06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

It's time again for our roundup on all the stuff we posted on our frontpage this past week.

E-Book General - News

• Is Sony readying the PRS-T3? PRS-T2 on sale for $99
• Mysterious Samsung Daynote - destined to challenge Amazon?
• Kindle Fire HD on sale for $159
• NPR - E-Books Strain Relations Between Libraries, Publishing Houses
• Bezos buys Washington Post. Really.
• Adobe Digital Editions 2.0.1 is out
• Android E Ink e-reader "Crema Shine" launches in Korea
• Amazon, Kobo and Sony request e-readers be exempt from accessibility laws
• Amazon could be working on next-gen e-paper display
• OverDrive Media Console with new Gui and Bookmark Sync
• Spoiled Kindle experience: too much sloppy content
• Barbara Mertz died age 85
• Google's cure to spinal problems: textbooks in Play store unveiled (US only)
• Amazon trying to unlock Russian book market
• Researchers stack E Ink paper like real paper (video)
• Indie bookstores resurgent
• calibre V0.9.43 released
• Next-gen Kindle Fire specs revealed (yes, the "baby" Fire)
• DOJ reiterates need for Apple punishments; gets support from Kobo

E-Book General - General Discussions

• Disruption through online book sales - is Germany next?
• Chain-reading e-books? You could be an e-book addict
• kobobooks.com doesn't give format anymore?
• 10 reasons why "real" books are better than e-books, supposedly
• Publishers object to DOJ proposal; it would punish them rather than Apple

E-Book General - Deals, Freebies, and Resources (No Self-Promotion)

• NOOK HD+ 16GB for $120, refurbished
• 50% off on any Packt e-book (exp. 08/15)

E-Book General - Writers' Corner

• Library skips publisher, goes directly to author

E-Book Readers - Amazon Kindle

• Kindle DX on sale for $239. Still worth it?
• Kindlets development: Absolute beginner's guide

E-Book Readers - Apple Devices

• Adobe Reader 11 for iOS lets you convert PDFs, if you pay for it
• iBooks app in latest OS X Mavericks developer preview!

E-Book Readers - Barnes & Noble NOOK

• Nook HD and HD+ now officially supported by CyanogenMod

E-Book Readers - Kobo Reader

• Kobo Firmware 2.8.1: pass or fail? (poll)

E-Book Software - Sigil

• Sigil V0.7.3 released

Miscellaneous - Lounge

• Aussies launch anti-CAPTCHA petition. Is it time to kill CAPTCHAs?

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• Love Facebook and Mobileread? We need you!

03:30 PM by TadW in E-Book General | News

After leaked specs of the next-gen Kindle Fire HD, here are the leaked specs of the non-HD, entry-level variant aka the baby Fire, as I like to call it.

• CPU: 1.5GHz dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4 4470 processor with PowerVR SGX544 graphics
• Screen: 1,280 x 800 pixels
• RAM: 1GB
• Android: 4.2.2 JB

Source: BGR. They further report:

The new entry-level Kindle Fire might not be as impressive as Amazon’s next-generation Kindle Fire HD lineup, but it packs significantly more punch than the current base model and our sources say that Amazon will likely offer it at the same price point: just $159 for the 8GB version. Amazon will also offer two new versions of the tablet, we’re told — one with 16GB of storage and one with 32GB — though pricing is unknown at this point.

Link to the report: http://bgr.com/2013/08/09/amazon-kin...ecs-exclusive/

03:20 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

For those of you who have spent the last few days in an isolation chamber, the DOJ is proposing an injunction prohibiting Apple from making pricing deals for five years and allowing e-book app vendors to link to their own stores for two years. Meanwhile, the five publishers who had previously settled in the e-book pricing case, ganged up once again, this time with a legal brief opposing the proposed penalties against Apple. Though this might have backfired a little. The Verge reports:

One thing's clear: the DoJ isn't pleased to see the publishing industry again uniting so soon after the major case. "There is reason to believe the publisher defendants may be positioning themselves to pick things back up where they left off as soon as their two-year clocks run," the letter says. This in and of itself justifies Apple's five-year penalty, which Buterman says will "ensure that Apple (and hopefully other retailers) can discount ebooks and compete on retail price for as long as possible."

Kobo shows that it could have been done differently. As Publishers Weekly notes today:

Meanwhile, the DoJ got some support for its proposed final order, in the form of Amicus briefs from Kobo, and from The Consumer Federation of America.

Notably, Kobo’s brief in support of the DoJ puts it odds with its retail partner—the American Booksellers Association, through which Kobo facilitates e-book sales. [...]

In its brief, however, Kobo says the DoJ injunction would help Kobo and the indies—especially through the requirement that Apple allow e-book retailers to link to their own e-bookstores for two years without paying a commission to Apple on sales.

Which is not really a surprise given that Kobo has invested quite some time and money lately in renovating their online book store. The PW article cites some convincing numbers showing how Kobo suffered from plummeted sales after Apple introduced its in-app store rules.

01:05 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

A new version of calibre, the popular e-book library management software, has been released. 0.9.43 adds the following new features and fixes:

New Features

• TXT Input: Allow using various markdown extensions for more features when converting markdown formatted txt files. See http://pythonhosted.org/Markdown/extensions/index.html for details.
• Sending by email: Allow sending by email to an arbitrary combination of email address. Access it via the 'Select recipients' menu entry in the Email To menu.
• A new 'Sort By' action for the right click menu. This allows sorting on all columns in the library, not just the visible columns. To use it go to Preferences->Toolbars and add it to 'The context menu for books in the calibre library'
• Allow adding images into the comments field, by clicking on the insert link button in the comments editor in the edit metadata dialog.
• Allow skipping the confirm bulk reconvert dialog
• EPUB Input: If the EPUB file identifies an actual cover image in addition to the titlepage html file, use the cover image instead of rendering the titlepage. This is faster and has the advantage that an EPUB to EPUB conversion preserves internal cover structure.
• Get Books: Improve searching by removing punctuation from title/authors before matching.

Bug Fixes

• Conversion: Fix empty inline tags that are the second child of a paragraph causing text change location.
• Fix book count in tooltip of choose library button not updating
• Kobo driver: When deleting shelves that have been synced, the Activity entry for the shelf was not being deleted. This left a tile for the shelf on the home screen of the Glo and AuraHD.
• Comments editor: The Insert Link button has no effect until the user clicks inside the comments box, therefore disable it until it is ready, to prevent confusion.
• Get Books: Update various Polish store plugins

New news sources

• Various French news sources by Malah
• La Capital de Rosario by Darko Miletic
• Jot Down by desUbiKado
• Private Eye by Martyn Pritchard

Improved news sources

• The Sunday Times UK and The Times Online
• Telegraph UK
• Le Monde: Edition abonnés
• The Scotsman

Want to know more about calibre? Head over to the Calibre forums.

Related: New calibre database backend - testers needed

08:44 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

No, they never went away, but independent bookstores are in growth mode. As half the book industry has moved to online purchases and ebooks, a good portion of the other half is now shopping indie. CNBC reports:

"Sales from independent bookstores in 2012 were up eight percent over 2011," said Dan Cullen a spokesman for the American Booksellers Association, a nonprofit trade group of independent bookstores.

"We've got people opening new bookstores and people buying into existing ones," he said. Talk of the death of independent bookstores "as a result of the big-box stores was premature at best," he added.

Some interesting numbers:

About one in five books sold last year was an e-book, accounting for $3 billion of the $15 billion in total publishing revenues, according to the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group.

Meanwhile, audio books are going through an explosive period, with sales up 21.8 percent last year from 2011, to $241 million. Amazon bought the biggest maker of audio books, Audible, in 2008 and has the lion's share of the market.

This comes as book sales are in general decline worldwide, with sales in the U.S. down 9.3 percent last year.

Independents hold just 10 percent of the overall book market compared with Barnes & Nobles's 20 percent and Amazon's 29 percent, according to the ABA.

B&N's numbers include *their* online and ebook sales so it sounds as if the Indies are cumulatively the equivalent to B&N's storefronts. Which suggests that lots of smaller stores at more sites *is* a viable strategy for a chain. It certainly seems to work for Half-Price books. (Though I'm not sure I'd count them as indie as the report does. They're family owned but... 116 stores/16 states...)

A trend worth watching.

(image by secretlondon123 via Flickr)

07:54 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

You'd think that in an electronic age, accumulating a stack of paper work is utterly unnecessary, right? Heck no. A group of human computer interaction researchers from Canada have come up with a system dubbed DisplayStacks, which allows you to physically stack a bunch of flexible E Ink displays and make them interact with each other. Still not convinced? Check out the following for a live demonstration.

If you're interested in more details in how this works, you can download the research paper over here (PDF).

07:21 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

As the old Russian proverb goes, "He who does not take risks does not get to drink champagne." In the case of Amazon, the saying may be amended to, "He who does not take risks misses the chance to make a fortune as the world's biggest book seller in the (territory-wise) largest country in the world." Publishing Perspectives has revealed some tantalizing details about Amazon's expansion plans into the Russian book market:

[Amazon] has begun signing contracts with Russia’s largest publishing houses to supply electronic content to its Russian store.

According to Amazon, at the initial stage the company will sell only digital content in Russia, while later will expand to print books. Currently, Russians buy tens of millions of dollars worth of print books and other media from Amazon, though these are ordered from overseas sites (and consequently, an alarmingly high percentage is “lost” in the post). [...]

According to Andrew Cechin, head of commercial projects Ozon.ru, the largest Russian online retailer, delivery of digital media content in Russia will be more profitable for Amazon than would establishing a large-scale logistics operation from scratch.

More at Publishing Perspectives (via Goodereader)

[image by David Dennis via Flickr]

06:29 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Every semester is the same: Students limp back to their dorm rooms with heavy bags full of textbooks and light wallets. Google's entry into the textbook market is a sign of change for the better. Although we haven't seen an official announcement yet (except for this teaser), news is spreading fast that textbooks have arrived in the Google Play store (alas only if you live in the US, so far).

You can purchase textbooks from Play at full price or rent them for six months at up to 80% off, and read them either on your desktop or with the Google Play Books app (available on Android and iOS).

More at Android Police (via Digital Reader).

Related: Google Play Books expanding further in Europe