05:01 PM by Jessica Lares in Amazon Kindle | Amazon Fire

From the Amazon Silk blog:

http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2013...as-a-new-look/

Since our last major release back in September 2012, the Amazon Silk team has been working hard to make the browser faster and more responsive. A lot of our improvements have happened under the hood, so you may not have noticed the last few software updates. But with our latest release, the browser has a new look!

Based on feedback from Kindle Fire owners, we redesigned the user interface to make the browser easier and more intuitive to use. Among the changes, you’ll find a new tutorial, redesigned tabs, improved browser controls, simpler navigation options, and easier access to our Reading View feature. We’ve also published a Silk Developer Guide to accompany the release.

Our goal with the Silk redesign is to provide a faster, more fluid, and more elegant browsing experience to help customers discover and rediscover the content that matters to them.

Some screenshots:

Looks great! I applaud the detail that they're applying to making the browser much more intuitive.

04:47 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

E L James, the author of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, has just topped Forbes' list of top-selling authors. She raked in $95 million from sales of her kinky erotic trilogy, which sold more than 70 million copies in 2012.

Originally a "Twilight" tribute titled "Master of the Universe," "Fifty Shades of Grey" vaulted its author from fan-fiction websites straight to the top of every best-seller list. The e-book format was a key factor, giving readers an easy way to purchase the sex-filled sequels -- and a discreet way to read them in public.

I read this story, and I feel a sense of deja vu... where I have read about this….. ah, I know, right here. So it's true: sex sells.

Anyhow, here's the list of Forbes' top-earning authors, with some of their best-selling novels:

1. E.L. James, "50 Shades of Grey" — $95 million
2. James Patterson, "Maximum Ride," "Witch & Wizard" — $91 million
3. Suzanne Collins, "Hunger Games" — $55 million
4. Bill O'Reilly, "Killing Lincoln," "Killing Kennedy" — $28 million
5. Danielle Steel, "The Sins of the Mother" — $26 million
6. Jeff Kinney, "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," "The Third Wheel" — $24 million
7. Janet Evanovich, Stephanie Plum detective novels — $24 million
8. Nora Roberts, "Thankless in Death," "Dark Witch" — $23 million
9. Dan Brown, "Inferno," "The Da Vinci Code" — $22 million
10. Stephen King, "Under the Dome," "The Shining" — $20 million
11. Dean Koontz, "Watchers", "Odd Thomas" — $20 million
12. John Grisham, "The Racketeer", "The Litigators" — $18 million
13. David Baldacci, "The Forgotten", "Zero Day"— $15 million
14. Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson fantasy series — $14 million
15. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter series — $13 million
16. George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones series — $12 million

04:40 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Bufo Calvin from the I Love My Kindle blog analyzed the currently top 100 selling e-books in the Kindle store and made an interesting observation:

Nineteen of the most popular books in the Kindle store have been released without DRM.

Just based on my quick survey in putting this together, it tended to be independents (of course…only Tor, among the big publishers, is publishing without DRM), and they tended to be “progressive” in other ways (allowing lending, not blocking text-to-speech access). [...]

Indies may be using this to give themselves a competitive advantage over tradpubs (traditional publishers)…and they may simply be trying to extend their reach by selling in the Kindle store to people who don’t use Kindles (but do need to be somewhat sophisticated in terms of technology).

An increasing number of e-book vendors have discovered the added value in selling books DRM-free. Perhaps all it would take is one big vendor - Amazon perhaps? - to decide to go DRM-free to make DRM go away for all and forever.

08:32 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

TorrentFreak has published a report stating that Dutch vendors who sell watermarked e-books are now required to share identifying information of suspected pirates with the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

The new digital distribution deal for eBook merchants will see them ‘watermark’ unique codes into the digital eBooks they sell which will identify a specific transaction number. These transaction numbers will be linked directly to a specific customer account. [...]

The agreement will see vendors connected to the eBoekhuis platform share previously-private customer data directly with copyright holders and anti-piracy group BREIN. This means that should digital books turn up on BitTorrent networks or Usenet for example, with a minimum of fuss BREIN will be able to match the embedded watermarks with the customer who bought them.

Digital watermarks are one of the technologies being touted as a means to deter piracy of digital content. The issue with watermarks is that they're subject to abuses that could invade an innocent consumer's privacy or, worse, expose him to lawsuits for infringements he did not commit.

In a blog entry, Kurt Roeckx, who runs the Dutch speaking e-book store E-webshops, shares his doubt about the legality of working hand in hand with the anti-piracy group.

But now we got a new contract that states that we must directly give information about the buyer if some anti-piracy agency (BREIN) finds an e-book file online. We must keep the information about the buyer for minimum of 2 years and maximum of 5 years. And if we don't sign the contract we won't be allowed to sell e-books with watermark anymore.

So this means that they want to bypass the normal judicial system, and probably contact those buyers they accuse of piracy directly. I questioned that this was legal. They say that it is legal according to the Dutch privacy law, but I have a hard time interpreting any of the options in article 8 as that we can give that information without the explicit consent of the person.

You can read his full blog entry here.

Image: peasap/Flickr

11:47 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

PDF files are everywhere, and there are quite a number of apps that are designed to make it easy to read and annotate them on your mobile devices. ezPDF Reader does an admirable job in this regard (*), and it's currently having a back-to-school deal which nabs a 50% discount off the regular price.

Links: iOS and Android.

(*) ratings look somewhat more favorable for the Android edition than for iOS.

04:13 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Readers | Android Devices

Time to snag a few more features with Amazon's Kindle for Android app. The latest update delivers two notable additions. First, you have more options for sorting the items in your library, and second, you can now display the time left to finish reading the current chapter or the entire book.

What's New:

• Library sorting by recent, title or author
• Time left in chapter and book
• Sync and stability improvements

Get your download on at the source link here.

Related: Android Kindle 4.1 breaks further page syncing?

03:39 AM by 6charlong in E-Book General | General Discussions

First, a word of apology. You see Ray Bradbury’s works finally came out in eBook format, that’s One. Two, Amazon, and only Amazon, had an “Opening Day” sort of sale on Ray Bradbury books: $1.99. Obviously since all I have this week is $2.39, my problem was: which one. (I bought Something Wicked This Way Comes.)

But the point of this post is that having bought it at Amazon I didn’t have it on my Kobo Aura, and when I opened up the Paperwhite to download my new book I received an almost palpable shock. I had set my beloved Aura aside for what? Apparently I’d forgotten how small a six-inch screen actually is. Was it worth saving $4 and change to read a favored book on this cramped screen?

Then I realized that the race is on. Surely Amazon has to answer the Aura’s challenge. They always announce the next model in late summer, so it should be soon. I think they will have to offer a bigger eInk screen, something that can even display newspaper pages for example--something with better formatting. Now I can’t wait to discover what Amazon will do.

05:21 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

It's not a secret that Amazon keeps sales figures for its Kindle line of tablets, well, a secret. Fortunately, some analyst from Morgan Stanley got his crystal ball out of its magic cupboard to give us some estimates how well Amazon's Kindle business is really doing. AllThingsD reports:

In a report released last week, Morgan Stanley said it estimates that Amazon will sell $4.5 billion worth of Kindle e-readers and tablets this year, up 26 percent from 2012.

Growth will slow next year, when the business will do $5 billion in sales, Morgan Stanley estimates, followed by similarly modest growth in 2015, when Amazon will do an estimated $5.5 billion in Kindle sales.

$5.5 billion a big number, but not that big if you keep in mind that, in 2012, Amazon's total revenue was a whopping $61 billion, with forecasts for 2013 somewhere between $73 and $76 billion.

And e-books? Again, the shiny crystal ball has the answer:

Morgan Stanley estimates that Amazon will do $3.8 billion in digital media revenue this year, and that the business will generate more revenue than device sales next year - with an estimated $5.7 billion in revenue.

In total, Morgan Stanley estimates that the Kindle ecosystem - which also includes advertising revenue of $192 million - will account for 11 percent of the company’s total revenue this year, but 23 percent of its operating profit.

[image by anurag agnihotri via Flickr]