goods themselves – it’s availability.

You see when you walk into a store to buy a product you can see that there are only so many of copies of the item that is available. Whether it be a movie DVD, a game, a book or any item that is inherently available in electronic form, the price of a physical version is based on the cost of actually manufacturing those physical copies and making them available.

Yet when you go to buy that online in its pure electronic form those incurred costs change, and change radically. The consumer almost instinctively gets this and that is something that content producers continually try to ignore. The reality is that online electronic goods shouldn’t cost the same, or in some cases more than their brick and mortar equivalents.

Online consumers aren’t cheap. If they were businesses like Amazon or even the many t-shirt businesses would be able to stay in business. The consumer is smart enough to know that a physical product, whether it be a t-shirt, or a book, or even a physical copy of a movie or music album, has a cost to produce and are more than willing to pay those prices.

So when a consumer turns around and says that they don’t want to pay physical goods prices for the electronic versions they aren’t being cheap and to suggest otherwise is insulting their intelligence. They are however more than willing to pay what they consider to be a fair price as long as you make it easy for them.

Being smart online consumers doesn’t mean being cheap is a post from: The Inquisitr

So, there’s that in the column of advantages to reading dead tree novels and references tomes.

A recent, teensy study of book reading speeds, encompassing 24 users, measured reading speeds for printed works over their digitally published counterparts to be slightly faster. Described as “noticeable enough to be just about statistically significant,” participants reading a short story by Ernest Hemingway finished 6.2% less quickly using an iPad, and 10.7% less quickly using a Kindle 2.

The Nielsen Norman group also measured user satisfaction among those surveyed, out of a score of seven. iPad, Kindle and book-books all rated about the same at 5.8, 5.7 and 5.6 respectively. Those reading on a PC scored the method much less favorably, though, ranking usability at a lamer 3.6.

Jakob Nielsen said the survey’s results were not surprising:

“Most of the users’ free-form comments were predictable,” says Nielsen.

“For example, they disliked that the iPad was so heavy and that the Kindle featured less-crisp gray-on-gray letters. People also disliked the lack of true pagination and preferred the way the iPad – actually, the iBook app – indicated the amount of text left in a chapter.”

Nielsen also said that those using a PC to read books tended to associate the medium with work, impacting their level of satisfaction. Of the survey participants, 40% of those who said they planned to purchase an e-reader in the coming months indicated they would opt for an iPad.

It takes longer to read e-books than book-books is a post from: The Inquisitr

The LP Generation

I grew up in the vinyl generation. No I don’t mean anything kinky, so get your minds out of the gutter. For me; and the rest of my generation, the vinyl LP was the audio equivalent of heaven.

I still remember the very first album that I bought, Emerson Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery, and the anticipation that built as I headed home to tear open the cellophane and place that round piece of virgin vinyl on the turntable for the first time.

There are fond memories of the next couple of albums I bought as well, Yes Songs by Yes and Uriah Heap’s Demon’s and Wizards, but there came a point where album buying became just a regular thing to do. As I got older those special musical memories surrounding vinyl became fewer and far between.

While there are the moments like listening to Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds opus (Thunderchild is still one of the best songs of all time in my book); or picking up the imported white vinyl pressing of a Synergy album, listening to music became … well … common place and – a lot of the time – boring.

As we went through the whole cassette and CD phase of music it never really change except for one thing. Music became more generic, more full of crap. When I was growing up we – the kids, not the record companies – graded how good an album was by the ratio of good to suckass tracks. You could be pretty sure that at least one or two tracks would suck but the fifteen to twenty bucks we spent on the album was considered to be fair. Any more than two suckass tracks and we would complain about getting ripped off.

At some point though that ratio started to change to the point we are almost happy if there were at least two good tracks to listen to. It was no longer a joy to go out and cruise the record store aisles picking out your album purchases for the week or month.

Reading under the covers

Along with music I also grew up with a love of books. In a way I was lucky because both my parents were veracious readers. We had a whole wall in our dining room that had a custom built bookcase occupying it which was full to overflowing with books across the full spectrum of literature. It is from these shelves where starting around the age of thirteen or fourteen I discovered classics like French Lieutenant’s Wife and philosophy from the likes of Bertrand Russell. It is also were I discovered the future worlds of Robert Heinlein and the incredible fantasy world of Dune and The Dragonriders of Pern.

For me there was nothing more satisfying that holding a brand new book in my hands and gently folding the front and back cover pages to prep the book so you wouldn’t break the spine at some later re-reading. Now I say I was lucky to grow up in a home like this because I never had to worry about buying books. It wasn’t until I got older and then moved out on my own that the cost of buying all those books became a decision point.

After all an album you could listen to over and over without it losing any real value. Books on the other hand where nice to have but really the chances of re-reading them seem to diminish as they sat on bookcase shelves. So as the record collection would grow the number of books would decline. New books became replaced by trips to the used book store where trades were made on a weekly or monthly basis.

Changing times ala MP3s, Napster, and the return of the single

There was a point in the LP generation where there was an equal ground between LP’s and 45′s. Teenyboppers would rush to the record store to grab the latest Jackson 5 or some other Top 10 radio song. The album buyers would look upon them with disdain as we cruised through the latest releases aisle to grab the must have album we had been saving our money up for.

Then, in what seems like overnight the 45 single disappeared. It was all albums, which were later replaced by cassettes which then fell to the CD. Then as computers became much more common place we started hearing about a new music format called the MP3.

Suddenly we were able to rip only the songs on a album that we like and then like the mixed cassettes and CD we were able to share with our friends those songs we really liked by copying them on to a CD. We thought the music world was our oyster but there was an even bigger ocean of music coming. It was called the Internet with things like USENET newsgroups for music and IRC channels that help spread the rebirth of the single.

All this though was nothing compared to the tsunami that was unleashed by Shawn Fanning and his creation called Napster. Suddenly you could literally within minutes find any song, any artist, that you wanted to listen to. You could experiment with different styles, you could find the rarest of songs. We gorged ourselves on a smorgasbord of music because the cost of acquisition was nil.

The effect on the music industry has for the most part been catastrophic. Music labels struggle by hook or crook to wring out every last cent they can from their collapsing business model. Musician are discovering that no-longer do they have to be beholden to those labels. Music lovers are discovering that they have a voice in this process again.

The business will never be the same.

Book publishers facing their own Napster Event

For the most part book publishers have escaped those early halcyon days of the Internet and Napster. sure there are bootleg copies that float around the Web but for the most part the price of acquisition (i.e.: original cost and then the labor to scan and package) in order to make books widely accessible was too high. Of course this changed as more books were written and then prepared for printing in a digital fashion. Suddenly we started to see books; much like music and movies, start to leak out onto the Web.

As with music book publishers are looking to protect their interests using things like Digital Rights Management (DRM) but as the music industry found out any success with this as a cornerstone of a new online business model is just an illusion. Even though companies like Amazon with their Kindle e-reader have their own DRM scheme they are going to end up facing the same kind of backlash that every other industry that has tried DRM methods has.

The DRM issue aside it would be safe to say that as technology progresses at its typical Internet speed the book industry is going to face its own Napster moment. It is inevitable mainly because they are trying to plaster their hardcoded brick and mortar business model onto an online business that operates at totally different creation, publication, and acquisition costs.

As with the music business with their vinyl and CD presses the book industry has their printing presses. Just as music had its massive advertising and promotional budgets so do the book publishers. No different than the music industry with their high contract payout to musicians so to does the book publishers have royalty advances in the millions of dollars. All that money has to be re-couped as well as making a profit for the company so it is no wonder that books cost what they do and I have no problem at all with that deal.

But when it comes to things like e-books one has to ask: how much does it cost to make one e-book?

Just one.

You see with physical books, like the CD, there is an inherent cost with each book you have to sell. Sci-fi author Tobias Buckell has a pretty good break-down of the costs that goes into the behind the scenes making of a book (as well as really great post on this subject) but he misses out on the real expense in my mind. In his post he stops just before the real expenses for book publishers start to mount. We are talking about the actual cost of printing thousands or more of those books. Then there is the cost of shipping. The cost of trade shows. There are a lot of costs that get added up in the expenditure column for each book published.

With e-books?

Well you would probably have much of the costs that Tobias mentions in his post but that is where it stops. There is no cost for printing thousands of copies. There is no cost for making the e-book available to world as there is with having to ship thousands of books.

As with MP3′s there is only the cost of creating one e-book.

One.

Just as with music and the iPod or its myriad of competing MP3/media players have provided record labels with a huge audience of listeners at an incredible smaller fraction of costs the book publishers are seeing the same thing with the rapid growth of e-readers.

There is a lot of double-speak that the publishers like to put forth, just as their music label brethren do, about how they can’t make money at the current pricing structure being promoted by book re-sellers. When it comes to this argument there is really only one question that needs to be asked: what does it cost to make one e-book?

The fact is that the book publishing business will never be the same.

What is old is new again

As bad as all this may sound there is an interesting thing happening in the music consumer business that the book publishers need to be paying close attention to.

I remember when everyone was foretelling the death of vinyl as first cassettes, then CDs and now MP3′s decimated its consumer base. It was predicted at one time that at some point that vinyl would disappear just as cassettes have. Even back then I never believed it and even though I was smirked at when I said anything to the contrary I always have believed that vinyl would make a comeback. It would never be anywhere close to the numbers being sold at its heyday but I have always believed that it would return.

Then this past Christmas when I was shopping for a Wii for our grandson’s present I stopped in a local downtown video game store hoping that they would have one (they did). On the way in the door though I noticed a sign in the window letting people know that they also were selling new LP’s. After paying for the Wii I got curious about the LP sales and ended up having a very interesting discussion with the owner of the store.

It turns out that sales are doing really well and not just locally as it seems that nationally the sales numbers for vinyl are growing. The driving force behind the sales as the business owner told me boils down to one thing: quality. You see these new vinyl LP’s aren’t the same cheap thin albums that we got use to near the end of their popularity. No, these new LP’s are thicker and being made from a better quality vinyl which when tied in with modern recording technology are producing great sounding LP’s.

But the really amazing stat that he shared with me was who the biggest customers were for these new LP’s were. You’d think it would be old farts like me looking to regain some sort of lost youth but you would be wrong. The largest consumers of the new vinyl are the kids.

The store owner told me that with the kids, who have grown up listening almost exclusively to MP3′s, the first time they listen to a new vinyl album it is like a great big huge OMG moment. They can’t believe that music can sound that good. They are hooked said the store owner and are some of  his best customers which also by the way adds sales of things like turntables, amplifiers, and speakers to the mix.

The music business may not be the same but in some ways it has gotten better.

The future OMG moment for books

When I was living in Calgary for a period of time I decided that I want to collect all the Robert Heinlein books I could. Not just the run of the mill paperbacks you can find at any used bookstore but I wanted first and second edition paperbacks. I wanted any edition hardcovers. I wanted the trade paperbacks. I wanted the specialty printings.

Why?

Because I wanted to enjoy the experience of Heinlein’s works in as many ways as I could. Through this I ended up with a close friendship of a bookstore owner who did his best to feed my addiction fill my bookcase. I did pretty good to with 12 or 15 first and second edition paperbacks, three or four trade paperbacks, an assorted number of editions in hardcover and one beautiful specialty print hardcover.

There was a certain pleasure that is kind of hard to explain when I held those books and enjoyed their contents but there is no way that a specialty print of Stranger in a Strange Land can be replaced by a e-book. You see that is a book’s OMG moment. The moment you turn back the leather cover and start reading the words on vellum paper or turn pages which have bulk that feels good between your fingers.

The music industry is currently going through an OMG period where consumers are finding that there is something about having a physical vinyl album that an MP3 can never equal. The sound is richer, the artwork that wraps the vinyl is – well .. artwork. There is so much more added value with an album that doesn’t come with any kind of downloaded MP3 or even a CD.

Sure well still get our MP3′s because they are great way to have our music travel with us in our highly mobile society but when it comes to enjoying the experience of listening to our favorite songs vinyl has a soul that can envelope us.

Books have that same potential. Yes e-books are a guaranteed future for the business and consumer, there is no argument there. However if the book industry learns anything good from what has happened to the music business it is that there is an OMG consumer base out there for them as well. I also believe that it is a market that if planned on now could in turn be a growth market. The music business it seems is turning a blind eye to their OMG potential but it is still early days for the book publishers, and authors.

The business may have changed forever but that doesn’t mean it can’t be better.

The return of the LP and the future of book publishing is a post from: The Inquisitr

Much ado is being made about the best-selling books on Amazon being skewed by the prevalence of free books.

By my count on the top 100 Kindle books on Amazon, 59 books are either free or cost a cent. Only three books in the top ten cost more than a quarter. And the book publishing industry is not pleased. Interesting, though, is the contrast between how the book industry feels about the free books versus authors. Industry flak says:

“At a time when we are resisting the $9.99 price of e-books,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, the publisher of James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer, “it is illogical to give books away for free.”

Indeed, said Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins, “free is not a business model.”

But dude- now it totally is, actually. And again, industry tries to control the market instead of going with the fast-moving stream to their peril. As a kid, I was an avid consumer of books (as well as Ring Dings.) I burned through at least three a day on weekends, sometimes one and a half under my desk away from Sister Anthony Therese’s gaze, at the risk of being whacked with a ruler. But when the internet came along, I stopped reading books. As long as content was in my eyes, I could give a frick if it was on a blog or in a book. All the better that I didn’t have to put on clothes or go out in the sun to get books from the bookstore or library. Books vs. internet, internet wins.

Now the publishing industry is being handed a golden opportunity in the form of e-books and all they can do is whine that it’s not good enough. Even though it’s been like ten years since Napster came along and people quit buying music the old fashioned way- and in fairness, that one kind of slapped the industry in the face- book publishers refuse to accept the the market has changed and won’t go back to suit them. The authors, who wisely point out that without the chance to hook readers in with a freebie, they’d be buried under a thousand million copies of RPattz’s face seem to get it:

Charlie Huston, the author of the Henry Thompson crime trilogy and a series of books about Joe Pitt, a vampire detective, said that “the part of me that grew up in a union household” still feels as if he were occasionally undermining himself by sanctioning digital giveaways by his publisher, Random House.

But, he said, “I guess my attitude right now is that I can be afraid of what’s coming or I can try and aggressively embrace it in some form.”

Going back to my random sample of one, in the ten years before I got my Amazon kindle iPhone app, I bought a handful of books. Maybe three. I’d already given up my reading attention to the internet, where I could read high quality things that never ran out of pages. Actually, I lied. After being pulled into a fascination with True Blood, I bought a discounted set of the Sookie Stackhouse books. The key here: content drew me in. Then I got an iPhone.

In the past 5 months, I’ve amassed 60 books on my iPhone. About 20 are free, the rest purchased happily even though free books are readily available. I even bought duplicate copies of all my Sookie books because I love them so much. I paid more for the Kindle versions than I did for the paper copies. The money I’ve spent on books has skyrocketed something like 5,637% merely because books became easy to obtain and easier to read. My phone is backlit. I can read in the dark. I always have it. I can carry all 60 books in my bra, where I keep my phone. Easy peasy.

Although only 5% of the market share of all books now, e-books will eventually stomple the paper book market. It’s coming. And free books will always be available by authors who are very good and know they’ll hook you on their crack content. As it is with the internet, these excellent authors will float in a sea of horrible writers, but the good ones will be evangelized and people like me and you will pay for their content and they will make a lot of money.

Seth Godin, in his laser-y and pithy way, addressed the general issue of whining about “the market” in a recent blog post:

The Marx Brothers were great at vaudeville. Live comedy in a theatre. And then the market for vaudeville was killed by the movies. Groucho didn’t complain about this or argue that people should respect the hard work he and his brothers had put in. No, they went into the movies.

Then the market for movies like the Marx Brothers were making dried up. Groucho didn’t start trying to fix the market. Instead, he saw a new medium and went there. His TV work was among his best (and certainly most lucrative).

It’s extremely difficult to repair the market.

…it’s not easy or fair, but it’s true. You bet your life.

The wealthy people who peddle books can’t fall back on this being news, like it was to the music industry when everyone started downloading music rather than paying $20 an album. The writing is on the wall- but will they accept the opportunity they have to reclaim some of the market they’ve already lost to the internet at large, or just sit their throwing their toys out of the pram because consumers have more choices now? I’m inclined, if the quotes above are any indication, to think it will be the latter.

Will free e-books kill the book industry or save it? is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Internet and technology is transforming just about every industry there is. Some at more breakneck speed than others but the change is coming. Changing as well is the consumer’s buying habits as more of our goods are obtainable as never-ending digital goods and for an almost zero distribution cost.

The creators of the goods are finding even fewer reasons each year to depend on the largess of rich and powerful middleman companies. News is finding readers on its own as more and more avenues of distribution appear leaving the paper megalith corporations with drastically shrinking revenues.

The same thing is happening to the book publishing industry as authors are finding that the stigma associated with self-publishing and marketing is quickly evaporating. The publishers are facing a future of electronic distribution that is beyond their control as e-reader, and more typical devices like smartphones and computers, gain market momentum as principal ways to read our books.

As with the newspaper industry these draconian methods of publishing and distribution are finding themselves becoming marginalized. Unfortunately they are also following in the footsteps of the news industry in their battle to maintain their centuries old status quo.

Today Simon & Schuster announced that they will be holding back any e-book versions of published books for at least 4 months. They argue this is needed in order to make a stand against the current pricing practice of e-books at $9.99 which they consider to be cut-rate pricing of their goods.

“The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback,” said Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS Corp. “We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new [electronic] readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible.”

Source: Wall Street Journal Online

The problem is that companies like Simon & Schuster are fighting against the inevitable future where their closely guarded profit margins won’t matter because the consumer and the creators will go around them.

Addition the really big elephant in the room has yet to make its presence official but the word is that Apple is coming out with a tablet with designs on the e-book market. If the book publishers thought that companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble were hard negotiator on price they would do well to take a quick lesson from the music industry – Apple doesn’t negotiate.

If Apple is coming to market with a tablet priced at a level that makes it attractive to a larger demographic than just Apple fans and geek heads the book publishing business is going to be in for a rude awakening.

Instead what we have is the same short term thinking that has been the bane of both the music and newspaper industry before them. As Frank Shaw pointed out

The fundamental question is pretty simple, if you think long term, are digital readers better for the industry overall? As in, over time will volume go up compared to print only sales? It certainly seems the answer is yes, which means the publishers are making short term profit decisions that will kill them over time. And seriously, seeing a publisher moan about protecting authors is a hoot as the guy from Hachette does here, “I can’t sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices. It’s about the future of the business.” Almost as good as the music industry talking about how they are “protecting” bands. Sheesh.

Sheesh indeed, but as the rhetoric is showing there is still plenty of room left on the stupid bus.

Book industry joins the news business on the stupid train is a post from: The Inquisitr

If there is one thing you can say about the Web it is that it is responsible for the disruption of more businesses than just about any recession. We hear daily about the newspaper industry facing annihilation, the music industry trying to suck out the last dollar it can, and the movie industry trying to constantly stuff the genie back in the bottle.

What we don’t necessarily hear a lot about is the book industry whether it be from the point of view of the authors, or book sellers, or book publishers. Every once in awhile stuff will bubble to the surface but on the whole much of the discussion around books get quickly overshadowed by its more loud mouth industry cousins.

That doesn’t change the fact thought that the book industry is facing a full frontal assault that will have as much an impact on the industry as the ones facing our other entertainment related industries.

Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing, gives a great overview of this assault in a post yesterday. In the post he outlines how companies like Amazon, WalMart, and Target are cutting the prices of books well below that of the publisher price, to the tune of 40-50%, in an effort to shore up their book sales. This is creating a multitude of problems for everyone in the business as this kind of subsidizing isn’t sustainable.

At some point something has to give. Publishers will be forced by retailers right across the board to cut their prices.

Publishers. For right now, publishers are getting paid an amount equal to the customary discount for hardcover books. But no one in the industry I have spoken with expects this to last for long. Amazon, Walmart, and Target are systematically conditioning consumers to expect these lower prices. Eventually, these retailers will be in the position to force publishers to lower their retail prices.

Book retailers, especially the small mom and pop shops, might be willing to discount some of the bestsellers but that is used to bring in consumers who the hope will buy additional books while there. By putting them in a position where they have to cut already slim margins in order to keep those customers hopefully returning this cheapening of their stock will make keeping the doors open even harder.

When it comes to authors Michael Hyatt has this to say

Authors. If retail prices collapse, it will mean that royalties and advances will also fall. You don’t have to be a mathematician to figure out that 10–15% of $9.00 is dramatically less than the same percentage of $25–35. Most authors have a difficult enough time making a living now. This will lower the income of all authors and force many to get out of the business altogether.

Now of course the freetards out there will suggest that this is actually beneficial for the authors in that it could allow them to deal directly with the consumer given the ease of creating ebooks and the availability of self-publishing services. There are also those that suggest that like bloggers, musicians, and newspapers book authors need to find different ways to market their books and provide auxiliary tangible goods to make up for what they might lose by giving away their books.

I don’t profess to know all the ins and outs of the book publishing business and I am sure that someone like Michael Hyatt would be able to provide more accurate numbers but the fact is that the large portion of authors out there aren’t making the big bucks. Not all authors are Steven King or Dan Brown and as much as we might think that all authors are racking in the cash nothing could be farther from the truth.

So when companies like Amazon and WalMart turn around and start slashing book prices to the bone because they are big enough to absorb the losses – for now – in the end this house of cards is going to come crashing down. While we might like to think that this will only affect the already rich book publishers the fact is that the ripple effect is going to me much larger and much deeper than we might think.

Free isn’t the answer for everything regardless of what the self professed experts might have us believe. Sometime paying for something tangible at a fair market price with actual real money is the right thing to do as that money spent often has a far wider effect that just clicking on a purchase button.

Book publishers, book sellers face being WalMarted to death is a post from: The Inquisitr

A leaked WSJ ad, scheduled for Oct. 25th, has gadget bloggers buzzing about Barnes & Noble’s new e-reader, the Nook.

Running on Android, the Nook is said to be priced at Kindle’s $259 pricepoint. Many people have likened the device to a Kindle/iPhone hybrid, as unlike Kindle with a physical keyboard, the Nook has a touchscreen interface like the iPhone and iPod touch for navigating and browsing. The Nook also is rumored to support color, another advantage over Kindle. Coupled with a rumored deal for the device with Best Buy, Amazon might see their market share seriously sliding in the coming months. But the most intriguing of the rumors, in this era of gadget porn, is not even hardware related.

The first big tidbit is that books will be “heavily discounted”- without a qualifier, it’s difficult to say how impactful this aspect is. I’ve been very pleased with my iPhone Kindle app- the 6.39 pricepoint of most of the trashy vampire romances I favor is decent, but feels a bit like a jack at about a buck fifty less than the ink and paper counterparts Amazon would have to find, handle, wrap, pack, ship and of course, print on dead trees. But the even more intriguing aspect is that the Nook may allow for lending of titles between friends. One of the biggest hurdles the eBook format has in catching on is the inability to share books- the crunchy granola intellectual types that read books tend to like to pass them around between friends so they have something to discuss over soy lattes and cruelty-free hemp granola bars.

While Kindle’s got a tight grip on the e-reader market right now, the Nook sounds like it will be a powerful adversary as consumers make the leap away from analog books. Being perfectly honest, I’ve read more books in the past six weeks than I have in the past six years since downloading the Kindle app. And by December, the number of consumers using an e-reader is expected to double to 3.8 million from 1.6 million in August. Confirmation and more details are expected from B&N at 4pm EST during an event at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan.

Update: B&N.com now lists the Nook, and does a specs rundown vs. Kindle.

[Image: Gizmodo]

Barnes & Noble’s Nook to incinerate Kindle? is a post from: The Inquisitr

In a post back on September 23 New Zealand author Brian Edwards puts forth the proposition that our public libraries are just a form of theft and that people who lend their friends books are thieves.

Yes you read that right. Every time you take a book out at the library you and the library are stealing money from book authors. It seems that Mr. Edwards feels that book authors should be paid every time a library lends out a book. In his opinion the act of lending books is tantamount to taking food out of his mouth

Every public library in New Zealand bought at least one copy of Helen. And they lent each of those copies to other people to read for… nothing. Last year there were still 227.4 copies of the book in New Zealand public libraries. If each of those copies was taken out by one person a month, that’s 2,729 people who read but didn’t pay for my book – my six month’s work. At $4.50 per unsold copy (ed: his share of book sales in stores), that’s a theoretical loss of income to me in one year of $12,280.

He continues on and accuses libraries of grand theft copyright

But there’s a principle here: when one person buys a book and lends it to another person to read, they effectively become an accessory to theft. Their generous act amounts to little more than stealing the author’s work. When a public library buys a book and lends it to thousands of other people to read, it’s grand theft copyright and really no different from illegally downloading music or movies or copying CDs or DVDs on your computer.

I’m still shaking my head over this one. Michael Masnick at Techdirt puts it best

Edwards also seems fully enamored with the myth that copyright law is based on some sort of "labor theory" — that the more time you put in, somehow the more money you deserve to get out. While I’m unfamiliar with New Zealand copyright law, in the US, such theories have been widely discredited in the courts repeatedly. And, of course, they make no sense when viewed alongside the actual purpose of copyright law. Edwards seems to believe that copyright is welfare for creators, rather than an incentive to create.

In the meantime, perhaps the public libraries of New Zealand can do Mr. Edwards a favor next time he publishes a book: don’t buy it. Ditto for anyone who might think of lending it… er… I mean, being an accessory to a crime in distributing copyrighted materials.

I would add that maybe the libraries in New Zealand should pull his books – just to be on the safe side of the law.

New Zealand author thinks libraries are a form of theft is a post from: The Inquisitr

We’ve seen the same thing repeated over an over with the music industry, television industry, news industry, and many more just like them. Crying doom and gloom about how their individual wealth creators are being driven into the ground by the Web. Granted the Web might be changing the playing field in favor of the actual content creator and consumers but it isn’t to blame for these businesses failing.

It is their own myopia and unwillingness to find ways to make their business work in the new media world instead of trying to constantly bend it to meet their current business models.

The latest of these is the book publishing world and people Araud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette Livre. It is his opinion that the monsters out to destroy the book publishing industry are the usual suspects – Google, Amazon, Barnes & Noble along with other e-book retailers.

His point of contention with these evil people is the aggressive pricing of e-books in the case of the major retailers and the availability of out-of-copyright books courtesy of Google.

“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Mr Nourry said.

There was a real and “muscular” debate in the US, he added. Retailers were paying publishers more than $9.99 for each e-book, so were selling them at a loss: “That cannot last . . . Amazon is not in the business of losing money. So, one day, they are going to come to the publishers and say: ‘we are cutting the price we pay’. If that happens, after paying the authors, there will be nothing left for the publishers.”

Source: The Globe and Mail – E-books ‘could spell the end for hardbacks’

Once again we see some-one who doesn’t seem to understand how the economics of the web works. The fact is that beyond the book author actually getting what their book is worth based on real sales the cost of delivering those e-books is next to zero. In contrast for book publishers the costs incurred to create all those individual copies of the original are far from zero. Why should retailers, and the author, have to sell a copy of a book that costs nothing to create for the same price as what book publishers deem it to be worth.

As with the business behind the other entertainment industries book publishers are finding that because of the Web the middle man isn’t the profit center that it once was.

Book publishers myopic as they claim e-books will destroy books is a post from: The Inquisitr

While most people might not think so it turns out, according to the Cleantech Group, that the Amazon Kindle may end up being more environmentally friendly than paper books.

After examining all the existing studies in order to do a lifecycle analysis the group found that carbon emissions from electronic books is far lower than your traditional book publishing. In light of the fact that e-readers aren’t typically marketed as being a sound environmental alternative to books that impact is becoming a topic of conversation.

According to Emma Rich, the person behind the study, when you take into account the manufacturing and mining needed to produce an electronic e-reader like the Kindle it gets a significant edge over the paper version.

"The roughly 168 kg of CO2 produced throughout the Kindle’s lifecycle is a clear winner against the potential savings: 1,074 kg of CO2 if replacing three books a month for four years; and up to 26,098 kg of CO2 when used to the fullest capacity of the Kindle DX. Less-frequent readers attracted by decreasing prices still can break even at 22.5 books over the life of the device," she [Emma Rich] wrote in conclusion.

Source: cnet – Green Tech :: Study paints Kindle e-reader a dark shade of green

While there are some that will argue that the environmental impact needs to take into account the increasing cost of electronic waste as we constantly upgrade to newer gadget. The Cleantech Group suggests that the e-reader industry could help make a significant impact once people become more accustom to using them rather than relying on paper.

As Martin LaMonica notes in his post though it all boils down to how the e-reader is used.

If a person continues to buy books and print periodicals and doesn’t recycle the product, the environmental impact could potentially be negative, according to this study.

Ease your conscience – the Kindle is greener than books is a post from: The Inquisitr

We call it the naked city, but did you know getting your tatas out ain’t so illegal up in here?

Jordan Matter’s new book Uncovered: Women In Word and Image was inspired by Janet Jackson’s most controversial nip-slip of all time at the Superbowl. If someone just moved the rock, Jackson’s nipple was exposed for a nanosecond under some kind of weird nipple dungeon and American freaked the frick out. Most Americans were terrified for the children (who may or may not have been eating from breasts directly before seeing one on TV) but Chris Rock did say “right idea, wrong titty.”

Matter said she began thinking about the “culture of covering up,” and the idea for the book came about. It makes sense- despite being perfectly legal, I would see many topless men on warm days in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but never a set of tatas on the C train. Such a double standard.

Matter snaps women out and about in the city, and uses women of a variety of ages and body shapes- it’s not just Girls Gone Wild: The Lexington Avenue Line. Below are some mildly NSFW excerpts of breasts in the wild in New York.

[Via: The Frisky]

Jordan Matter’s Uncovered shows us NYC, with boobs is a post from: The Inquisitr

This past weekend was San Diego Comic-Con, where nerds, fanboys, and devotees of all things magical/fantastic/scifi/comicbook show up in droves to see snippets from upcoming movies, glimpses of their most obsessed-over actors/actresses, and to get “inside information” on upcoming projects – this year was no different.  Johnny Depp made a surprise appearance, footage debuted, and the flames of rumors were fanned.  Oh and something called New Moon, the latest upcoming movie in the Twilight series, had an event.

The first official trailer for this movie debuted long ago (see below for an embed), but the days prior to Comic-Con saw a release of official photos and some more details on the movie – culminating in a Friday panel where many attendees waited in line for a day.  A day.  That’s defined as “greater than 24 hours”, where hordes of teen/preteen girls (with their dads) and middle aged women waited in line for a brief interaction, by proximity, with the cast and crew of their obsessions.

Very simply, the fact that these sort of people would brave a highly judgmental and vocal crowd of thousands of nerds says volumes for their sanity, not to mention what they might consider devotion.  Comic-Con is a place for geeks to enjoy themselves once a year and indulge in all of their favorite geek activities, which runs the gamut from comic book-based movies to science fiction TV shows, but definitely does not include the world of Twilight.  A new (and not-yet-real) panel for the announcement of a new Blade movie?  Sure.  But a place for a bunch of screaming females to fawn over the upcoming release of slow-motion shirtless males?  Not so much.  If Blade is an example of nerd-acceptable vampirism, then Twilight is its antithesis.

Based on the trailer, it’s safe to say that New Moon will just be more of the same seen in the previous movie, albeit with a new director and potentially better visuals.  But it doesn’t change the fundamentals of the story, which is based mostly on the drama and inner thoughts of a helpless teenage girl who needs lots of manly men to save her, some of which just happen to be “I shine in the sunlight like diamonds and it’s sooooo cute!” vampires.  Oh, and the fundamental beliefs of the Mormon Church (LDS).

More disturbing than the material itself, however, is the rabid fanbase.  The panel at Comic-Con was reportedly barely-controlled chaos, as the female hordes screamed such unique one-liners as “I love you Rob!”, but, somehow, insights were given into the acting prowess of Robert Pattinson (“Edward”): “[he had to] stand on a green box and look and stay basically expressionless”.  How truly talented he is!  But the throngs of fans found “camaraderie” as they waited to have the brilliance that was the Twilight panel bestowed upon them, so all was not lost.

Comparisons will inevitably be made to nerd diehards like Star Wars fans, but there are crucial differences, not the least of which is that overnight lines were formed for the movies, not a quick Q&A session.  The most important differentiation is that no matter how devoted a Star Wars fan is, they are able to dissect any part of that universe and judge it objectively for its quality – Twilight fans are completely the opposite.  While many of even the most diehard Star Wars nerd may recognize that Episode I was far from the peak of the series, anything even remotely related to Twilight is defended to the absolute death.  For evidence, look no further than reactions to criticisms that all the books have horrible literary value, that the actors in the first cinematic installment have no talent, or that the whole concept of the series is little more than a vehicle for the delivery of softcore porn and Mormon values – the knee-jerk fan response is fantastically hilarious.

And this past weekend is just further evidence that the borderline-illiterate nonsense is not going to stop any time soon: there are still books left to translate into movies, and Meyer has one (or more) sequels in publishing limbo.  Unlike Meyer’s not-at-all-similar counterpart JK Rowling, most authors in the vampire pornfiction industry don’t know when to stop, and her zombie following will no doubt create a bestseller out of every page or frame ever published.

Being part of the anti-Twilight minority is not going to become any easier as the years of the next decade progress, especially as the movie studios find out what a cash crop the series truly is.  But comfort can be had in a key fact:  while geeks and nerds are known for occasionally doing odd things in pursuit of their fandom, the rabid Twilight hordes will continue to embarrass themselves on a scale unprecedented, most especially in the eye of the media.

Go Team Jasper!

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction.  He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

Once Upon a Twilight Dream is a post from: The Inquisitr