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Writing, life, and the publishing world from a freelance editor, book consultant, and writer.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'e-books'
The Authors Guild Weighs In
Last Sunday, we talked about Random House claiming e-book rights via contracts signed before e-books came into existence - and heirs fighting that stance. Today, a week later, we’re talking about the Authors Guild post in response to Random Houseâ€...
Last Minute Shopping
If you’ve been thinking of buying an e-reader for yourself or someone else, PC Magazine has a comparison of the different devices. It used to be that there weren’t many choices, but that is changing.Overall, it’s a good comparison. There was on...
Falling Dominoes
I believe there will be a time when e-books will be interactive, have pictures like some of the e-textbooks already have, perhaps even have a way of asking the author questions or visiting their websites (e-readers already have Internet capabilities)...
Heirs Fight for E-Book Rights
As you might have guessed, just about all the publishing news lately has been on e-books or Kirkus Reviews shutting down. We can’t tackle the both today, so I thought I’d give you some interesting news on e-book rights.We’ve said before that e-...
Survey Re: E-Books
All the news every day seems to center on E-books. The Bookseller, on December 2nd, reported on a survey of more than 1,000 book trade professionals prior to The Bookseller’s Digital Conference.Here are some of the results of that survey:The result...
Digital Pirates
Mike Harvey, Technology Correspondent, for The Times Online had an interesting article last week on digital pirates, those who plundered music and films a few years back and who are now going after e-books.In the US, where the Kindle has been availab...
Smashwords Smashes Barriers
Yesterday brought news that Smashwords, Inc., will begin supplying books to the Amazon.com Kindle store. This is good news for authors who have published in e-book form. Smashwords already has agreements with Barnes & Noble, Sony and Shortcovers....
Free-Download Publications
For those who, like me, have never published an e-book or given away a free downloadable publication, the New Jersey Business News has some tips. In the article, they’re primarily talking about those “relatively brief, pamphlet-like "books" distr...
News Wrap-up
Thought I’d do a wrap-up of a few news stories on books that didn’t make it into the weekly blog posts.Here’s one from the New York Times:Macmillan, the publishing company that owns Farrar Straus & Giroux and St. Martin’s Press, has a new...
Another Viewpoint
Okay, we talked last week about the book price war going on between Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target. This week we kick off with another viewpoint. This one from Marion Maneker, who writes for a website called The Big Money who provides articles for The W...
A Big Name Speaks Up
Today, we continue the talk about the price slashing by the big block stores, Wal-Mart, Target and the online store Amazon. Only this time, a big name author weighs in. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Stephen King’s publisher is...
Here Comes Another E-Reader
Can’t these guys just get together and make all their e-readers compatible? Is that too much for the reading public to ask?Barnes & Noble is now unveiling their own electronic reader, the Nook, according to the New York Times.The device feature...
Browsing Online
According to LibreDigital and Internet News, “Online previews of e-books and digital texts lead to more sales -- with romance novels topping the list of the genres most perused online…. After romance comes books for tweens and teenagers, followed...
Surviving Books
One of the big topics at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany this week is online writing and the effect it has on the book publishing industry. According to EarthTimes,The spectre haunting the industry is the discovery that today, everybody is a write...
Paging Apple
It looks like as early as January 2010, Apple may be entering the e-reader scene. They’ve been working on the iTablet -- a lot of that work has been happening behind closed doors. Rumor is they’ve been having secret talks with newspaper and text...
Naughty or Nice?
It’s Christmas! No, you didn’t fall asleep and just wake up from a two and a half month coma. It’s Christmas because Neiman Marcus says so. They said so by releasing their Neiman Marcus’ annual Christmas Book.Scrooge the economy! Take a look ...
Take a Load Off
We talked recently about kids carrying thirty pounds of books in their back packs. To save the backs of our kids, e-books may be the solution. I was reading an article in Tuesday’s NewsOK that says ebooks may be the solution to California’s money...
Book Pirates Afloat
We seem to talk about ebooks more than just about anything else. They just keep making news. It’s either a new e-reader, or low priced or free books being used as marketing enticements, or platforms not being compatible with different readers.Now t...
New Strategies
In the past, we’ve talked about publishers being a bit slow to jump on the e-book wagon. They now seem to be trying to get onboard and looking for new innovations (or re-working old innovations). While surfing around, I found an article in Bussines...
The Enticement
According to the USA TODAY, the latest marketing come-on to sell books is to first give one away. That’s what James Patterson, the brand, is doing. Notice that the USA TODAY calls him a “brand” now that he’s more the front man for the authors...
A Radical Revolution?
I was reading an article in the San Francisco Chronicle online called “Watch Out Publishing Industry, There’s a Radical Revolution on Your Heels” and I thought, Really?Radical?Here are some snippets from the article by Frances Dinkelspiel:When ...
Like Rabbits Multiplying
I swear, new eReaders are popping up daily. Now Sony’s revealed its latest version of its eBook Reader. They’re calling it the Daily Edition. It’ll work via AT&T’s 3G network and will come with built-in free wireless capability. Seems to ...
Good Publishing News (Maybe)
There’s certainly been enough bad news to make writers cry lately, but there may be a sliver of good news on the horizon. The San Francisco Chronicle thinks the forecast may be cautious optimism with a possibility of progress.Just in time for an es...
Kindle and Espresso
I was reading an article in Knowledge@Wharton about the technological evolution taking place in publishing. Not surprisingly, it talks about the Kindle.… while the online-only retailer doesn't release sales figures for the reader itself, its cultur...
Just Say No
According to an August 7th New York Times article, one of the largest entertainment agencies, William Morris Endeavor, is telling its clients to opt out of the Google book settlement.You probably already know about the controversy surrounding Google ...
The Future of Books
This past Sunday, I attended the Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime chapter meeting. The speaker, David Heavener, talked about screenwriting and the film industry. Heavener is an award winning filmmaker and actor. He’s also an speaker and singer/songw...
More E-Reader News
I keep talking about e-readers (even though I don’t have one, unless you count my iPhone). That's because things keep happening. We talked about Amazon and their e-reader, the Kindle, and Barnes & Noble's new eReader and then the Apple reading...
Here We Go Again
Okay, we’ve talked about Amazon and their e-reader, the Kindle. And we’ve talked aboutBarnes & Noble’s new eReader. Most of us seem to hope they’ll all somehow sing Kumbaya and make their devices compatible so you could download any book ...
Free e-Reader, Free e-Books
I got an email on Friday (and a lot of you probably got the same one) from Barnes & Noble. After our recent discussion of Barnes & Noble competing with Amazon for e-readers, I found the email quite interesting.B&N not only wants you to bu...
2008 Book Buying
Bowker has released its annual report on book buying, or as they call it, an indepth look at “book data, demographics, psychographics, genre category breakdowns and distribution channel analysis" for 2008.For authors, the report would prove interes...
