01:02 PM by Wetdogeared in E-Book General | News

A few news snippets from MediaBistro's eBook Summit. More publishers bashing Amazon, with profitability for publishers being threatened. Plus, adverts may be coming to an eBook near you.

Amazon's $9.99 eBook Price Point Attacked as "Predatory Pricing" From: mediabistro.com (blog)

Bob Livolski, founder, Books on Board:
"It's an attack on literature so Amazon can control the industry."

@ eBook Summit: Advertising Is Coming To E-Books From: paidContent.org

- the $9.99 standard price for a digitized title—as established by the space’s leader, Amazon —is not enough to support content creation and distribution.

Fuchsberg, the president of Skiff:
“If e-books are where more consumers are spending their time, ads will inevitably follow."

Growing e-book industry discusses challenges at MediaBistro event From: DM News - Dianna Dilworth

To address this issue, Amazon has tried to push consumer adoption by setting the industry's competitive price point for e-books at $9.99 each. But publishers are concerned that this cost is not profitable and runs the risk of hurting the choice of books that will be able to be published.

12:42 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

MobileRead's resident Hanlin dev community (his name is Leo) just released a second application for the Hanlin V3 and clones. It's a reader program (and the required data files) for Wikipedia. You can fid screenshots and more information here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65834

In case you're interested, his first program for the Hanlin V3 is a star map. You can find it here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...262#post624262

If you want to find other programs he's released, his home page is here:
http://www.leobueno.net/

12:27 PM by mtravellerh in E-Book Readers | PocketBook

Our member SciFiFan again managed to create a marvelous little custom version of FBReader. The existing version of FBreader on the Pocketbook 360 is a couple generations out of date, and this custom version adds a few tweaks that improve usability. Not only does it feature page breaks before chapter beginnings (in ePub), but it also uses the motion sensor as a trigger for page turns. I don't know how he does that exactly, but he has created a mode where the automatic 360° mode is reduced to 180° up or down, right or left and a wrist movement turns pages, where a turn to the right turns a page back, while a wrist movement to the left moves a page forward! It works fine!

You should be aware that the pagebreak before the chapter counts as one paragraph. This leads to the fact that jumping back to your original reading place might be slightly erroneous the first time (you might have to move a page forward in later chapters)

It's here

http://code.google.com/p/fbreader-po...76_fbreader180

Just paste it in your system/bin! If you don't like it, just remove it from there! Don't forget to give SFF some HUGE K!

NB: I changed the link to a new version featuring a more sensible g-sensor and allowing to export external links!

12:06 PM by advocate2 in E-Book Readers | Sony Reader

From Today's Wall Street Journal:

Sony announced Thursday morning that it will sell subscriptions to the digital edition of the Journal as well as a daily summary of news events available only to owners of the Sony device. In addition, users will be able to subscribe to a daily summary of news stories and columns from MarketWatch.com, which like the Journal is owned by Dow Jones & Co.

The Journal summary will cost $5 a month on top of the $14.99 monthly charge for the digital edition of the paper, while a subscription to the MarketWatch product will cost $10.99 a month.

The article is very interesting, but I don't know if you can read it without a subscription.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000..._LEFTWhatsNews

09:41 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

A friend of mine just sent me an email he got from Amazon. He wanted to remain anonymous, so I can't tell you who. But I will vouch for him. He isn't sure how many ebooks he's returned, but he estimated the total to be around 30. I hope that's not true; in absolute terms that's a pretty low number. A fair number of people are going to be getting this email at some point.

Here is the text of the email:

Hello from Amazon.com.

We're writing regarding your request of Refunds.

Unfortunately, the number of issues you have sustained with your Kindle Store orders has led us to believe that there might be a larger issue. Since it appears that many of your orders have been accidentally purchased, we ask that you contact Customer Service for troubleshooting in an effort to avoid these issues in the future.

Effective immediately, we are unable to compensate you for any additional issues with your Kindle Store orders.

Thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,

Account Specialist
Amazon.com

05:16 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Borders just announced a partnership with Kobo Books (formerly Shortcovers) to open a Borders branded ebook store.

Borders Group, Inc. (NYSE: BGP) today announced a strategic investment and commercial partnership with Kobo, Inc., a global eReading service that is the newly named spin-off of Toronto-based Indigo Books & Music Inc.'s Shortcovers digital reading initiative. Through the partnership, Borders will launch a new eBook store integrated into Borders.com and powered by Kobo. In addition, Kobo will power a Borders-branded eBook store for multiple mobile devices. Sales through these Borders-branded eBook stores will be booked by Borders. Kobo's mobile applications are device neutral, which will enable consumers to purchase eBooks from Borders on popular smartphones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Pre and Android, as well as other devices. Borders and Kobo plan to launch these new services within the second quarter of 2010.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix....ews&id=1366236

********

Amazon-0, everyone not Amazon +1

Okay, that's a bit simplistic, but I'm pleased to see the one, the ebook market is getting crowded; and two, most all the new stores only sell Epub. Each new store is 1 more blow against vendor lock in, and 1 more blow in favor of universal compatibility.

05:08 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Ta-ta-ta-taaaaaa..... and the winners are.....

We are very happy to hereby announce the winners of MobileRead’s winter contest 2009. We have received 138 valid entries, among which we selected three main winners and 15 follow-up winners in a random drawing.

Congrats to the winners of our main prize – poshm, FlorenceArt and gustav011 – who now each have the choice between a shiny new Pocketbook 360° or a PocketBook 301+ Comfort. We’re absolutely convinced that you’ll have a fantastic time reading fun stories on your new devices! Please let us know how you like them.

Congrats also to our 15 follow-up winners. Oliver Twist brings each of you a $30 eBook voucher!

The e-book vouchers got to: LazyScot, Jellby, Svenni, BlueMonkey, shortncuddlyam, der-Matt, Latinandgreek, Acolsandra, Toertchn, Gfhuertac, maggie*, Mosherix, Max, WDE, Gaurnim.

We would like to send a big thank you to all contestants! You were restlessly searching for letters, never too tired to find new and “interesting” ways to make your searches more efficient. In other words: We never underestimated your creativity and you kept us real busy!

Thanks also to the sponsor of our main prizes: PocketBook!

PS: If you are not amongst the winners today - please don’t be disappointed! We’ll have plenty of more contests in the future, so stick close.

04:23 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

You probably remember the letter sent by Random House charmain Markus Dohle on Friday. He informed agents that the existing contracts with RH granted ebook rights by default even where digital rights are not mentioned.

The Author's Guild has posted a response to Mr. Dohle's letter. They take the position that he is 100% wrong, and the evidence weighs heavily in their favor.

The misunderstandings reside entirely with Random House. Random House quite famously changed its standard contract to include e-book rights in 1994. (We remember it well -- Random House tried to secure these rights for royalties of 5% of net proceeds, a pittance. We called it a "Land Grab on the Electronic Frontier" in our press release headline.) Random House felt the need to change its contract, quite plainly, because its authors did not grant those rights to it under Random House's standard contracts prior to 1994.

A fundamental principle of book contracts is that the grant of rights is limited. Publishers acquire only the rights that they bargain for; authors retain rights they have not expressly granted to publishers. E-book rights, under older book contracts, were retained by the authors.

There's no need to take our word for this, however. A federal court in 2001 examined this precise matter in Random House v. Rosetta Books. Judge Stein of the Southern District of New York was unequivocal in his 10-page decision: authors did not grant publishers the e-book rights in the old book contracts at issue. Judge Stein specifically dismissed notions, raised by Mr. Dohle in his letter to agents, that the non-compete clauses of these old contracts in some manner acted to grant Random House electronic rights to the works, saying that this "reasoning turns the analysis on its head." The court pointed out that the license of rights comes solely from the contract's grant language, not from the non-compete clause, and that non-competition clauses, to be enforceable, have to be narrowly construed. Using the non-compete clause to secure future rights is unsustainable. An appellate court affirmed Judge Stein's decision.

from:
http://authorsguild.org/advocacy/art...ve-rights.html