12:43 PM by Lin2412 in E-Book General | News

iBooks has averaged one million new customers every week since mid-September.

Keith Moerer, the director of iBooks at Apple, revealed that statistic in a rare public appearance at the Digital Book World conference in New York City on Thursday. It’s startling to anyone who dismisses Apple as an also-ran in the ebook market and might encourage publishers and authors who haven’t focused on the platform to begin doing so.

...Another difference between the iBooks and Amazon is that Apple doesn’t charge publishers to promote their books on its site. “One hundred percent of our merchandising is editorially focused. We accept no co-op payments, no pay for placement,” Moerer said

(Original Article From Gigaom)
(related)

03:58 PM by pdurrant in E-Book General | News

Another announcement from Scribd of a big publisher signing up with them. After Houghton Mifflin Harcourt they now also have Macmillan.

See the announcement on their blog.

But it's not Macmillan's entire catalogue. Only 'more than a thousand'.

03:55 PM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

From the Boston Globe:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/...pOJ/story.html

The campus bookstore, a seeming anachronism in the digital age, will soon become history at the University of Massachusetts.

Starting next fall, students at the flagship Amherst campus will buy almost all textbooks from Amazon.com. The online retail giant has struck a deal with UMass to replace an on-campus “textbook annex” run by Follett Corp. with a smaller Amazon distribution center.

UMass officials hope the arrangement will save students money.

“We really recognize that textbooks and course materials are a major expense for students, and those have continued to go up over time,” said Ed Blaguszewski, UMass spokesman. “This is about convenience and saving money for students.”

Amazon told UMass that it could save students an average of 31 percent, or $380 annually, compared with prices at the old store.

The Amazon system will offer students access to digital textbooks and, for old-fashioned ink-and-paper texts, free one-day delivery to addresses on campus and apartments in nearby towns.

Students can also pick up texts, ordered online, at an Amazon-staffed storefront in the campus center that’s set to open in June.

The company said it is negotiating similar contracts with a number of other universities and colleges.

“Many schools are feeling pressure to control the cost of education, and textbooks contribute to that,” said Ripley MacDonald, Amazon’s director of student programs. “Many are also seeing revenues in their bookstores flat at best, or even going backward, so they’re looking at ways to stem that trend. We’re trying to reinvent the bookstore experience.”

More at the source.

11:15 PM by Marseille in E-Book Readers | Android Devices

You may have heard of Project Ara, Google ATAP's modular phone. It went through two developer's conferences and two tech spirals last year in a surprisingly open development process. A lot of what we got to see usually happens behind closed doors. This month will be the third conference, and Google wants to sell its first devices this year, though it would be a 'limited market pilot' at first.

There are long form articles posted in the top item in this FAQ: http://www.projectara.com/faq/ Some are a bit old (fortune is the newest in August), but they all do a good job of explaining what Ara is and how it came to be. Basically you can build your own phone and pick your own processor, storage options, battery capacity, cameras and peripherals, and upgrade any one without having to upgrade the entire device. Some modules are hot swappable, so you can flip in, for example, a fully charged battery module to replace a drained one on the go (no power down needed). Screens are also modules, and thus the reason for this post.

Ara probably won't succeed without market demand. Google has big partners unlike a lot of modular programs out there you might hear about. Toshiba, NVIDIA, Marvell, Rockchip, Quanta, etc are all on board, and that's important. And they've also sought to develop smaller partners worldwide with these development conferences. But I don't see marketing budgets like Samsung's or Apple's ever coming to bear here. This will be more democratic. It will succeed or fail depending on demand from users. Diversity of modules may depend on how active users are. This post is for anyone who might want to build, not just a phone, but any mobile device, to their own tastes.

As we're all readers here, I'm asking you to tweet at E Ink and ask them to support @ProjectAra so we can all build our own eReaders, independent of any one store front. So we can use our own readerware, news readers, browsers. So we can keep audiobooks, podcasts and music on board and do TTS. So we can choose a size of eReader that suits us. So we can choose our own battery capacity or make our dedicated eReader a little less dedicated and more multiuse if we so please.

If you're interested, please tweet to E Ink at https://twitter.com/EInk that you want them to make an eink screen for @ProjectAra and post below to let me know if you do. Feel free to ask questions here if you're curious about Ara.

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

If you've been absent and are keen to find out what MobileRead was up to this week, check out the links below:

E-Book General - News

• Kindle sales have 'disappeared', says UK's largest book retailer

07:14 AM by Lin2412 in E-Book General | News

Amazon launched the Kindle, which is now in its seventh generation, in 2007. Sales peaked in 2011 at around 13.44m

Waterstones has admitted that sales of Amazon's Kindle ebook reader had "disappeared" after seeing higher demand for physical books.

The UK's largest book retailing chain, which teamed up with Amazon in 2012 to sell the Kindle in its stores, saw sales of physical books rise 5pc in December, at the expense of the popular e-reader.

Kindle sales had “disappeared to all intents and purposes”, Waterstones said.
James Daunt, chief executive, told the Financial Times that the resurgence in popularity of hardback and paperback books was due to Waterstones refurbishing some of its 290 shops.

Head office also handed more control over what stores sold to the managers running them, so they could cater their stock to local tastes.

Amazon launched the Kindle, which is now in its seventh generation, in 2007. Sales peaked in 2011 at around 13.44m, accoding to Forbes. That figure fell to 9.7m in 2012, with sales flat the following year. It is estimated that Amazon has sold around 30m Kindles in total.

At the same time, British consumers spent £2.2bn on print in 2013, compared with just £300m on ebooks, according to Nielsen.

US book giant Barnes & Noble is looking to spin off its Nook ereader business, which is estimated to be losing $70m a year. Meanwhile, core sales, excluding Nook, rose 5pc in the most recent quarter.

(original article)

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Once again, our weekly roundup of highlights from the past seven days of MobileRead:

E-Book General - News

• E-readers 'damage sleep and health,' doctors warn

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• January 2015 VOTE

07:18 AM by Halk in E-Book General | News

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30574260

The article, however is not talking about electronic readers it's talking about using a tablet instead of an electronic reader.

It's a very badly written article.

"The researchers said other e-readers such as the Nook and Kindle Fire produced similar wavelengths of light and would have the same impact."

Some Nooks do not produce similar wavelengths of light.