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

There’s nothing wrong with a little bit of Harlequin reading for a guilty pleasure but it seems that when it comes to the Kindle, and the Nook as well, there has been an influx of what is termed erotic romance, or as the less gentile might call it – soft-porn.

Right now the Top 100 listing for the Kindle is home to books like “Bent Over”, “Double Teamed”, “Bedded by the Boss”, and “Hot Daddy Cop” and while that might not seem all that bad what is raising a few eyebrows is that these e-books are coming with some rather suggestive cover art.

Needless to say, most of the books feature scantily clad figures, often intertwined, on their covers. Now, we’re not prudes, but when a woman’s bare behind shows up in the top 100 list on the Kindle (as is currently the case with “Bent Over”), you start to wonder whether someone over at Amazon might get a little concerned about its image and what the young folks who own Kindles might comes across in their browsing. (Start clicking on “related titles,” and things go downhill quickly–from the risque to the downright perverse.)

via Cnet.

Of course romance, or erotica romance if you prefer, has always been popular and the hasn’t changed with the rise of e-books. What has some folks concerned apparently is the cover art as that is the first thing some-one sees when looking through the titles

Has the Kindle become the new home of soft-porn? is a post from: The Inquisitr

I will admit at the outset that I am a devoted e-book reader- I have a Kindle, but mostly use the Kindle app on my iPhone and have shunned paper and ink books since my very first Kindle Edition.

That said, people decide on whether they should lay the mack on someone on the subway based on their reading choices? Doing it wrong. Intellectual compatibility is very important, but an otherwise attractive and fancy-smelling person can be reading a dodgy book for any number of reasons. The fact that other riders could be judging me by my choice of embarrassing vampire romance novel is worrying- so it’s probably good that I rely solely on my iPhone e-reader. Maybe they think I’m doing something more highbrow and respectable, like playing Bejeweled.

The notion Kindles are putting a dint in the subway-based dating scene comes courtesy of the New York Times. The writer, Lisa Lewis- in her not at all dramatically titled piece How E-Readers Destroyed My Love Life, bemoans these awesome devices because she cannot judge a prospect by his choice of reading material:

I had one good pickup line, and e-readers ruined it. I can no longer hit on a handsome man on a long commute by asking about his book — because I can’t see it. Gone are the days when, sitting on a train delayed in the station, I could imagine exactly where in the New York Public Library we would first kiss — in the stacks between Mailer and Malamud or Foer and Franzen? E-books may be saving literature, but my dating life has suffered.

So, you spot Dreamy McHotterson on the G Train. He smells like jet fighters and punching. He’s enlightened enough to not only invest more than $100 in reading, but he loads up his device and brings it with him to work. And the Kindle isn’t enough to “hey, baby” him? An opener raving about battery life? Lauding the newfound lightness of your work bag? Complaining about a hot new release that costs more than the hardcover for the Kindle edition?

I suppose paper books could serve as a shibboleth for all the luddites- do you judge hotness based on reading material and/or format?

[via Gawker]

[Or Look At it This Way] Kindle Spares You Shallow Chat Ups is a post from: The Inquisitr

I have been a comic book lover for years, I even owned my own comic store for awhile; talk about a kid let loose in a candy store, and when I first heard of Graphicly (previously Graphic.ly but they seem to have dropped the ‘ly’ domain extension) I will admit to being a little sceptical.

It wasn’t so much the idea of a web based comic book service but rather being more of aesthetics as I wan’t overly convinced that digital versions of our favorite reading material could be pulled off. I have checked out other offerings, from Marvel for example, but none of them hit my personal sweet spot when it came to reading my comics online.

Graphicly though, has through its platform iterations, been a pleasant surprise and now they have gone one step further and created a fantastic web reading experience using HTML5.  Additionally they have incorporated all the social features that you could want for sharing your favorite comic much as you can see from this screenshot of one of my favorite comics Witchblade.

If you want to get even more immersive in your reading you can go to full screen mode and enjoy the smooth transition between panels, as well as drill down into each part of the panels depending on your viewing options you will really be able to enjoy your reading experience.

For those of you that aren’t so fond of doing everything in your browser Graphicly also has a really nice cross-platform desktop app (AIR) which is my preference.

Now if you are more into the mobile aspect of reading your favorite comics Graphicly has apps for Android, iPhone, iPad, and Windows Phone but to be honest I didn’t enjoy the reading experience that much. It might be different on a tablet but I really believe that is the smallest form factor for enjoyable reading.

Anyway if you are a comic fan, and especially indie comics then head over to Graphicly and try out their apps, or the web version, with any of the many free comics that they have available. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

thanks to Louis Gray for the heads up on the HTML5 release

Graphicly brings your comic love to wherever you are – now with HTML5 goodness is a post from: The Inquisitr

With the E-Book market heating up and Amazon drastically dropping the cost of their Kindle e-Readers (the cheapest model is now $114) it was only a matter of time before e-Books began outselling hardcover and paperback books and that is now the case, at least at Amazon.com

After just four years of selling the digital versions of books Amazon has announced this week that the company is now selling 105 E-Books for every 100 books, for their count Amazon includes both hardcover and paperback copies of books sold.

According to Indyposted the count did not include free E-Books, such as public domain offerings of Shakespeare material.

With the $114 Kindle currently the best selling version of the company’s e-Reader to date those numbers should be expected to climb in the future.

Have you made the leap to e-Books, why or why not?

E-Book Sales Now Outweigh Book Sales At Amazon is a post from: The Inquisitr

Just a few months after they got their own New York Times Bestseller list, electronic books hit another acceptance milestone- they’ve outpaced paperbacks as the single bestselling format in the US.

The sales stats turned in favor of electronic books earlier this year, with paperbacks outselling them in January. By February, ebooks took the top spot:

The Association of American Publishers revealed in their latest report, which compiled sales data from US publishing houses, that total ebook sales in February were $90.3m (£55.2m). The AAP said this report makes digital books the largest single format in the US for the first time ever, overtaking paperbacks at $81.2m. Paperbacks led up until January, with ebooks coming second.

Adult hardback and paperbacks plummeted 34.4% in February, compared with sales growth of 202.3% for their electronic counterparts in the same period. Deputy editor of The Bookseller Philip Jones commented on sales projections for the format:

“Ebooks have grown massively, but they do not yet match overall print books and nor is it predicted that they will. The most bullish predictions suggest that ebooks will account for 50 per cent of the US market by 2014 or 2015, and then will probably plateau.”

The AAP credits an influx of Christmas-gifted readers as well as broader offerings in the market for the recent jump in e-book sales.

E-books outpace paperbacks in February sales is a post from: The Inquisitr

Well, this kind of feels like a bit of a pivotal moment for e-books- the most nationally referenced best-seller list is getting an e-book list, too.

The New York Times, whose best-seller list is often used as a reference point for an author or work’s legitimacy or success (the Times itself modestly refers to its own list as the “industry standard”), has been ranking best-selling books since 1935. Janet Elder, the gray lady’s editor of news surveys and election analysis, said the e-book best-seller ranking was a long time in the works:

“We’ve had our eye on e-book sales since e-books began,” Ms. Elder said. “It was clear that e-books were taking a greater and greater share of total sales, and we wanted to be able to tell our readers which titles were selling and how they fit together with print sales.”

It’s probably about damn time the NYT began ranking e-books, which according to Mashable are expected to top a billion dollars in sales this year. One of the nation’s top booksellers, Amazon, said earlier this year that e-book sales have outpaced hardcover books, and that they’re expected to outsell paperbacks by the end of 2011.

‘New York Times’ to add e-book best-seller list is a post from: The Inquisitr

It might only be the 158,221st best-selling Kindle e-book on Amazon but the fact that it is a book titled The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure has created a growing firestorm on blogs and Twitter.

The reason apparently that the e-book has slipped in under the radar apparently has to do with the way Amazon handles submissions to their self-published e-books for the Kindle.

According to Amazon though as they stated in an email to a commenter on another blog they have to take into consideration things like people’s freedom of choice as well as worrying about the implications of censorship.

“Let me assure you that Amazon.com does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts; we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.”

“Amazon.com believes it is censorship not to sell certain titles because we believe their message is objectionable.”

Here is a screencap, courtesy of the team at The Next Web, of the page where the e-book is listed for sale on Amazon:

I have a strong feeling that the firestorm has only just started.

Amazon cites ‘individual choice’ in keeping a self-published book for pedophiles in its listing is a post from: The Inquisitr

According to Amazon, the newer, stripped down Kindle selling for $139 is outperforming previous units sales-wise, but the giant online retailer stopped short of offering numbers to illustrate exactly how well the new device is selling.

This iteration of the Kindle’s got some added bullet points, but the $139 wi-fi only price point is probably the biggest factor in Kindle’s claimed sales dominance. In addition to a being easier on your wallet, the new Kindle’s got higher contrast (stated 50% better than “any other e-reader”), glareless reading, storage doubled from 2GB to 4GB, and a month of battery life without wi-fi usage, up to three weeks with wireless. Amazon also claims less noisy page turning (was this a problem?), enhanced PDF functionality, and passage sharing with built-in Twitter and Facebook functionality. (The highlighted passage sharing shows up on my iPhone Kindle app to a degree, and it is quite cool to see which phrasing people think is worth pointing out or saving.) Oh also, it uh, never gets hot. Like a laptop or anything. So there’s that.

Amazon has always remained tight-lipped on Kindle sales figures, so the lack of data is not entirely unexpected. New Kindles started shipping two says ahead of schedule, on Wednesday, so many Amazon Prime members will probably be receiving theirs in the mail tomorrow. In today’s release about the sales non-figures, the online superstore reverted to their habit of quantifying Amazon sales to Amazon sales for absolutely zero clarification on anything:

…in the four weeks since the introduction of the new Kindle and Kindle 3G, customers ordered more Kindles on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk combined than any other product, continuing Kindle’s over two-year run as the bestselling product across all the products sold on Amazon.com. The new Kindles started shipping to customers today–two days earlier than previously announced.

Have you caved in since the price cut and jumped on the e-book bandwagon?

Amazon says new Kindles outselling previous version, doesn’t offer numbers is a post from: The Inquisitr

Word out today is that Barnes & Noble will be starting to sell a WiFi enabled version of their Nook e-reader. The price on their site says that the WiFi version will be available for$149.00 and as an extra bonus they are going to be dropping the price of the 3G version from its original $259.00 sticker price a new price of $199.00.

There has also been a firmware update, 1.4, that will enable the Nook to use AT&T WiFi hot spots for free.

The Nook gets WiFi and a low price is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you’ve got a Kindle or Kindle DX, your device is going to get a bit more social come late May.

At the top of the interest list for new Kindle features in Kindle Version 2.5 include connectivity to social networking sites, allowing you to share passages and quotes with contacts on Facebook and Twitter. User consensus is also coming to the Kindle in the way of highlighted passages from the Kindle community indicating which passages fellow readers found to be the most interesting.

Not all the new features are geared toward sharing, though- the update will also allow you to finally password protect your Kindle so if someone picks it up, they won’t find out you’re addicted to paranormal romance novels. Also being added is the ability to organize books into collections, a feature that will come in handy for those with a vast collection of e-books or a touch of OCD. And if reading electronically is killing your eyes, the Kindle is also getting two new, larger fonts and increased font “sharpness.”

Amazon says the update will automatically install on Kindles in batches, and users don’t have to take any additional steps to get to the new features.

Late May Kindle 2.5 update includes Twitter, Facebook, content options is a post from: The Inquisitr

We totally understand that children love their pop-up books, but is it really necessary for our e-Books to go the way of Hollywood movies? According to Gizmodo that’s the plan and it could be arriving sooner rather than later.

3D e-Books will work much in the same fashion as 3D movies, by requiring special glasses. At this point South Korean scientists have developed books that require users to tilt the books in order to operate properly, which is rather quite annoying.

Kim Sang-cheol of  South Korea’s Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology  says that “it will take a while to market this technology to the general public.” If their technology doesn’t end up on e-Books it could still find use in medical equipment and on various Smartphone and Tablet devices. [Reuters]

3D Ebooks Could Arrives In A Few Years…Give Us A Break! 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

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

E-Readers are slowly becoming a regular part of out collection of tech gadgets with Amazon’s Kindle the current leader of the pack. That could change however as ASUS has plans to push out the cheapest e-book reader on the market, and a dual screen version at that.

From what ASUS president Jerry Shen is reported to have told the guys at engadget the Eee Reader will be the cheapest e-book reader with a possible price of $163.00. There will of course be a higher end model with possible extras like inbuilt 3G, a web browser and expandable storage. The real killer here though could be the dual screen forma factor

The dual screen form factor would enable users to read books as books were intended to be read, or they could use the secondary panel to surf the web, type on a virtual keyboard or whatever else ASUS dreams up.

Source: engadget – ASUS planning dual screen Eee Reader: world’s cheapest e-book reader

Look out Kindle, ASUS dual screen Eee Reader coming our way 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

Right now when people talk about e-books most everyone thinks of Amazon and its Kindle e-book reader. It is a market than a growing number of companies are wanting to get a foothold in and hopefully take away some of Amazon’s business in the process. At the same time companies like Sony and Barnes & Noble are having to deal with a growing dissatisfaction among consumers over the fact that all these e-books are coming with varying degrees of DRM (Digital Rights Management) wrapped around their purchases.

Consumer upset came to a head recently over Amazon’s deletion of two of George Orwell’s books from people’s Kindles without any notification or warning. It doesn’t help that e-books bought at Amazon can only be read on the Kindle or Amazon’s iPhone app. Now while Amazon doesn’t look to be changing its policy about its DRM restrictions Sony, manufacturer of the Reader e-book device, has decided to move away from its own proprietary DRM restrictions and adopt the open e-book standard called ePub.

“There is going to be a proliferation of different reading devices, with different features and capabilities and prices for a different set of consumer requirements,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit. “If people are going to this e-book shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores, and not just be required to shop at one store.”

Source: New York Times :: Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books

Now before we all start jumping up and down yelling hallelujah Sony might be dropping it’s own method DRM but it doesn’t mean that they are going to be giving up on using some method of DRMing their e-books. They have decided that going forward that they will be using the more widely supported Adobe Content Server 4.

As Paul Sweeting at GigaOM pointed out this has nothing to do with the consumer; although it does make for good PR, but more to do with control of a platform

[….] Amazon’s e-book ambitions go beyond simply selling a lot of Kindle devices. Taking a page from Apple’s iTunes playbook, its goal is to establish Kindle as the dominant e-book publishing and distribution platform. And as Apple has amply demonstrated, when you control the platform, you control the value chain, which means you reap a disproportionate share of the value that’s exchanged.

And the best way to maintain control over a platform — again, per Apple — is through the use of proprietary DRM. Like Amazon’s Kindle DRM, the copy protection at the heart of the Content Server platform is proprietary, in that Adobe owns it. Unlike Amazon, however, Adobe’s standard is openly licensable by others. While that still leave Adobe in an enviable position — able to collect licensing fees from both ends of the value chain — it’s clearly a more friendly environment for publishers and consumers than Amazon’s walled-garden approach — and may be publishers’ best bet to avoid getting trapped by Amazon the way the record companies were by Apple.

So while Sony maybe congratulated on its willingness to accept an open standard for the e-books themselves let’s not get to carried away because after all they aren’t doing this out of the goodness of t heir hearts.

The freeing of e-books, well sort of is a post from: The Inquisitr

Today, Google announced plans to launch an e-book service by the end of the year, in direct competition with Amazon’s Kindle.

Speculation over the service is hinging on two key differences. While Kindle titles hover around $9.99 for most titles, Google indicated a more open-ended pricing policy, allowing publishers to charge a higher rate and creating some rumbles about driving up the general price of e-books.

The other very large difference is that Google wants to eliminate the necessity for an expensive, one-function piece of equipment, allowing consumers to access their purchases on any web-enabled device. Netbooks, smartphones, home computers and digital readers will be able to access content, and consumers will be able to- get this- move the books they’ve legally purchased from device to device just because they feel like it! (Kindle purchases are only viewable on the pricey Kindle device, iPhones and the iPod Touch.)

Amazon currently offers around 280,000 titles in the Kindle Store. Google has already digitized about seven million books.

Two men enter, one man leaves: Google promises e-book service by end of 2009 is a post from: The Inquisitr

Personally I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Kindle as it is just another of the many US centric products on the market but I ran across a rather interesting stat concerning this e-book reader from Amazon. It would appear that approximately 70% of the people that have forked out the outrageous amount of money Amazon wants for the Kindle are 40 and over.

Granted it is an unscientific poll as the results were derived from someone pulling the numbers out of a comment thread of a previous post by Dave Carnoy at the Crave blog

Back in March, I did a post titled, "What’s the average age of Kindle owners?" I cited a thread in Amazon.com’s forums discussing Kindle owners’ ages.

Well, I have a little follow-up on the whole issue. Apparently, someone went ahead and tabulated 700 of the responses in that Amazon thread (that represents about 75 percent of all the posts) and broke out the numbers. Here they are:

• 0 – 19: 5%
• 20 – 29: 10%
• 30 – 39: 15%
• 40 – 49: 19.5%
• 50 – 59: 23%
• 60 – 69: 19.5%
• 70 – 79: 6%
• 80+: 2%

We can’t call this the most scientific poll ever taken, but it’s probably a good indicator of the Kindle’s age demographic. If you add it all up, over half the owners are over 50 and 70 percent are over 40.

His post did raise one point that I hadn’t honestly thought when it came to the popularity of the Kindle among older users. The fact that one can increase the font size and that for someone with arthritis the Kindle is a lot easier to hold for long periods of time than large books. That’s something I’ll have to keep in mind for my wife, who suffers badly from rheumatoid arthritis, if Amazon ever decides to let the rest of the world buy the damn thing.

An interesting Kindle stat is a post from: The Inquisitr