If you finished all the books on your Kindle last night and wanted to download more, you probably would have been out of luck. The “buy” buttons for Kindle books disappeared, prompting panic and conspiracy theories–especially in light of the fact that only the big six publishers: Random House, Penguin, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and, Read More
Computers. What are they good for? To make human errors more pervasive and therefore funnier, for one. Consider this Nook version of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in which, according to blogger Philip Howard (hat tip Ars Technica), every instance of the word “kindled” has been replaced with “Nookd.” Read More
Bad news for anyone who thought they were going to be the next EL James: As it turns out, half of self-published are making less than $500 a year off their books. Now, the numbers are skewed a little bit higher for the first comprehensive study ever done on the subject, with the average pull-in for self-publishers at $10,000. But that’s only because–much like in the rest of America– 10% of the market was bringing home enormous figures, leaving the other 90% with very low sums…and half with less than a grand a year for their work.
And we think we know why. Read More
Amazon has started what it’s referring to as “a $6 million annual fund dedicated to independent authors and publishers.” It sounds like a fellowship program but it’s actually a pot of money for luring self-published writers into exclusive short-term contracts with the Kindle store. The more bestselling writers the company can lock into the Kindle (however temporarily), the less appealing rival e-readers will be. This has already gotten some authors into trouble with Barnes & Noble, which has refused to stock print books by authors it cannot sell through its own digital platform, the Nook. Read More
Earlier this week, a glitch in the Amazon matrix caused some readers of Haruki Murakami’s new novel 1Q84 to mistakenly conclude that the Kindle version of the book is only available for reading on one device rather than the usual six. This turned out to be a mistake, but before the problem was resolved a half dozen readers left one star reviews on the page for 1Q84. Read More
Amazon quietly enabled their Kindle e-reader with a lending feature that allows users to give e-books away for fourteen day periods, reports eBookNewser.
Previously sharing or lending had been the exclusive domain of the Barnes & Noble competitor, Nook, which allows books to be lent once, to one other Nook user, also for a Read More
Google’s eBooks initiative debuted today and has already made it into Twitter’s trending topics, showing how the promise of device-agnostic e-books captures the imagination of the reading public.
The store launched with more than three million titles from 4,000 publishers, any of which can be read from a browser, e-reader or mobile device. The Read More
The Wall Street Journal reports that a Marketing and Research Resources study of Kindle, iPad and Sony Reader owners—ahem, paid for by Sony—indicates that these electronic libraries are somehow convincing people to read more books. Of the 1,200 device-owning people surveyed, 40 percent said they are reading more now. It’s a bit of good Read More
A few years ago, I found myself on the giant playground known as the Google “campus” in Mountain View, Calif., speaking to a small group of Google employees about, among other things, originality. I tried to make what I thought was a pretty unoriginal point.
The culture, I suggested, rewarded successful copying Read More
If you want just a plain old Kindle (new, not used), tough luck. They are “temporarily out of stock” at Amazon. The Journal‘s Digits blog weighed in on the lack of $189 reading devices:
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment, and it’s unclear whether the shortage is due to Read More
